Thursday, August 18, 2011

Couples Therapy

I started my career as head of marriage and family therapy in a psychiatric hospital. My divorce at the time caused me to change career direction and focus on trauma and addiction. I have over the years still done group. marriage and family therapy having been formally trained in this therapies so early.
Beware of therapists who claim to be marriage or family therapy. The therapy for individuals and coupls and groups are distinctly different. Individual therapy can be harmful to relationships when applied outside the context it was developped for.
The fields of marriage, family and group therapy have their own research and disciplines.  Commonly people who are practicing only a 'little bit' of one and mostly doing some form of individual therapy are grossly out of date.
It is highly lucrative to do 'marriage therapy', cause divorce by incompetence, then see one of the couple essentially for individual therapy for the 2 years or more of grieving. I witnessed this as the 'norm' for 'counselling' in one community where I worked. A counsellor had consecutively treated some hundred or more couples with all of them divorcing.  She said to me, "Couples come to me and I help 'facilitate' their divorce'.  No one needs to help 'break' a marriage.  Broken marriages and families commonly need a mediator, notary or lawyer.

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