Collaborative Couple Therapy
Making A Case: Dan Wile's Legacy
Apr. 05, 2020 10:28 PM
Daniel Wile, Ph.D died on March 18, 2020. With his passing some of the art and elegance within psychotherapy has lost a little ground.
Dan Wile was a creative “genius”* in a sometimes desolate landscape of manualized protocols and interventions. While it is often the fashion these days to demonstrate and strongly promote evidenced-based methodologies as the sine qua non for therapeutic work, Dan Wile quietly and methodically persevered to better understand himself and the compassionate practice he called Collaborative Couple Therapy.
Wile authored three books on Collaborative Couple Therapy and many scholarly articles addressing various dynamics with psychotherapy. His mentor and eventual collaborator, Bernard Apfelbaum, Ph.D., was a proponent of ego analysis (not ego psychology): understanding human problems as originating from critical and negative self-ego states such as feelings of inadequacy, self-hatred, shame, and self-blame. The ego-analytic therapist helps her client get on his own side, sympathizing with himself and his predicament, so he may exercise compassionate, nonjudgmental curiosity about his predicament. Collaborative Couple Therapy operationalizes and repeatedly models how intimate partners can actualize this compassionate platform within themselves individually and with each other.
Dan was scrupulously committed to process and to values that make therapy compassionate and healing. These include giving voice to the reasonableness in people’s perspectives, structuring intimate conversation between partners as the vehicle for producing change, and encouraging individuals to embrace with kindness the totality of their own unique and subjective human experience. And Wile embodied what he taught.
Dan would sometimes describe his method by saying he helped people make a ‘better case’ for themselves with their partners: He modeled how people could express themselves authentically without blaming or judging each other. Many of us build a case for how right we are by arguing how wrong someone else is. In such an instance Dan might empathically reflect to himself, “He’s not making a very good case for himself.” Dan’s approach was to encourage people to sympathize with themselves, find the reasonableness in their own experience, and learn to express that with compassion for self and with kindness toward one’s partner. Dan was a gentle and inspiring teacher, well-loved and now missed by all fortunate to know him. What a lasting case he’s made in the lives of so many.
*From the acknowledgements of John Gottman’s book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.
Dan Wile was a creative “genius”* in a sometimes desolate landscape of manualized protocols and interventions. While it is often the fashion these days to demonstrate and strongly promote evidenced-based methodologies as the sine qua non for therapeutic work, Dan Wile quietly and methodically persevered to better understand himself and the compassionate practice he called Collaborative Couple Therapy.
Wile authored three books on Collaborative Couple Therapy and many scholarly articles addressing various dynamics with psychotherapy. His mentor and eventual collaborator, Bernard Apfelbaum, Ph.D., was a proponent of ego analysis (not ego psychology): understanding human problems as originating from critical and negative self-ego states such as feelings of inadequacy, self-hatred, shame, and self-blame. The ego-analytic therapist helps her client get on his own side, sympathizing with himself and his predicament, so he may exercise compassionate, nonjudgmental curiosity about his predicament. Collaborative Couple Therapy operationalizes and repeatedly models how intimate partners can actualize this compassionate platform within themselves individually and with each other.
Dan was scrupulously committed to process and to values that make therapy compassionate and healing. These include giving voice to the reasonableness in people’s perspectives, structuring intimate conversation between partners as the vehicle for producing change, and encouraging individuals to embrace with kindness the totality of their own unique and subjective human experience. And Wile embodied what he taught.
Dan would sometimes describe his method by saying he helped people make a ‘better case’ for themselves with their partners: He modeled how people could express themselves authentically without blaming or judging each other. Many of us build a case for how right we are by arguing how wrong someone else is. In such an instance Dan might empathically reflect to himself, “He’s not making a very good case for himself.” Dan’s approach was to encourage people to sympathize with themselves, find the reasonableness in their own experience, and learn to express that with compassion for self and with kindness toward one’s partner. Dan was a gentle and inspiring teacher, well-loved and now missed by all fortunate to know him. What a lasting case he’s made in the lives of so many.
*From the acknowledgements of John Gottman’s book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.
Collaborative Couple Therapy Explained
Feb. 28, 2017 05:53 PM
Couples counseling is the sole focus of my private practice and for some time now I’ve wanted to write a succinct description of the primary model I work from: Collaborative Couple Therapy (CCT). Recently I spoke to a group of local therapists about my work with CCT and I provided the following primer as a foundation for my talk. It may be a little wonkish but I hope it provides some helpful information.
Originated by Daniel Wile, Ph.D., Collaborative Couple Therapy suggests that most relationship problems emerge from a loss of voice: An inability to adequately express one’s leading edge feelings, in other words, the authentic, often vulnerable, thoughts and feelings we all have from moment to moment. CCT attributes loss of voice to a lack of entitlement from freely expressing these authentic, vulnerable feelings due to self-critical beliefs. Inhibited from acknowledging uncomfortable feelings like shame, anxiety, self-doubt, or even desire during conflict, people often resort to fighting with or withdrawing from their partners.
The foundational task of CCT is to help couples have intimate conversations about their problems through relating with each other as allies and confidants. In a collaborative conversation partners talk with each other as if observing the problem from a platform, suspended high above the fray, looking down at the situation and people with compassionate curiosity, awareness, and reflection. To facilitate these conversations, the therapist often speaks for both members of the couple at strategic moments to model and promote platform conversations within the couple and between the therapist and each individual. The method for doing this is called doubling (adapted from Jacob Moreno’s Psychodrama Therapy).
The ongoing question for the CCT therapist is, “How can I help this couple have an intimate conversation about their present dilemma?” CCT solves the moment, rather than specific complaints, by gently returning to each individual’s expression of her leading edge feeling to her partner. Leading edge feelings are what is most “alive” or relevant for each person in the present moment. In this way, even arguments are an opportunity to deepen emotional intimacy when we permit ourselves to reveal our hidden and sometimes haunting feelings and vulnerabilities. --Doug
Originated by Daniel Wile, Ph.D., Collaborative Couple Therapy suggests that most relationship problems emerge from a loss of voice: An inability to adequately express one’s leading edge feelings, in other words, the authentic, often vulnerable, thoughts and feelings we all have from moment to moment. CCT attributes loss of voice to a lack of entitlement from freely expressing these authentic, vulnerable feelings due to self-critical beliefs. Inhibited from acknowledging uncomfortable feelings like shame, anxiety, self-doubt, or even desire during conflict, people often resort to fighting with or withdrawing from their partners.
The foundational task of CCT is to help couples have intimate conversations about their problems through relating with each other as allies and confidants. In a collaborative conversation partners talk with each other as if observing the problem from a platform, suspended high above the fray, looking down at the situation and people with compassionate curiosity, awareness, and reflection. To facilitate these conversations, the therapist often speaks for both members of the couple at strategic moments to model and promote platform conversations within the couple and between the therapist and each individual. The method for doing this is called doubling (adapted from Jacob Moreno’s Psychodrama Therapy).
The ongoing question for the CCT therapist is, “How can I help this couple have an intimate conversation about their present dilemma?” CCT solves the moment, rather than specific complaints, by gently returning to each individual’s expression of her leading edge feeling to her partner. Leading edge feelings are what is most “alive” or relevant for each person in the present moment. In this way, even arguments are an opportunity to deepen emotional intimacy when we permit ourselves to reveal our hidden and sometimes haunting feelings and vulnerabilities. --Doug
Solving The Moment Not The Problem
Jan. 25, 2017 12:55 PM
I have experience learning and applying several therapeutic models that build on my body of knowledge as a therapist. Quality models usually have commonalities. The differences are often where the therapist repeatedly places her attention.
Solution Focused Therapy (SFT) has a bias: If you remain focused on the problem, you stay stuck in the problem. SFT reminds us of a truism that is easy to forget. Focusing primarily on the problem is easy to do, however, precisely because the problem is painful, it grabs our attention, and we want it to stop.
Collaborative Couple Therapy (CCT) has its own foundational tenants. One of these is solve the moment not the problem. Solving the moment encourages us to repeatedly place attention on how we relate with our partners about the problem.
In solving the moment we share our feelings about the problem with our mate (i.e., our hopes, confusion, sadness) and do our best to compassionately acknowledge each other’s perspectives. We fold the problem into the relationship as something to relate with together, as collaborative confidants, rather than using the problem against each other. Through sharing and receiving each other’s hearts in this way, our problems can become vehicles for deeper intimacy.
“But what about the problem?”, you might ask. “Don’t we want to solve it?” Of course . . . and solutions come in all shapes and sizes. Perhaps we will just get more relaxed about disagreeing. Or, perhaps someone will feel moved by the vulnerable heart of her lover and adjust her perspective. Solving the moment trusts that solutions reveal themselves when we can safely reveal our inner turmoils, and our deepest desires, with the one we love. --Doug
Solution Focused Therapy (SFT) has a bias: If you remain focused on the problem, you stay stuck in the problem. SFT reminds us of a truism that is easy to forget. Focusing primarily on the problem is easy to do, however, precisely because the problem is painful, it grabs our attention, and we want it to stop.
Collaborative Couple Therapy (CCT) has its own foundational tenants. One of these is solve the moment not the problem. Solving the moment encourages us to repeatedly place attention on how we relate with our partners about the problem.
In solving the moment we share our feelings about the problem with our mate (i.e., our hopes, confusion, sadness) and do our best to compassionately acknowledge each other’s perspectives. We fold the problem into the relationship as something to relate with together, as collaborative confidants, rather than using the problem against each other. Through sharing and receiving each other’s hearts in this way, our problems can become vehicles for deeper intimacy.
“But what about the problem?”, you might ask. “Don’t we want to solve it?” Of course . . . and solutions come in all shapes and sizes. Perhaps we will just get more relaxed about disagreeing. Or, perhaps someone will feel moved by the vulnerable heart of her lover and adjust her perspective. Solving the moment trusts that solutions reveal themselves when we can safely reveal our inner turmoils, and our deepest desires, with the one we love. --Doug
'Doubling Down' On "Doubling" In Collaborative Couple Therapy
Dec. 09, 2013 03:11 PM
Recently I wrote about one aspect of a training experience with Dan Wile, Ph.D., the originator of Collaborative Couple Therapy. As stated then, I will continue to write about Dan’s work as I deepen my understanding. I believe there is a subtlety to his model that is powerfully transformative. In the mean time I was struck by an additional insight from my experience in the November consulting group. In my original entry I wrote “Dan’s perspective is compassionate and particularly attentive to not ‘rebuking’ clients in even the smallest way.” I now have a more nuanced understanding of this.
Inherent in Dan’s methodology, I think, is a faith that individuals have the capacity to generate compassion for each other (and for ourselves) through the process of experiencing “confiding” and “intimate” conversations. Whatever the outcome of any particular conversation, I think Dan trusts this human capacity within all of us. (For the therapist to behave otherwise would certainly not model trust.) Collaborative Couple Therapy never works in opposition to the client’s perspective because of that trust. At her best, the therapist remains perpetually curious about the client’s experience, persistently refining understanding of that perspective in the ebb and flow of the conversation. This is gentle and patient route finding, deftly navigating shoals and eddies, allowing the river to reveal itself on its own terms. In that revealing, compassionate understanding naturally blooms. Great stuff!
--Doug
Inherent in Dan’s methodology, I think, is a faith that individuals have the capacity to generate compassion for each other (and for ourselves) through the process of experiencing “confiding” and “intimate” conversations. Whatever the outcome of any particular conversation, I think Dan trusts this human capacity within all of us. (For the therapist to behave otherwise would certainly not model trust.) Collaborative Couple Therapy never works in opposition to the client’s perspective because of that trust. At her best, the therapist remains perpetually curious about the client’s experience, persistently refining understanding of that perspective in the ebb and flow of the conversation. This is gentle and patient route finding, deftly navigating shoals and eddies, allowing the river to reveal itself on its own terms. In that revealing, compassionate understanding naturally blooms. Great stuff!
--Doug
Dan Wile & Collaborative Couple Therapy
Nov. 25, 2013 10:18 AM
In September I participated in a two day intensive training in "Collaborative Couple Therapy” with its originator, Dan Wile, Ph.D. I had heard a lot of positive things about Dan, although I had never read any of his books. I was so impressed by the experience that I flew down to Oakland, California, Dan's home, to participate in a therapist consultation he conducts. These monthly three hour meetings are an opportunity for therapists to refine their skills employing Dan's methodology for helping couples.
There are many therapeutic perspectives that help couples navigate difficulties in relationship. All of these perspectives are imperfect from the standpoint that people and their intimate relationships are unique. Many of these differing perspectives have shared beliefs and assumptions, however. Differences are often about where the therapist's attention and emphasis are primarily placed. The structure that any particular therapist uses has much to do with his own psychological perspective.
From my perspective, Dan Wile’s Collaborative Couple Therapy deeply resonates with me. I look forward to writing more about Dan's view in subsequent articles as I further my understanding. For now I'd like to give a very small taste of the content from the November consultation.
"Doubling" is one of Dan's concepts that supports "intimate conversations" between partners during a therapy session. When a therapist doubles she literally speaks for each member of the couple as a way to better clarify and understand the emotion each is feeling. In Dan's own words, I "speak as if I were that person talking to the other partner. I translate that person's angry, defensive, or avoidant comment into a collaborative, confiding one.”* This structure can quickly build confidence in a client that the therapist understands his perspective while simultaneously modeling behavior that invites each member of the couple to better understand himself and other. Fundamentally, Dan's perspective is compassionate and particularly attentive to not "rebuking" clients in even the smallest way. More on all of this in future blogs. --Doug
*http://danwile.com/2013/11/a-little-doubling-can-go-a-long-way/
There are many therapeutic perspectives that help couples navigate difficulties in relationship. All of these perspectives are imperfect from the standpoint that people and their intimate relationships are unique. Many of these differing perspectives have shared beliefs and assumptions, however. Differences are often about where the therapist's attention and emphasis are primarily placed. The structure that any particular therapist uses has much to do with his own psychological perspective.
From my perspective, Dan Wile’s Collaborative Couple Therapy deeply resonates with me. I look forward to writing more about Dan's view in subsequent articles as I further my understanding. For now I'd like to give a very small taste of the content from the November consultation.
"Doubling" is one of Dan's concepts that supports "intimate conversations" between partners during a therapy session. When a therapist doubles she literally speaks for each member of the couple as a way to better clarify and understand the emotion each is feeling. In Dan's own words, I "speak as if I were that person talking to the other partner. I translate that person's angry, defensive, or avoidant comment into a collaborative, confiding one.”* This structure can quickly build confidence in a client that the therapist understands his perspective while simultaneously modeling behavior that invites each member of the couple to better understand himself and other. Fundamentally, Dan's perspective is compassionate and particularly attentive to not "rebuking" clients in even the smallest way. More on all of this in future blogs. --Doug
*http://danwile.com/2013/11/a-little-doubling-can-go-a-long-way/