About Dialogue Couples Therapy
What is Dialogue Couples Therapy?
Dialogue Couples Therapy (DT) is a short-term couples therapy program designed to help couples(or other adult relationships such as adult children/parents, friends or colleagues) grow together in self awareness and better understanding of each other, resolve repetitive conflicts with respect; and improve passion & intimacy (both physical and emotional). This program teaches you how to communicate in a more respectful and personally accountable way. Create the safe, harmonious and lasting relationship you are longing for.
Dialogue Couples Therapy: Helps couples get unstuck from repetitive conflict and negative communication patterns. It allows the potential for greater closeness as we learn how to resolve conflicts with respect. Learn mindful & reflective listening skills and grow closer through shared vulnerability. Understand how you were wired for the relationship you are experiencing by early relational trauma or what you experienced/observed growing up in your family. Learn how to recognize and heal this in yourself “you don’t know what you don’t know”, and increase trust in yourself, your partner & the relationship.
Dialogue Couples Therapy allows us to learn from and witness each other in a wholly new way. Learn how to regulate your nervous system so you can listen & learn from your partner and the situation, especially during emotional dysregulation & pain. Real Dialogue decreases our universal human tendencies to dehumanize and create intimate enemies when we feel unfairly treated, unheard, unseen, or unknown.
Learning & practicing Dialogue Communication skills, disrupts our human tendencies to create an “enemy” in the “other” and guides us through our agitations and impulses to blame our partner for our emotional reactions or upset. Learn how to become aware of what is happening inside of YOU and how to express that to your partner in a non-judgmental, non blaming way. This is especially important during painful differences/conflicts and even more important and difficult when you feel attacked, blamed, insulted or emotionally wounded by your romantic partner (or friend, parent, sibling, Co-Worker, Boss, ect..)
In our current era of incivility, negativity, superficial judgements and condemnations of each other, we need something better. We need personal accountability; to learn how to OWN our feelings rather than projecting them on to or blaming others (especially our closest partners, friends, or family members). Without it, we will repeatedly find our “enemies” in those closest to us, in those who disagree with us, and/or in those that have a different perspective. Whatever happened to lets “agree to disagree”, to the ability to have discourse and disagreement with respect? Can we not disagree without demonizing, disrespecting, or exploiting the other to fulfill our own needs, desires, or agenda?
Dialogue Couples Therapy is a pathway to true authentic love, connection and peaceful respectful resolution of conflict with our loved ones, colleagues, friends or our fellow humans living on the planet with us. Learning to communicate in this way creates the potential for more harmonious, loving, peaceful, and connected relationships. It’s the next step in our personal, relational and perhaps planetary evolution. It starts with you and your relationships. Why not become better humans for ourselves, each other and the greater good of all?
Who Developed Dialogue Couples Therapy?
Originally developed by Polly Young-Eisendrath Pd.D and her late husband Ed Epstein, MSW in 1982, DT has been practiced, taught and supervised by Polly since the mid 1980’s and she has published four books about it : Most recently “Dialogue Therapy for Couples and Real Dialogue for Opposing Sides-Methods based on Psychoanalysis” by Polly Young-Eisendrath Pd.D & Jean Pieniadz-Ph.D(2022), & “Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path” Polly Young-Eisendrath Pd.D, (2019), and previously, “You’re Not What I Expected” Polly Young-Eisendrath Pd.D (1993). & “Hags and Heroes” Polly Young-Eisendrath Pd.D (1984).
After the initial idealized “falling in love” phase is over, all couples enter into disillusionment and power struggles in which they play out painful emotional dynamics that are unconsciously generated from how they were “wired” or programmed about relationships in the families they grew up in and their prior relationships. This creates confusion and often results in blaming (projecting) onto your partner. You might think or say things such as: “Why do you make me so angry?”, “Why do you continue to ignore my feelings or needs or hurt/betray me repeatedly?” “How did I end up with someone like you or in a relationship like this?”, “I don’t know if I even trust you anymore or if I’ll ever trust you again.” and even a loss of hope: “Is this as good as it can get between us?”, or “I can’t keep living like this, I’m so unhappy and my life is passing me by”. You may even see your partner as an “intimate enemy” who hurts and misunderstands you on purpose. This can feel and seem intensely troubling and destructive and even unbearable to the point you start considering leaving the relationship. However, with Real Dialogue Couples Therapy, this stage of disillusionment/hurt/betrayal, can open a door to greater self awareness and understanding and renewed passion, intimacy and closeness in your relationship. By learning and practicing the “Real Dialogue” skills in a therapeutic setting, you can increase insights about yourself and your partner and develop a curiosity about your relational dynamic that can be transformed into greater emotional maturity and relationship growth. If the disillusionment is not transformed, it can lead to a sense of “deadness” or feeling trapped in a relationship with repetitive conflicts and power struggles about who’s right and who’s wrong and who’s needs are more important. If this continues, and there is not enough good/positive happening to counteract the negative patterns/interactions, then continued breaks in trust and connection increase, until even potential infidelities or other kinds of betrayal occur which can result in the death of intimacy and love that ultimately ends the relationship.
Real Dialogue Couples Therapy offers both deep insight into the roots of how you were wired to be in relationship, and the possibility of a new level of self acceptance and acceptance of your partner exactly as they are. After the emotional landscape of harmful patterns is clarified, the couple is taught skills for recognizing and avoiding re-wounding each other with repetitive arguments and accusations while encouraging renewed trust, closeness and intimacy. In addition to combining Jungian psychoanalytic methods and theory, with aspects of psychodrama and mindfulness, you are also educated in better understanding your own and each others Attachment Styles, Love Languages, Defensive behavioral patterns, and past relational trauma experiences that can all contribute to the issues you are experiencing in your current relationship. We also provide a psychoeducational component to review current research regarding what makes for a happy long lasting relationship and what inhibits connection & closeness resulting in unhappy relationships destined to fail. This program requires personal accountability in that each individual has the opportunity to better understand their own underlying motivations, emotional wounding and defensive patterns contributing to the ongoing problems in the relationship. In this way Dialogue Couples Therapy is a unique approach to healing chronic relationship problems with a parallel process, almost like individual therapy, where there is the potential for greater individual healing even as you seek growth and healing in the relationship..
Couples therapy is notorious for failing as the couple becomes too dependent on the Therapist to mediate their conflicts and serve as a “referee” to the point couples can only deal with their problems in the presence of the Therapist. Real Dialogue Couples Therapy, even from the first session, requires the couple to speak to each other and develop communication and listening skills that do not depend on the therapist. In the skills section of the program, the Therapist acts as more of a relational/communication Coach in helping the couple practice these new ways of speaking and listening to each other and resolving conflicts with respect using “real life” examples of what is bothering each partner the most in the relationship. As a result, Couples of all kinds (Romantic Relationships, Familial-Parent/Adult Child Relationships, Adult Siblings, or even Co-Workers/Boss Relationships) can expect to learn, practice and develop these skills throughout the program, which they can then transfer to “real life” and if continued, expect to improve the quality, closeness, honesty and connection of these relationships for the rest of their lives.
Q. WHAT CAN DIALOGUE Couples Therapy DO FOR YOU?
A. HELP YOU FIND PEACE & LASTING LOVE IN RELATIONSHIPS
Real Dialogue takes places when people speak for themselves (not each other), listen to each other’s unique and subjective perspectives, and Resolve conflicts with respect as they learn from each other.
· Real Dialogue creates real solutions and real discoveries shared between people, as they seek to better understand themselves and others.
· We need Real Dialogue because we need each other. As humans we are wired for connection not isolation. Reality is constructed between us and not simply within us. We have an innate desire for connection, closeness and lasting love.
· With Real Dialogue new ideas and meanings are not obvious, or assumed, but always there to be discovered through authentic, open, respectful, communication & connection with others.
· Real Dialogue is surprising and open ended based on curiosity rather than assumptions. It leads to new discoveries & solutions, respectful problem solving via negotiation and compromise, and ultimately new insights of self knowledge and increased empathy & understanding of the other.
· When conversations are closed(only one person’s viewpoint is allowed), controlling, defensive, blaming (YOU and YOUR beliefs/behaviors are MY problem) , they create an enemy in the “other” leading to a destructive and hurtful relationship for the couple, the individual, and in families and communities.
This destructive communication pattern eventually leads to cycles of violence of all kinds in interpersonal relationships, and even to wars between nations or religions or political factions. As Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world”. Real Dialogue Communication teaches you a way to do just that. .