Moving beyond the blame game: toward a discursive approach to negotiating conflict within couple relationships

Couples Work in Cultural Context: Te Ao Māori and Poststucturalist Practices Informing Counselor Training in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article outlines key themes that appear in the teaching of poststructuralist ideas and practices for couples counseling within the Postgraduate Diploma in Counseling Program at Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand, and it explores the congruence of this pedagogical approach with Māori (indigenous) understandings of relationality, collaboration, and partnership. The diploma program's curriculum includes narrative therapy and relational language-making. Themes explored in this article include: understanding (heterosexual) couple relationships as contextualized entities, deconstructing dominant discourses of coupledom, and the positioning of counselors/teachers as nonexpert. Taking each theme in turn, the authors, one of them Māori and two Pākehā (European), articulate points of alignment with Māori cultural concepts and practices.

Core competencies in social constructionist supervision?

Family therapy is moving increasingly toward evidence-based practice and competency-based training. This article explores what might seem to be an unlikely link between social constructionist supervision, which is based on dialogic and fluid processes of meaning-making, and the increasing reliance on discrete core competencies in the education and training of family therapists. We propose an alternate approach to competencies for supervision with therapists in training that, among other things, invites accountability and provides evaluative props. The approach we propose is based on a set of orientations that we hope reflect the dialogic and contextual nature of social constructionist practice and supervision. These orientations consist of reflexivity and attention to power, fostering polyphony and generativity, collaborative stance, and focus on client resourcefulness. Ideas and questions for supervisors and therapists in training to address the orientations are articulated.

Relational drawings in couple therapy

In couple therapy sessions, partners often get into long and drawn-out discussions, heavy with pain, resentment, and blame. It is vital for the therapist to avoid becoming entangled in these escalating interactions. In this article, as one way of avoiding these interactions, a protocol is proposed of using relational drawings in couple therapy for opening space for new stories. This approach is strongly rooted in extensive therapeutic experience, as well as in dialogical ideas. Not the content of the partners' imagery is central, but rather the dialogical exchange about the drawings. In particular, the focus of the therapist is on the partners' interactions, their hesitations and their surprises. Working in this way opens space for the partners to reflect on what they experience as crucial in their bond. The protocol is illustrated with two detailed case examples.