The purpose of this workshop is to provide sufficient examples, instructions, and practice to enable participants to begin to use doubling in their own therapeutic work. When you double in Collaborative Couple Therapy, you speak as if you were one of the partners talking to the other. The person you’re speaking for now has someone on their side helping them make their point. And they generally need help. Left to their own devices, people in conflict typically express their wishes as complaints and their needs as demands, leading to bad feeling, power struggles, and despair. Therapists typically treat such gridlocked interactions as expressions of character pathology, ghosts of the past, personality clashes, or long-nursed grudges.
Dan Wile sees the heart of the problem as loss of voice—the inability of partners to express their inner yearnings and fears. They feel alone in their experience. Hopelessness sets in. This is “loss of voice”—whether it takes the form of kicking and screaming or quiet withdrawn desperation.
In Collaborative Couple Therapy, we take the problem that is occurring at the moment and, by giving voice to each partner’s experience, transform it into a moment of intimacy. This turns the relationship into a curative force for solving the problems that occur moment-to-moment in the relationship. The central therapeutic task is to move couples out of their spiral of alienation—their adversarial or withdrawn state—and into a cycle of connection.
Doubling is an excellent way to help partners give voice to their experience by showing them how it might look if they were able to so. When Partner A snaps angrily at Partner B in a manner that appears likely to escalate the situation, the therapist moves in and recasts the statement. If Joe says to Mary, “It’s always about you. You’re selfish. You never consider anyone else. You never think about me at all,” the therapist, doubling for Joe, says, “As you can see, I’m angry” or “I worry you’re going to leave me” or “I fear we’re drifting apart” or “I worry you don’t like me anymore” or “I miss the way we use to be” or “What happened to us?” The therapist transforms Joe’s blurted out accusation into a disarming self-disclosure by bringing out the wish or fear hidden in the complaint.
In Collaborative Couple Therapy, the therapist creates an intimate conversation by introducing into the couple dialogue the haunting feelings that each partner struggles with alone. John and Julie Gottman, who use doubling in their internationally renowned couple therapy approach, have granted Dan the honor of calling their use of this method, “Doing a Dan Wile.”