Dialectical Behavioral Therapy for Couples and Marriage Counseling

Couples Therapist Shivani Misri Sadhoo says some couples experience high levels of conflict. Reactions get triggered, sometimes in an instant. They look to move rapidly to anger, harshness, blame, criticism, and hostility. Flare-ups become common. Out-of-control emotions seem all too frequently, dominating the relationship.

How you respond to your spouse, how your spouse responds to you shapes your emotions in very vital ways. When you experience your partner understanding and validating what is going on for you. You feel valued, cared for, even soothed. When you experience harshness, criticism, and invalidation, it is like salt on an open wound. Over time the pain and suffering that partners endure forms distance, isolation, and loneliness. What was once a breeding ground of caring and warmth now feels cold and toxic. No question regarding it, these hurtful and painful methods of relating are stressful and exhausting.

Reactive couples very much look to move out of what appears to be these inevitable cycles of painful escalation yet look really unable to do so. These couples require more than intimacy-building or communication methods on how to improve their love relationships.

They need to have control of emotions first, to stop making things worse. Only then forming a better relationship becomes possible.

Counselor Shivani says DBT has some principles that it needs to work upon in a therapy session with couples. Here are some of them.

• DBT in a couple’s and relationship, therapy takes a non-judgmental way of promoting acceptance and validation of each partner as well as oneself. Another method of putting this, developing a mindful awareness of your own experience moment to moment. And awareness of your experience of your partner. And awareness of what goes on for you at this moment to moment experience.
• DBT in marriage counseling also pays attention to what is needed for change. Shifting from negative and invalidating responses and judgments to your partner, as well yourself is woven with increasing your own emotional self-regulation and distress tolerance.
• Central to DBT in couple’s therapy is forming the skills to shift from emotional dysregulation to increased regulation and impactful communication;
• DBT in marriage counseling includes developing skills around self-expression, needs, thoughts, concerns, yearnings, and forming effective problem-solving skills.