Why Parallel Therapy Works

At first glance, Parallel Therapy can look like two individual therapies running side by side. Each partner sees me alone. Each has their own session, their own history, their own work. But the thinking underneath it is systemic, and much of that thinking comes from the psychiatrist Murray Bowen.

I didn't design Parallel Therapy from Bowen's theory. It grew out of a practical constraint: a couple who couldn't be in the same room. But when I looked at why it worked, Bowen's ideas explained a great deal.

The relationship is the patient

Bowen saw families, including couples, as emotional systems. Problems don't live inside one person. They live in the patterns between people: who pursues and who withdraws, who worries and who goes quiet, who gets blamed and who does the blaming. Each person's behavior makes sense only in relation to the other's.

That's why, even in separate sessions, the focus of Parallel Therapy stays on the relationship. I'm not simply helping one person feel better. I'm helping each person understand their part in a pattern that involves both of them.

Change one person, change the system

One of Bowen's most practical insights was that you don't need everyone in the room to change a system. When one person changes how they respond — stops escalating, stops withdrawing, stays steady when they'd usually react — the whole pattern has to adjust. Bowen often coached a single motivated family member for exactly this reason.

Parallel Therapy takes this one step further. I work with both people, separately, and I know what's happening on each side. That lets me time the changes so that when one partner tries something new, the other is ready to receive it.

Differentiation

At the center of Bowen's theory is the idea of differentiation of self: the ability to stay yourself while staying connected to someone who matters to you. A well-differentiated person can hear their partner's frustration without collapsing or counterattacking. They can know what they think and feel, say it plainly, and still be interested in what the other person thinks and feels.

The Developmental Model of couples therapy, created by Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson, builds on this idea. They describe two related skills: self-definition, speaking clearly from your own experience, and other-definition, setting your own agenda aside long enough to really understand your partner. Much of my work in individual sessions is building exactly these capacities.

Separate sessions help here. It's hard to become more differentiated with your partner sitting across from you, triggering every old reaction. Alone, a person has room to notice their reactivity, think about it, and practice something different before trying it at home.

Triangles, and why transparency matters

Bowen also described triangles. When tension between two people gets too high, one of them pulls in a third person to relieve it: a child, a friend, an affair, a parent. Therapists can become a third corner too. A partner who confides in the therapist against their spouse has created a triangle, and the therapist is now holding a secret that works against the marriage.

This is the main reason full transparency is required in Parallel Therapy. Both partners know that anything said in one session may be shared with the other. No one can recruit me as an ally, and I'm not carrying information that one partner is hiding. I'm connected to both, and aligned with the relationship rather than with either side.

The past in the present

Bowen paid close attention to how patterns pass down through generations: the rules about money, affection, anger, and ambition that people absorb as children and carry into their marriages without noticing. In Parallel Therapy, each partner has time to look at those inherited patterns in depth. And because I know both histories, I can help each person see that their partner's most frustrating behavior often has roots that have nothing to do with them.

A steady presence

Finally, Bowen believed the therapist's most important tool was their own steadiness: staying calm and thoughtful in the middle of a couple's anxiety, without taking sides or taking over. In Parallel Therapy, that steadiness has to hold across two relationships at once. When it works, each partner feels fully understood, and neither feels that I've become their spouse's advocate.

Parallel Therapy looks unconventional. But underneath the structure is one of the most established ideas in family therapy: people change within relationships, and relationships change when people do.

If you'd like to talk about whether Parallel Therapy fits your situation, I offer a 20–30 minute video consultation. You can reach me at (212) 327-3624 or contact@drherwitz.com.