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Bart and Susan: (Second Interview - Part2) How does a couples therapist help a couple to find each other in the void?
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A NOTE FROM JASON:
Hey, I hope you got a chance to listen to the first half of the second interview with Bart and Susan. Just in case you are not up to speed, Bart and Susan are an engaged couple in their 50’s who have been together for 3 years. They face challenges around, “money, work and time” that keep them from moving securely towards marriage.
In this second interview you get a real sense of how Bart’s enthusiasm and Susan’s thoughtfulness act as the glue that brought them together. The challenge is that these very strengths appear quite different under the microscope of depending deeply on each other.
Susan’s thoughtfulness comes with worry and Bart’s enthusiasm lacks follow through.This worked well enough when they were on their own, now they realize that they are going to need to learn together how to become a thoughtful and enthusiastic team. In order to do this, Bart is learning how to better hold worry and Susan is learning how to better hold enthusiasm. (Notice the many times in this interview Bart presents to Susan how he is trying to be more thoughtful and Susan tries to hold onto his enthusiasm.)
In order to grow in these ways, they have to stop the patterns that led to going into destructive self protective places. Susan has to slow her worry about her future with Bart and he has to slow his over promising without organization and follow through. They are both happy to report that they have stopped themselves from going into some of these old patterns but not functioning in these ways also leaves a void between them.
Finding a way to help the couple venture into that void and experience, “a gentle unfolding of the soul” (as Rob Fisher put it in Season 1 - Episode 11) is the job of the couples therapist. How do you learn to do that?!? Well, take a listen to my clinical interview and then listen to my two follow up interviews (arriving next month) with Melissa Ferrari and Debbie Campbell as we take up that very question.
Thank you for tuning in and I hope you enjoy.
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