2 The Power of Stories in Our Lives 35 3 Assessing the “We” in Therapy 61 4 Helping Couples Cultivate Their We-Stories 76 Exercise: Dialogue Guides for Couples' Conversations 109. 6 Building We-Stories Throughout the Life Cycle 132 7 Living and telling the 'we': giving away our stories 158.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Karen Skerrett is a staff member at the Family Institute/Center for Applied Psychological Studies at Northwestern University and Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University. She has taught at the University of Illinois, Adler Institute and was a longtime faculty member at the Chicago Center for Family Health, an affiliate of the University of Chicago.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, last, and always I want to thank my family: my husband Roger and our children Chris and Sarah, whose unwavering love and support gave me my first real experience of belonging. Experienced clinicians: Bill Pinsoff, who first offered me a systematic way of thinking about couples and a flexible concept of my own family; Lori Teagno, who leads the speech;.
PREFACE
We believe that cultivating "us consciousness" can lead not only to a change in the quality of a couple's relationship, but also to changes in how each partner interacts in the workplace, community, and wider society. In this book we argue that positive and affirming We-Stories are powerful tools for experiencing and cultivating us in relationships.
INTRODUCTION: POSITIVE COUPLE THERAPY
In this spirit, I have developed methods for evaluating "we" and exercises for building me-ness in a relationship. The process was invigorating, challenging in the best sense, and unwittingly gave us the first clear script for "We."
WHAT IS THE “WE”?
Ultimately, the “We” is a statement of meaning about the relationship and about the life trajectory of each partner. In the spirit of the “We,” our intervention was simple: we asked them what the Zimmersteins thought was the right thing to do.
S ecurity E mpathy
They were their own couple – a unique combination they had created that belonged to neither the Zimmermans nor the Rosensteins. It was time for the Zimmersteins to establish their own ground and personal vision in the world.
R espect A cceptance
Of course, this meant creating some necessary boundaries that pushed back the overly well-meaning family members and allowed the Zimmersteins to flourish on their own. What do the Zimmersteins want and what have they decided to do? became a powerful slogan and touchstone as this couple pursued meaning and purpose in their relationship, distinct from their families of origin.
P leasure H umor
In addition to explaining the elements of "We" and encouraging them to believe more deeply in this possibility, how do we help them achieve this shift in thinking, feel it in their relationship, and then take action in life theirs together. Traditional versus integrative behavioral couple therapy for married couples with marked and chronic problems.
BOOSTING YOUR RELATIONAL POSITIVITY RATIO
RESILIENCE BOOSTERS FOR COUPLES
& Vick, 2010; Alea, Singer, and Labunko, in press). in press) also found that couples' memories of strongly positive and strongly negative events from their relationship differed based on their use of the pronoun "We." This study found that regardless of the emotional value of couples' memories, memories with more “we” statements were associated with greater marital satisfaction. In its macronarrative form, the pair's We-Story is at a similar level of conceptual and empirical complexity.
Therapists recognize that couples frequently and spontaneously use the words “we” and “we” to talk about this quality (Skerrett, 2010). What these "us-oriented" memories and themes have in common are some essential features that make them "good enough" to bring out the feeling of the couple's bond.
ASSESSING THE “WE” IN THERAPY
In an initial ME (For US) study, we looked at the ME (For US) scores of 289 married individuals (Singer, Labunko, Alea, & Baddeley, in press). The strongest predictor of a woman's self-reported health complaints was the gap between her ME (For US) item ratings and her husband's ratings. Unraveling Will and Katie's We-ness Problems Let's now take a closer look at each of the individual ME items.
In the first session, they both began to talk about some of the frustrations they had endured in the relationship. But even in light of the evidence we can provide with ME (to US), distressed couples often resist the shift to this We consciousness.
HELPING COUPLES CULTIVATE THEIR WE-STORIES
Have each partner write a brief version of their life story
Help each partner identify the relationship between the presenting problem and a recurring pattern in their personal development. For example, someone may say that he is under stress in his current life and that it (may) be related to his lifelong habit of taking on too many responsibilities.
Process
Suppose we made more of an effort to make eye contact during the evening. Our goal here is to feel closer to each other by the end of the nights when we go to dinner parties. To achieve this, we will change our ways of interacting during the night.
Finally, the mutual contract to act in support of "We" takes the couple to the highest level of gratitude. Or maybe they've always had a vision of "Us" but it's never been expressed.
DIALOGUE GUIDES FOR COUPLE CONVERSATIONS
LOVE LETTERS
STUCK STORIES
Identifying the Script in the Stuck Story
This story stuck to Owens has many variations, but it came back many times in our work. Stuck stories contain narrative scripts (Siegel & . Demorest, 2010; Singer, Blagov, Berry, & Oost, 2013; Tomkins) sequences of events and emotional responses that are repeated so often in individuals' lives that they form a schema or template rather than actual experiences are received and organized by their thought process and memory. In this particular story, we see a sequence of Katie feeling that Will's actions are out of her control, and this loss of control is very threatening to her.
Katie in turn defends her efforts to support him, but he is already too hurt to acknowledge these efforts and feels that she is shaming him. Eventually, the toxic patterns can become so ingrained and permanent that they totally undermine the relationship and block all attempts at repair and reconnection.
Connecting the Script to Individual Stuck Stories From the Partners’ Past
Although Will's father was a very competent man, he had not been overly ambitious after leaving the Navy. Will's status in the family was not helped by the fact that his two younger brothers both excelled in school and played football for their high school team. How will Katie's role as the "responsible" child fit with Will's reluctance to include her in some of his big financial decisions.
How Will's mother's disappointment with his father was echoed in her disapproval of Will's unconventional path. How the success of Will's siblings might affect his own ambitions and determination to achieve financial success.
Generating Compassion From the Airing of the Individual Stories
He would go shopping or grab a beer and try to find a moment of peace, away from the 'whining'. Yet he found no love at home and no physical confirmation of himself as a desirable man. With eyes closed, the partner imagines walking through the rooms of the house and then confronting mother or father.
For each parent, the partner first asks for something they wanted and didn't get, and then they ask for something they received and didn't want to be removed. Here is Katie's list of what she did and didn't get from her parents.
Wanted and Did Not Get
It is an imagery exercise in which the therapist asks each partner to imagine revisiting his or her childhood home.
Received and Did Not Want
Drawing Meaning From the Stuck Story
If we keep putting each other in the same box, we will get the same results. If we do not believe in the goodwill of our partner, we will immediately return to the state of being stuck. Specifically, in the case of Will and Katie, they needed to see that transparency and trust were key ingredients to overcoming their impasse and restoring intimacy in their relationship.
While they may have known these “truths” in an abstract sense, their work with their stories, individual and shared, is the emotional core behind these truths and what moves them to more positive action. In the language of Angus and Greenberg's narrative EFT model, they were ready to find their “healing story.”
Building the We-Story to Replace a Stuck Story Once we help couples to see the toxic patterns of their stuck stories, we
KATIE (STARTING TO CRY): And then in the car I could see how you just went inside yourself. Three techniques that we regularly use with couples are "reverse role play", "family sculpture" and "the empty chair". Carl thought about it and then explained that the therapist would be in the role of his mother and that Tiffany would be herself.
These stories coalesced into a perfect storm of consumption that needed to be resolved if Carl and Tiffany were to have any hope of building their own solid "we" without mom-Carl in the middle. To help them get rid of this repetitive story of motherly love, the therapist asked Carl and Tiffany to imagine an empty chair in the office to be Carl's mother.
BUILDING WE-STORIES ACROSS THE LIFE CYCLE
We've mentioned how unusual it is to find couples who enter into a relationship with a sense of the 'us' – let alone the skills to support it. Changes in physical health, energy levels and endurance highlight awareness of the fragility of life. One of the therapist's main challenges in the early sessions is to refute the couple's defensive belief that they are too busy to invest time in the relationship.
This was another deepening layer in the spiral of differentiation—an expansion of the mutual capacity to hold more tension in the relationship. "This" in the poet's words is the sonnet he created; The "it" in the couple's life is the "We-Story" they have forged - a catalog of remembered events they have shared and endured together.
LIVING AND TELLING THE “WE”
In our view, teaching couples about "we" must be about more than their private psychological worlds or the small domestic arena. In contrast to this malaise, once couples actively work toward promoting the "we" in their relationship, they tell us that they feel a greater sense of purpose in their daily lives. Still, we would like to argue that "We" and the couple's commitment do not live in a vacuum.
They have realized that "We" is about taking care of ourselves as well as taking care of others. Let's go back to this and place this activity clearly in the context of connecting "We" to a greater shared purpose.
AUTHOR INDEX
SUBJECT INDEX
