Parallel Therapy

Most couples therapies begin with the same structural premise: both partners in the room, at the same time, with one therapist. The focus is identifying and achieving the relationship they aspire to have and to becoming the partner they aspire to be.  Any individual therapy occurs outside of the couples treatment with different therapists. 

But there is a category of couple for whom the joint session has become the problem. The room is too charged. Decades of grievance are present in every exchange. One or both partners cannot access the vulnerable material that real change requires — not with the other person sitting three feet away.  The needs of each partner are too different. The work cannot happen within each other’s presence. 

Parallel Therapy is the structure I developed for those couples.

I work with each partner individually, in separate sessions, with the full depth of individual treatment. There are no joint sessions.  Each person knows the other is also in treatment with me.  Each agrees that I can share any information from any session with either partner at my discretion. Full transparency exists between each treatment.  Both have consented to this structure.  Both have agreed to focus on their relationship. 

What is preserved from individual therapy is the safety that allows depth work — the kind that permits a person to confront a parent in a visualization, or grieve something they have never named, or recognize a survival strategy they have been running since childhood. I can zero in on each person’s stuck points and craft interventions that are uniquely tailored to each person’s developmental level.  Often, this work is too overwhelming for the partner to witness. 

What is preserved from couples therapy is the focus on the marriage and access to both sides of it. In conventional individual therapy, when someone talks about their marriage, the therapist is working from one person’s account. In Parallel Therapy, I am not working from anyone’s account. I am seeing both people directly — not their partner’s version of them. 

My role in this modality is unlike anything in conventional couples work.  I am a coach, a referee and a translator.  I cross pollinate between each treatment, deciding when and how to disclose the other person’s viewpoints and which interventions are uniquely suited  to each partner at the tome most likely to be productive. 

The interventions are discussed and prepared in session, practiced in real life, and then returned to me from each person’s point of view. I get two versions of every experiment. 

This  position carries real responsibility. Each partner needs to feel that I am genuinely theirs — that I see them clearly, that I will not become the other person’s advocate. Managing that dual relationship with integrity is the central discipline of my role. It is also what makes it effective.

Parallel Therapy is not appropriate for every couple. It is best suited to those in established marriages where the joint therapeutic frame has broken down or where the depth of individual work required exceeds what couples therapy can structurally provide.  It requires more sessions and greater expense.  It requires some between session communication with me.  

The gap between two versions of the same experiment is where the work lives — and where the relationship begins to change.