Relational Self-Awareness and the Hard Truths of Couples Therapy: An Interview with Dr. Alexandra Solomon

Curt and Katie chat with Dr. Alexandra H. Solomon about relational self-awareness, effective couples therapy, and the challenges therapists face when working with high-conflict relationships. Dr. Solomon shares her integrative framework for couple interventions, how to conceptualize the “we” in therapy, and her thoughts on therapy outcomes, including a positive separation. We explore regulation, self-reflection, and navigating modern relational norms like ethical non-monogamy.

(Show notes provided in collaboration with Otter.ai and ChatGPT.)

About Our Guest: Dr. Alexandra H. Solomon

Dr. Alexandra H. Solomon, PhD, is internationally recognized as one of today’s most trusted voices in the world of relationships, and her framework of Relational Self-Awareness has reached millions of people around the globe. A couples therapist, speaker, author, and professor, Dr. Solomon is passionate about translating cutting-edge research and clinical wisdom into practical tools people can use to bring awareness, curiosity, and authenticity to their relationships. She is a clinician educator and a frequent contributor to academic journals, and she translates her academic and therapeutic experience to the public through her popular Instagram page, which has garnered over 200K followers. She’s a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice and adjunct faculty at Northwestern University. Her hit podcast, Reimagining Love, reaches tens of thousands of listeners across the globe each week and features high-profile guests from the worlds of therapy, academia, and pop culture. She is the award-winning author of Taking Sexy Back, Loving Bravely, and Love Every Day.

In this podcast episode: Relational Self-Awareness, Couples Therapy Mistakes, and Therapist Growth

We invited Dr. Alexandra Solomon to talk about what therapists get wrong in couples therapy and how her relational self-awareness framework can help clinicians more effectively support relationships. Her work bridges research, clinical wisdom, and pop culture, helping therapists and clients alike understand how to improve relational dynamics.

Key Takeaways for Therapists Working with Couples and High-Conflict Relationships

“When you are a couple therapist, the relationship becomes your client. So I’m oftentimes…[asking]: if we think of this marriage as a third entity, what does the marriage need right now?” – Dr. Alexandra H. Solomon

• Therapists often try to do couples work without adequate training; being a good individual therapist is not the same as being an effective couples therapist.
• In couples therapy, the “client” is the relationship itself—not either partner.
• Self-regulation is crucial: couples must build the capacity to stay regulated near each other before deep relational work can happen.
• The “change partner” vs. “acceptance partner” dynamic can fuel conflict and misunderstanding; both styles represent effort, just in different forms.
• Relational self-awareness invites clients to explore their own reactions before blaming their partner.
• Early-stage couples therapy should include micro-dosed interventions and structured positive experiences to reduce shame and build hope.
• Ethical non-monogamy and modern relationship models require therapists to drop assumptions and support intentional decision-making.
• Therapists must get clear on their own romantic myths and biases to avoid imposing them in therapy.

“It is an ongoing, curious and compassionate relationship that we’re helping clients develop with themselves. Because that becomes the steadiest, surest, most reliable foundation for intimate partnership: is for two people to develop the capacity to be curious about their own reactions. We know that…I call it, the golden equation of love: my stuff plus your stuff equals our stuff.” – Dr. Alexandra H. Solomon

Resources on Relational Self-Awareness and Couples Therapy

• Dr. Alexandra Solomon’s Website
• Reimagining Love Podcast
• Loving Bravely, Taking Sexy Back, Love Every Day – books by Dr. Alexandra Solomon
• PESI & Psychotherapy Networker Couples Therapy Certification Course
  

Relevant Episodes of MTSG Podcast

• Understanding Polyamory: An Interview with Dana McNeil, LMFT
• Exploring Systemic Trauma and Relational Privilege with BIPOC and LGBTQI Couples: An interview with Akilah Riley-Richardson
• Building Your Treatment Team in Private Practice: Essential Networking Skills for Therapists
• Interdisciplinary Teams
• Family Therapy: Not Just for Kids – An Interview with Adriana Rodriguez, LMFT

Meet the Hosts: Curt Widhalm & Katie Vernoy

Curt Widhalm, LMFT

Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is the cofounder of the Therapy Reimagined conference, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University and CSUN, a former Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, former CFO of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com

Katie Vernoy, LMFT

Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant supporting leaders, visionaries, executives, and helping professionals to create sustainable careers. Katie, with Curt, has developed workshops and a conference, Therapy Reimagined, to support therapists navigating through the modern challenges of this profession. Katie is also a former President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com

A Quick Note:

Our opinions are our own. We are only speaking for ourselves – except when we speak for each other, or over each other. We’re working on it.

Our guests are also only speaking for themselves and have their own opinions. We aren’t trying to take their voice, and no one speaks for us either. Mostly because they don’t want to, but hey.

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Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/

Transcript for this episode of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast (Autogenerated):

Transcripts do not include advertisements just a reference to the advertising break (as such timing does not account for advertisements).

… 0:00
(Opening Advertisement)

Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the modern Therapist’s Survival Guide, where therapists live, breathe and practice as human beings. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, here are your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy.

Curt Widhalm 0:12
Welcome back, modern therapists. This is the modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy, and this is the podcast for therapists about the things that go on in our practices, how we show up for our clients, the kinds of work that we do with clients. And Katie and I are both licensed marriage and family therapists, and over the history of this podcast for our longtime listeners, most of you know that Katie and I don’t really particularly work with couples, and when we do, it might even be reluctantly as part of other kinds of treatments, whether it be part of working with a family system. And to those of you who do work with couples, we thank you for your service. And helping us to be able to round out a lot of the topics that we talk about on the podcast, and getting into doing some couples work, we are joined today by Dr. Alexandra Solomon, and thank you so much for helping to come up with some of the gaps and where Katie and I can provide some guidance for people. Thank you very much for joining us today.

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 1:19
Well, thank you. Thank you both for the service that you provide, creating community for therapists, because, as we all know, it can be a little a little lonely out there for us therapists, so I love that the two of you have been creating a space for therapists to come together, at least virtually and yeah, and just feel heard and seen, understood and supported in the work that we’re all doing.

Katie Vernoy 1:42
Oh, thank you. That’s so, so very nice to hear. It’s you don’t have, you don’t always know, right, what’s, what’s getting out into the world. But I’ll ask you the question we ask all our guests when we get to get started here, who are you and what are you putting out into the world?

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 1:56
Yeah, well, I am Alexandra and I’m a licensed clinical psychologist by training. So the two of you are MFTs, who work with couples reluctantly, and I’m a clinical psychologist who’s been working with couples eagerly and and for lots and lots of my career. And I think there’s something that’s so interesting that highlights that even though we have these sort of different pathways in mental health, oftentimes our degree in and of itself, you know, tells us very little about the work that we’re actually doing in real life. So I’ve been, you know, at this for for nearly 30 years, about 30 years, and think about my work as three corners of a triangle. So some of my week is spent in practice with individuals and mostly with couples at all stages of development. The second corner is, I’ve been a teacher and trainer for lots of years. I spent about 20 years at Northwestern University, at the Family Institute training Marriage and Family Therapy graduate students to do couple therapy. And I still teach at Northwestern an undergrad class called marriage 101 which is we we bring together students from all over the campus for a quarter, quarters worth of what I call relational self awareness training, journey into themselves, their family systems, their love lives. And I do a lot of clinician education. And then a third corner is translation. I have a podcast. I write relationship self help books. I’m active on social media. I, you know, have been working with the media for a long time. I’m I have a partnership with masterclass, and it’s been just, I just have been, throughout my career, really interested in taking what we do behind closed doors and what researchers do in the ivory tower and kind of walking across the bridge and making sure that all of that wisdom is is available to, you know, what I call the regular people. And I it’s an interesting I think it’s a fun time, especially, I’m sure that the two of you have things say about this. Think it’s interesting time to do that translational work, because I know when I started in the 90s. You know, it really was like if a journalist would ask me to weigh in on a story, I would weigh in. And now I, along with so many others, are just creating so much content. So rather than now teaching people the skills, I spend a lot of time helping people discern what is content that is helpful, that’s relationally sound, it’s based in the evidence versus things that feel kind of, you know, too good to be true, too too simple to hold the complexities of our relational lives.

Katie Vernoy 4:33
Oh, that is, you’re speaking our language. We’ve had a couple of episodes where we talk about some of the dangers of pop psychology, or even, you know, looking at influencers and other folks, especially in our profession, potentially over simplifying messages that maybe are too good to be true or weaponized in the wrong hands.

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 4:53
Right. Exactly, exactly which is, it’s a new I think it’s, I mean, it feels to me like a new problem, at least I talk differently about that than I did whatever pre social media.

Curt Widhalm 5:05
One of the questions that we ask at the beginning of episodes is from a supportive place, a collective wisdom, it’s not a shaming place. But what do therapists get wrong when they’re working with couples?

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 5:16
I think I mean starting us off right at the beginning is, I think that there are lots of us, and again, this is, I’m glad you framed it. This is not shaming. I think there’s lots of us who are working with couples, who aren’t trained to work with couples. And just and it’s not, I’m not even talking about something that’s unethical. It’s just maybe unwise for ourselves and for our clients, much the same way that I could treat a teenager. You know, that’s that is I, back in the day, learned how to work with adolescent clients, but I wouldn’t, I don’t, I don’t have enough ongoing, formalized training in that area. I think one of the mistakes that couple that people make, is acting as if being a good therapist equals being a good couple therapist. And I’ll tell you, from personal experience, my husband and I have been in couple therapy off and on over our money, our 27 year marriage, and I’ve had that experience of sitting in front of a person and being like, Oh, I bet this person is a heck of a good individual therapist, but I don’t feel like she’s attending to the we here. You know, couple therapy is more than just sitting with two eyes, you know, two individuals. It’s also everything that’s happening in the space between them. So that’s my first thought on that.

Katie Vernoy 6:37
I’d love to dig into that a little bit, because I find so many times when we ask that question, what are people getting wrong? it’s oftentimes folks who don’t know what they don’t know. And so if you could give us a little bit more information on how to address the we versus the I, because I think that it sounds like that’s a really critical component that people miss.

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 6:58
Yeah, you know, when you are a couple therapist, the relationship becomes your client. And that doesn’t mean that you are going to, like, ride or die for the relationship. You know, I think there’s, back in the day when there was research on the effectiveness of couple therapy, you know, a divorce or a breakup was considered a therapeutic failure. And I definitely, definitely don’t subscribe to that. You know, I think that one of the I think that it can be a really powerful outcome of a couple therapy treatment to help a couple and well, you know, I think that the the two good outcomes of couple therapy are a relationship that feels a whole heck of a lot more sustainable and vibrant, or an ending where the blast radius is contained and people are able to feel proud of the choices that they make in the ending. And I think the two negative treatment outcomes are some status quo, you know, or an ending where people are really committed to putting the problems at the other person’s feet, or, God forbid, tearing each other up through the process of of divorce. So I think that we need to be really thoughtful about how we define good work. That’s one of the things. I don’t, I’m not here to say that the only successful outcome is helping them stay together, but I do believe that the relationship is the client. So I’m oftentimes thinking in my head and asking out loud, if we, you know, if we think of this marriage as a third entity, what does the marriage need right now? And it just, it kind of, I use that question to kind of reorient all three of us to it’s really easy to see what you need, and it’s really easy to see what you need, but the two of you are the stewards of this third thing that you’ve made together, this relationship, and what does it need? And that’s not about self sacrifice or self abandonment, but rather about the pride and the responsibility in caring for the we.

Curt Widhalm 8:59
So, the couples that I have worked with, the answer to questions like that is, I need them to change into the perfect ideal of what I want.

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 9:10
I wish. I wish they would just, yeah. I had that yesterday. I had a partner who’s so wished that her partner had just done X, and it’s so simple to her that if he would just and she can see how if he would just do x, it would unlock whole new level, you know, in relationship. And then the question this is, where relational self awareness comes in is, sure, it’s very easy to say that if you would change, I would feel different. And the braver and more interesting question is, why? What is the what feels uncomfortable inside of me about asking for it? What’s the story I tell myself of who I am if I’m married to somebody who doesn’t seamlessly and easily and readily do that thing? You know? But that’s the that’s the thing about a relationship, isn’t it? It’s just so it can feel so easy and obvious to us of what the other person should do differently. I felt so validated in that idea when I heard Michelle Obama talking to Oprah, when she wrote her book becoming and she talked about Michelle, talked about going to couple therapy with Barack, and being blown away that actually the couple therapist was asking Michelle, what happens inside of you when Barack, whatever is late for dinner? And she was like, no, no, the problem is Barack’s late for dinner, you know. And the couple therapist is like, and then what for you? What does that bring up for you? What do you do? And Michelle was like, this was not my notion of what couple therapy was. I think that so many of our clients have that shattering.

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Curt Widhalm 10:41
You brought up relational self awareness a couple of times. Can you describe what that is, or what that concept is?

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 10:49
It is an ongoing, curious and compassionate relationship that we’re helping clients develop with themselves. Because that becomes the steadiest, surest, most reliable foundation for intimate partnership: is for two people to develop the capacity to be curious about their own reactions. We know that it, you know, the sort of, I call it, like the golden equation of love my stuff plus your stuff equals our stuff. And it’s, in fact, you know, back in 2014 when Doug Sprenkle and Jay Labow and Doug Schneider did common they studied the common factors in couple and family treatment. They looked across all the major models of couple and family treatment to find out, you know what? Okay, these models are really good at telling us what they do differently. You know, whether it’s prioritizing behavior, prioritizing past, different priorities, you know, different framings, different language. But what do they have in common? And one of the things they found that all these models have in common is every single model of couple therapy has some way of helping partners move from that myopic, simplistic, linear framing of I do this to them, or they do this to me, and moving them into the language of patterns and cycles and dances. The more I do this, the more they do that, the more they do that, the more I do this. And that that’s basically the heart of couple therapy is, is, is, it’s systems training for couples, helping them move into a story of their problems and of their struggles that is cyclical, that sees how each part, each partner has a hand in creating the very dynamic that then becomes the bane of their existence.

Katie Vernoy 12:44
When you were talking earlier about self abandonment or self sacrifice, unlike Curt’s couples that say my partner just needs to fix themselves.

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 12:56
Yeah, yeah.

Katie Vernoy 12:56
I have a lot of clients who talk about how often they have to self abandon, or how often they have to self sacrifice to keep the relationship going. Because they don’t see the other person having that self awareness or being able to make changes. And so I find myself grappling with the question, what is in benefit of the relationship, and how do I determine if that would be a self abandonment or would be a self sacrifice, and how to kind of go through that process of determining potentially, is this sustainable? Is this something that I can actually do? But also, if one partner feels at least that they are doing all this work to try to serve the relationship, and don’t feel like they’re met, it can be very isolating, and a lot of folks get very bitter.

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 13:46
Absolutely it’s Well, I wrote my first book in 2017 called Loving Bravely, and I was blown away that that very question, Katie that you just posed, is the question I got over and over again, like, I’m here for this, I’m doing the work. I’m listening to the podcast. I’m in the therapy with Katie and my partner, and my partner is not. So I spend a lot of time wrestling with this, and I I mean, so many answers. One is, it’s why it’s so important, I think, for all of us to continue to normalize therapy, so that then a person who’s like, Babe, can you please, you know, put in, can you please hold up a mirror and learn more about yourself? It’s like, I guess I’m gonna go to therapy. And it’s not like, that big of a deal. That’s one kind of easy answer is, we want everyone to be willing to do this work. And then there’s another answer, which is, yes, I do think there are these really sad cases where people outgrow each other, where it’s like the amount of me that I can’t figure out how to fit into this we it’s just it’s just too big. There’s too much of me that I that I don’t know how to bring to you, that you don’t know what to do with that I’m actually doing us both a disservice. Think those are, that’s also one of the things that is very real and happens. But there’s a lot of us in the shades of gray in the middle. So one of the ways I’ve been talking about this lately, I’m I started to call it this effort mismatch. Because there very often is a person, I call them the change person, and they are there week after week, and Katie’s office, and they’re listening to the shows and they’re reading the books, and they’re doing the journaling. And that’s a kind of effort that is saying, that is saying my life and my relationships and myself are these forever works in progress. They’re iterative. We’re always peeling back a layer, we’re always growing, we’re always trying to figure out how to be 1% better. Beautiful. That’s beautiful. But there is another kind of effort that I see people do, and that’s what I call the the acceptance partner, and that’s the partner who does keep their eye on all the ways in which this is actually a pretty, freaking beautiful relationship. You know, it’s a lot going right here. There’s a lot that is simple, but also really quite whole and wholesome and nurturing and sustaining and sustainable. And so that’s a kind of effort too. And there’s a I kind of use, like a gym analogy, that sometimes effort in the gym is you get on the treadmill and you run intervals. That’s an that’s one kind of effort, but there’s a kind of effort also that’s holding a plank, you know, that’s a kind of effort that like that steadiness and that sureness. And I think that the that change people and acceptance people are sort of drawn to each other, or somehow, in somehow, end up together and and it’s very easy for change partners to miss the kind of emotional contribution that their acceptance partner is making by appreciating what this relationship is and has and has been doing for a lot of years. But I’m super interested in hearing how that lands for you.

Curt Widhalm 16:56
This all sounds really lovely and wonderful. And I think part of what has scared me off of working with couples a lot in my practice is that oftentimes the level of contempt that is coming in by the time that couples actually enter into therapy. These all sound like really wonderful principles, when things are kind of status quo and things are going fine, and people are wanting to deepen their relationships. For people who are coming in already very high conflict, how do you help to be able to open up some of this?

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 17:33
Yeah, it is. I mean, when people are coming in high conflict, what they’re telling us is that they are too dysregulated to have conversations that are that have any measure of curiosity, introspection, empathy, right? So I think the first order of business is helping people learn how to regulate themselves. Because as a couple, I mean, as a couple therapists, there are things that we can do to hold the frame. We can, you know, do things and, you know, we can have do our little, famous time out symbol, talk only to me. You know, we can see them individually for a while if it’s too heated together. There are things we can do to contain but we also need to be teaching self regulation skills and helping people recognize when they are not regulated. Because, you know, I think about Gottman’s research, where he found that even couples with high relationship satisfaction scores, once they get into that dysregulated, circular place where they’re too they feel too unheard to listen. They feel too unseen to be able to witness the other one. Once they’re in that place, it’s actually really hard for even happy couples to move back into regulation. So those regulation skills are important. I spend a lot of time talking people about, you know, these difficult conversations need to be like micro dosed and and to not keep going past those thresholds. Because I think you’re right Curt that the more people engage in contemptuous behavior with each other, the more than the mere presence of the other is a dysregulating cue. You know, it’s like the threshold gets lower and lower and lower. So the first order of business, very often, is working with people’s bodies, working with like helping them just have experiences of being calm near each other and creating more capacity to be calm near each other. It’s also why we oftentimes are having people ideally working in individual therapy. I feel like I’m oftentimes the quarterback of a team. I’m working with a couple, and they each have individual therapists, and then to the degree that I’m able, I’m coordinating that team, because you’re right, Curt, there’s such deep intrapsychic old stuff that gets kicked up in our in our intimate relationships, that also needs to be addressed in more of a one on one setting,

Katie Vernoy 19:49
That’s one of my favorite things to do, is working within one of those teams and having a couple therapists talking and working on the the larger picture, and then working with one of the members of the couple on the deeper stuff, the individual stuff. And I find so often that in the individual work, and so I’d love to see how this shows up in the couple work, that being able to identify some of the partners stuff, and understanding more of the context of the partner, and providing empathy and compassion, and being able to move into a place of and maybe this is more of the acceptance piece of it, but being able to to put more context around and even see their partner as a human versus an adversary, it seems so powerful, and being able to see how that comes back to the couple therapists that I work with and and how they show up differently, or they don’t show up differently, which is also very interesting in that they’ve got these grand ideas in individual therapy, and they don’t show up in couple therapy. But, but I’m curious what your thoughts are on, on all of the traumas and the baggage that’s being brought in, and how that, if it’s addressed an individual, how that shows up differently in couple counseling?

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 21:05
Oh, I think it’s so helpful. I think it’s so helpful. I think it’s, you know, when I’m when I’m doing clinician education, I find myself oftentimes talking to therapists about what Al Gherman called many years ago, ITCP individual therapy for couple problems, which is something that we oftentimes do, right we are we’re working one on one, but our clients talking about their marriages. And I know even even somebody, even me, as somebody who teaches and trains couple therapists; in my one on one cases, when my individual client starts to talk about his or her marital dynamics, I feel my own loss of systemic framing, right I am, because I think we become such fierce advocates for our individual therapy clients, we get skewed. We start taking our clients psychic reality as capital R reality. We stop inquiring about the partner’s perspective, what the partner would share with us if they were here, the ways in which our individual client is contributing to that dynamic. So I think it is, I hear you, that when we have that collaborative team, the couple therapist, can, you know, just give some perspectives about how our client is showing up in the couple work. But even we can do that, even if we only, even if we never talk to a couple therapists, or if there is no couple therapist, we can talk to our individual clients by asking questions like, I’m just thinking about what your partner would say if they were here. Or, let’s imagine, you know, let’s role play it together. There’s ways that we, in one on one treatment, can keep that relational frame, which ultimately helps our individual clients. Because if all we’re doing with our individual clients is kind of like waxing and waxing poetic on how this would be so much easier if their partner would be different, we’re ultimately disempowering our own client, right?

Katie Vernoy 22:53
For sure, for sure. I think it’s it’s something where there’s so much to talk about here, but I’m just recognizing that, whether it’s through individual therapy or the work to do the self regulation, those types of things, it feels like that’s the beginning of the work. It’s, it’s…

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 23:12
Yes.

Katie Vernoy 23:13
…understanding myself, understanding how I can take care of myself, so that I’m showing up in the best way I can, be the best partner I can be, show up how I want to be showing up, and then what? Because it feels like that’s just, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, really.

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 23:29
It is when we’re talking about couple therapy, we’re talking about those like helping people be more regulated in conversation with their partners, right? That is, that is one piece of it, sort of the top down interventions, and the more regulated people can be, then the the safer it becomes to start to connect the present to the past and understand that, as Terry Real says, We marry our unfinished business, right? So many of the models, whether we’re talking about Imago therapy or insight oriented therapy. So many of our models are about those connections to the path. And so I I have a a tool that I’ve been using for years and years and years called a vulnerability cycle map. It’s from Mona Fishbane and Michelle Sheinkman when they developed it 2004. And that map is my favorite tool because it helps me as the couple therapist, understand the psychology of partner A, the psychology of Partner B and the dynamics between them. And we look at what was the role that each of them played in their family of origin, what was their kind of core vulnerability, their their sort of core wound from childhood that was feeling not prioritized, not seen, not kept safe, not believed, overburdened, like, what was that kind of emotional Achilles heel, that sensitivity that they developed in childhood, that they are scanning, the relational, you know, dynamics for to, God forbid, feel again. And then what’s the survival strategy? What’s the behavior that like four F’s, fight, flight, freeze, fawn. What do they do when that gets triggered? And by mapping, I literally, I make the map. I will show my clients the map. We’re looking at the map. That becomes our map of our work together, because then we can recognize, oh, wait, you’re moving into survival strategy. That must mean something here feels pretty darn threatening. What is it? You know, then we can start to work backwards and understand how the past and the present is getting, is getting all kind of jumbled up together. And then we’re creating new experiences, new versions of how to speak from the vulnerability, how to like, talk about what’s happening inside, like, in in taking accountability, inviting our partners tenderness instead of harshness and and creating a set of new experiences that then, you know, hopefully help them move away from that place of contempt. But as we know, when couples come in and there’s high contempt already, that is true. I mean, what Curt speaking to is a reality. Oftentimes couples have waited so darn long, I oftentimes think like, oh my gosh, you guys, like, it’s like, you’re, you’re here with a very, very advanced disease progression, you know, and now I’m going to have all my own feelings about how hard it is to help you change course. So certainly that is real that we, you know, I think we, all of us, ought to be shouting from the rooftops for couple therapy early and often, because, yeah, patterns that are well cemented are harder to change than when we get a young couple who’s engaged or, you know, newly married, and they’re trying to set down good habits.

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Curt Widhalm 26:35
What does your between sessions work look like as far as homework assignments, as far as contact with the couples in between sessions, and I’m curious just about kind of the structure, especially in the early stages of therapy, where some of these skills are not yet really embraced, or they walk out the door and they have at least the cognitive knowledge of what’s going on, but maybe not the ability to apply it.

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 27:05
Yep, we, I don’t assign homework to every couple every session, but especially early on, when one of the functions of homework early on, I think, is helping people feel a sense of agency and ability to make change. Because couples, I find this, I’m interested if you guys do as well. Couples oftentimes come in with more shame and more kind of hopelessness and despair. And that’s not just because the problems have gotten so bad. I think it’s because there’s just a collective shame about couple therapy. It feels like a breach of the romantic myth that this should be easy. So what I want couples to feel quite early on in our work together is a sense of pride in what they’re doing to invest in their relationship. So the homework early on is also to help them feel like they’re actually doing something they’re investing., So I sometimes will have them listen to something I love, I love this old exercise called the caring days exercise where couples make a list of these 10 things that when my partner does them, I feel loved. So we’re building a little bit of positivity between them. We’re building a sense of like that they have the power to make this different. And I will say, Okay, I’m giving you this homework when you come back next week. I’m all ears for all the ways that it was hard, it went wrong, you didn’t do it like whatever happens happens, and we deal with it, you know. So it’s I’m careful to not set up the couple to feel shame or self consciousness if they don’t do it or if it goes poorly, but rather, just to start to help them get used to this idea of of investing in small ways in their relationships.

Katie Vernoy 28:50
I’m thinking about, I guess this is the beginning of treatment, but may, or should, I guess, continue to evolve. But goal setting and and where we land. Because you talked about earlier that there’s not just one positive outcome, the relationship is stronger and everyone’s great, that potentially there is an outcome where there’s a I’ve heard the term conscious uncoupling, or a very positive close to a relationship. But how is that, how is that developed? The reason I ask is I’ve heard couples talk about wanting to find that that way out the door, and their couples counselors like, I am the champion of your relationship, or vice versa, where the couple saying this is hard, we’re not making a lot of progress, but we are still committed, and our couples counselor is telling us, maybe we might have to, you know, separate. And so it’s, it’s, it’s, I’m just wondering how that alignment happens and how that conversation goes, because there’s couples that have potentially very realistic or very strong convictions, or they might have very unrealistic expectations and they don’t understand the capacity of the relationship. And so I just am curious how that that goal setting can work.

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 30:01
I I think, well, I remember years ago having two of my two really experienced couple therapists in the field, doing a brown bag lunch together, and they got into this debate about whether or not they tell couples to divorce. And one of them was like, absolutely I do. I’m like, you guys, there’s nothing good here. You guys, gotta get out. And the other one might was, is a feminist couple therapists. And she was like, I’m not in charge of people’s destiny and their life choices. So it was really, it was in that moment where I was like, Oh, wow. Smart minds differ on this one. But I am. I’m of the camp where I will I I don’t have a crystal ball also, and I have been blown away time and time again in my years of work at couples where places, couples where I thought we would make pretty steady progress and we were quite stuck, and couples where I thought this is going to be really, really hard, and I watched them turn things around. So I don’t know, and I have, I don’t know that we as a field have a have a really great sense of of that. So I want all of us to be cautious about staying very near our couples and continuing to have conversations about how this is feeling, and neither making promises nor making prognostications, you know, but just to stayquite near our couples and to really see ourselves as like, truly, like fellow travelers, that we are in this together, and we don’t know what’s possible. And the thing that we know, the thing we know for sure, is that the most powerful variable for change is the quality of the connection between the therapist and the couple. So can we as a couple, as the as the couple therapist, can we have the capacity to be with them in questions that don’t have easy answers? And if they’re looking at us and saying, What do, you know, tell us what to do, especially for those of us who grew up in family systems where we were like the perfect child or the parentified child, we will grab our cape and tie our cape on and we’ll be like, I’ll tell you what to do. You know, can we be humble enough to say I don’t know, but here’s what I do. I know we’re gonna show up every goddamn week and we’re gonna keep working on this. I’m in it with you, and we don’t know, we don’t know where it’s going, which doesn’t mean I’m not in charge, right? I can be in charge of the space I’m holding, the space I’m holding the frame, but I don’t know where this is going, because I can’t know where this is going. So can we be comfortable with that uncomfortable, that discomfort, I think it’s the most truthful thing that we can do, but I’m super curious where, how that lands for you guys.

Katie Vernoy 32:33
I love that answer, because I feel like that’s the only thing we can do. It feels like if the therapist takes the lead to the point of dictating what should happen with clients. That’s just bad therapy.

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 32:46
I think, I think, I think it oftentimes just reveals the the therapist’s discomfort or the therapist’s biases, right? Sure, you would not last seven minutes in this marriage, but guess what? That’s not your marriage, and you are not your client didn’t come in to say, Do you want this marriage? No, the client came in to say, Can you help us with our marriage? And we don’t know, we see them for 50 minutes a week, or whatever 60 minutes a week, or however long they work. That’s the window that we get, and we have to understand and be humble about the fact that the way they show up for couple therapy isn’t an exact isomorph of how they show up for the days and hours and weeks of their lives, and that we have different, I spend a lot of time training couple therapists to really get in touch with the romantic myths that we’ve internalized about love. You know that that make us have some version of our partner ought to be this for us, or do this for us, because those myths, also those myths and those beliefs shape how we track progress. But we’re My belief is that we have to help couples optimize the marriages that they are in and really understand the rules of their marriage. That that not this is not about, you know, endorsing abuse, or any of that kind of stuff. But just about that, there are, there actually are lots of different ways to have have a marriage. You know, marriages get to be graded on, on the terms that the couple comes up with.

Curt Widhalm 34:16
Has your work over the years changed with things like ethical non monogamy, more open relationships. How has that impacted the way that you work, the way that you conceptualize things?

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 34:30
Certainly, yeah, I think it shifted in my teaching and training, in my own learning. If I had, you know, I am, I am learning. I continue to learn alongside my couples, you know, around how to open up, what works, you know, what are the best practices around ethical non monogamy. But I think everything, what I love, I guess I would say what I love most about this moment in our field, is whether a couple is choosing sexual. monogamy or choosing some version of non monogamy. What I love is that we are now having that conversation more often, and talking about the risks and benefits no matter where a couple puts their sexual boundary. Rather than it just being if you are a couple, of course you are sexually monogamous, and of course everybody knows exactly what that means. I think it’s so much healthier when we as couple therapists are asking about where the couple’s sexual boundaries are, why they are there, how they’ve had conversations about where to put them, and why, you know, why they’re putting them, where they put them. So I think it’s, it is, I think it’s a really important, I think there’s so much richness that comes when we help couples make intentional choices, rather than these knee jerk kind of like plug and play versions of relationships.

Katie Vernoy 35:48
We have a conversation with someone that talks about ethical non monogamy, polyamory, and so we’ll link to that in the show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com. But one of the things that you’re talking about here, that I really appreciate is this idea, there’s not rules, there’s not these other things. It’s, what are the agreements?

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 36:04
Yeah.

Katie Vernoy 36:04
And it really gets to the concept you were talking about, which is, what is the relationship in front of you? And how have the people within that relationship been able to set things together, and which of those things are healthy, and which of those things might be tied to these past traumas or past relationship patterns that they are recreating and teasing those things apart from a very objective place sounds like really rich and rewarding work. What are the core concepts that you think that all couples therapists need to understand? What are the things that you want people to take away today? And then maybe you can talk about the fantastic course you’re putting together that that they can also get these concepts.

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 36:04
Okay, the core, well, core things are, I want all of us couple therapists to be right off the bat, mapping each of our clients, genograms and family trees, understanding, you know, the families of origin that our clients grew up in. I mean, I suppose if you practice from a purely CBT lens, maybe you don’t need that. But to me, the you know, it’s pretty hard to do couple therapy that can make meaningful change without understanding family of origin patterns and how those shape present. I want couple therapists to always, always be talking about sex early in the couple work, even if their presenting problem has nothing to do with sex. The research shows that we as couple therapists are frequently reluctant to bring sex into the room unless our clients do. But the bottom line is our clients are going to be reluctant to bring it up unless we do. So to have that as part of every get to know you process as a couple therapists to just normalize that this can be in this space. It doesn’t have to be front and center, but it’s welcome. Conversations about your sexuality together are welcome here. I want couple therapists to I think, especially with couple therapy, because there’s so much in the room with you, it’s really tempting to reach for technique and script, and to know that that most of our power is in our power is in our willingness to stay near and stay curious. And one of the things that we need to mostly be curious about is our reactions to our clients. If we start feeling like we don’t like one of our one of the partners in a couple, or we’re having a hard time connecting with them, to get curious about that, to think it can feel kind of shameful to a couple therapists, to not like a client, or to feel judgy of a client, and so we sometimes will push those feelings away. But there’s an awful lot that we can learn and we ought to be paying attention to about why we’re having a negative reaction to our client. It might be something about us, what they remind us of from our own past, but it might be something about a survival strategy that they’re using in their relationship that feels off putting. So then we may have to double down on understanding the tender underbelly that is driving that, you know, yucky behavior, so that we can reach for that. Because, right, that’s how people change, is when we reach for their you know, when we reach for their goodness, or we reach for their humanity, their dignity. So those are some of the things I think about.

Curt Widhalm 39:11
Where can people find out more about you and your work?

Dr. Alexandra Solomon 39:14
Yeah, well, I’m so excited about this new so I’m, I’m launching with PESI & Psychotherapy Networker, a couple therapy certification course and and we’ll make sure that you have links to that for your listeners. Because this is, you know, if you didn’t have formal training in couple therapy, or if you trained in one model, you know this, my approach really is integrative. I’ve been training as an integrative clinician for years. So this is a way of, kind of weaving together the best of a number of approaches. And we cover not just the process of therapy, but common topics. We talk about developmental transitions and problems around sex and problems around domestic labor and domesticity and in-laws and parenting. So we’re doing kind of an across. Across the course of therapy, as well as diving into topics and populations and problems. It’s a really comprehensive course that has been so exciting to make, and I did interviews with couples, so you see me in action, working with couples. We’ll meet live throughout the course. And it’s a certificate that then becomes part of how you position yourself within your practice and within your community. And we get to keep in touch then, because it’s in touch them, because the certificate is good for two years and there are continuing ed requirements. So we will get to keep learning together.

Curt Widhalm 40:30
And we will include links to those in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com. Follow us on our social media, join our Facebook group, the modern therapist group, to continue on with these conversations, and until next time, I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy and Dr. Alexandra Solomon.

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