Pathways to Dialogue: The Work of Collaborative Therapists with Couples

Since Collaborative Therapy is often described as a philosophical position or a stance and the literature on collaborative therapy does not provide any “recipes” or steps to follow, I was interested in talking to therapists to find out how they implement collaborative ideas in their practice, specifically in their work with couples. My curiosity started when I read that many therapists believe that couple‟s therapy is the hardest treatment modality and not many therapists included work with couples in their practice (Lebow, 2007). As a collaborative therapist I thought that my colleagues did work with couples, and that I worked with couple‟s too and my sense was we did not feel that couple‟s therapy was more difficult than our work with individuals or families. So I wanted to find out what therapists thought about collaborative work with couples and how they actually did it. This was the beginning of my doctoral dissertation, which was a detailed qualitative study that explored therapists‟ accounts of the premises ii that guide their collaborative therapeutic work with couples. In this paper I will not cover all of the findings of that study, but I will focus particularly on what therapist told me about how they foster or generate dialogic conversations between partners in couples.