Yael and Charley: How does a couples therapist help a young couple (Interview 2-PART 1)?

Hi there. You're listening to Human Nurture. I'm your host Jason Brand. A PACT Level 3 therapist out of Berkeley, California. And this season, we're asking the question, how does a couple's therapist learned to do that? So, we give you an insider's view into couples therapy and the consultation sessions between couples therapists. 

What you're about to hear is an actual couple talking about their experience, we call it a couple clinical interview. 

Let's get you grounded for this episode. It was recorded in my office because there was that brief window in COVID between the initial outbreak and the Delta spike, where people were actually coming in. And I was able to squeeze in a few sessions with Charley and Yael.

You'll hear the sound. It's a little rough in the beginning, we're getting settled.  I left that part in, because I think it's important for you to get a sense of the good rapport that I have with Charley and Yael. We're excited to see each other in person and you'll hear a genuine feeling of warmth and ease in the room. 

Before the session, I had a really helpful conversation with my colleague, Jeff Cohen. He's also a Level 3 PACT person in Berkeley. 

And Jeff gave me some good insights into how to bring forward the person in a relationship who says there's no room for their feelings.  So within this couple, Charley is the identified feeler, meaning that his feelings are often the ones seen as being too big to manage. 

But as we know in PACT-- where there's one, there's always the other. So one goal of mine in this session was to help them to look at how their current ways of managing feelings leaves them both alone with the feelings.

The challenge I had though, was that in the room, I also had to help Yael find her feelings and amplify them so that they could get expressed for the couple to hold. You'll hear me repeatedly slowing Yael down and really focusing on her experience Then, I'm going to cross question to Charlie about those feelings as  a way to amplify them further. 

That's enough to get you settled. Here we go, first, half couple clinical interview, Charley and Yael In my office.