Working with couples takes the practitioner into privileged terrain that can be joyful, heartwarming and invigorating. However, volatile sessions marked by hostility, conflict, negative attributions, blame defensiveness and a lack of empathy have a very different effect. These experiences are intensified by attempts to triangulate, threaten to terminate the session, or turn the anger on the practitioner. Not only must the practitioner contain their clients’ strong emotions, maintain the structure of therapy, and devise effective intervention but they must also manage their own emotional response. While we know that therapists are better at emotion regulation than non-therapists there has been little attention paid to the emotional experience and emotion regulation strategies of those working with high conflict couples, before, during and after sessions.
A Study to Explore These Questions
Working with Emotionally Focussed Couples (EFCT) therapists, Yıldızhan (2023) aimed to explore the practitioner’s emotional experience, strategies used to self-regulate, how these impacted the therapeutic process and the influence of training and professional activities. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty-one participants who also completed a brief demographic form related to age, gender, education level, therapeutic orientation, clinical experience, and level of EFCT training. Interviews were conducted to the point of saturation, where no new themes emerged.
Emotional Experiences of Practitioners Working with High Conflict Couples
Practitioners reported difficult emotions including anger, hopelessness, anxiety, and incompetency while working with high‐conflict couples. While these feelings can contribute to burn-out, awareness and willingness to openly report them is helpful. A second theme labelled ‘Sun After Storm’ by the researchers referred to the relief practitioners reported following these sessions, suggesting they were able to self-regulate.
Emotion Regulation Strategies
Practitioners reported using a range of adaptive techniques, both intra and interpersonal, to manage their reactions to high conflict couples. Each participant reported using more than one technique. Interpersonal strategies were used before, during and following sessions and comprised use of professional resources like supervision or additional training and social support from family members, partners, peers and colleagues. Supervision was the most frequently used intrapersonal strategy.
Interpersonal strategies included use of the body by using grounding or breathing techniques, self-care activities like taking a walk or having a coffee, positive self-talk, distancing from the session by actively choosing not to think about it and processing one’s own emotions. Making meaning of one’s response and allowing space to reflect and accepting it may be less helpful in the moment but of more value in future work.
The Positive Value of Emotion Regulation
Managing affect was assessed as valuable in building the therapeutic alliance, conducting assessment, and delivering effective interventions. By contrast, a failure to manage emotions resulted in the avoidance of intense feeling, a moving away from the therapeutic model and difficulties empathizing with the client.
In Conclusion
Any practitioner who works with couples will, on occasion, encounter high conflict distressing exchanges that will directly and negatively impact them. A second order view recognises that as soon as a practitioner engages with a couple, a new system, the therapeutic system, is formed which can either replicate the patterns of the original system that include the symptom or create new ones. The practitioner is responsible to conduct themselves in ways that does not perpetuate either the abusive exchanges or shut down that characterizes such couples. The responsibility to manage their own inside space falls squarely to them and when done well has major positive benefits in the therapeutic process.
Yıldızhan, C., Kafescioğlu, N., Zeytinoğlu‐Saydam, S., Erdem, G., Söylemez, Y., & Yumbul, Ç. (2024). Emotion regulation in emotionally focused therapists working with high‐conflict couples. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmft.12725
