Tag: Christine P Bellian

The Therapeutic Alliance and Couples Therapy

Post author By Christin Bellian
Post date February 20, 2021

The therapeutic alliance can be a tricky thing to navigate when working with couples!

The challenge lies in balancing the needs of one person against the needs of another person while tending to the health of their relationship. The therapeutic alliance consists of the therapist-client bond, agreement about therapeutic goals, and agreement about the tasks of therapy (Wampold, 2015).

The therapeutic alliance is at the heart of therapy. It is through the therapeutic relationship that healing takes place, and the therapeutic alliance fosters the belief and trust in the efficacy of therapy. This requires the therapist to continuously monitor the therapeutic alliance by directly asking clients about their experience, watching for nonverbal cues, and balancing their focus between both partners. Even more importantly, the couple’s therapist recognizes the couple rather than the individuals as the client. This is important because it identifies the relationship as the source of dissatisfaction rather than the individuals. As your couple’s therapist, I promise to do all of the above.

Tags Christine P Bellian, Communication, couples, family, relationships

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Trauma and Making Meaning

Post author By Christin Bellian
Post date February 17, 2021

Trauma and making meaning have a very strong correlation.

Trauma disrupts a person’s sense of meaning. There are two types of meaning. The first is situational meaning, or the meaning a person gives to a specific traumatic event. For example, someone might explain a traumatic event as “an accident.” The second is global meaning, or how a traumatic event fits into a person’s overall view of life. For example, someone might say “I believe everything happens for a reason.” However, after a traumatic event, these two types of meaning may be at odds. That same person may wonder why an accident happened if they cannot make sense of the reason it happened, especially if they believe the event should have led to greater understanding or an unpredicted better outcome but that is now what they are experiencing.

After a trauma, there are often discrepancies in one’s belief systems that are resolved either by a person’s ability to incorporate the trauma into their global beliefs or by altering their global beliefs to include the possibility of the trauma (Werdel & Wicks, 2012, p. 62). Therapy helps a person resolve this conflict that a traumatic event might create through in-depth exploration of both their situational meaning and global meaning.

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Tags Christine P Bellian, chronic illness, Communication, family, post traumatic growth, ptsd, relationships, Self Esteem, types of therapy

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What is framing in family therapy?

Post author By Christin Bellian
Post date February 3, 2021

Framing is retelling the problem in a new way that is useful to the individual and family (Combrinck-Graham, 2014).

Why is framing so important to therapy? Framing in family therapy helps people consider experiences not just from their own perspective but also from the perspective of other family members. Framing help clients identify factors they may not have previously considered, which can alter their perceptions of a situation and encourage new or different ways of dealing with a problem.

Framing can help people see change as an opportunity for growth and to encourage people to adapt instead of reacting.

Framing helps people experience an event from a broader context; this is important because how a family is impacted by an event is more about how the individual and family relates and reacts to the event than the event itself.

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Tags Christine P Bellian, Framing