Using Collaborative Helping Maps to Organize Therapeutic Conversations with Couples

Using Collaborative Helping Maps to Organize Therapeutic Conversations with Couples

This entry highlights the use of a simple map that can both help practitioners think their way through complex situations and organize constructive conversations with couples about challenging issues. It will provide a brief overview of collaborative helping maps and then illustrate their use with an example of work with a white lesbian couple that invites them into a broader conceptualization of their perceived individual and interpersonal difficulties within a broader sociocultural context. (This interview was part of a role-play interview in a series on couple therapy at a family therapy institute. There were extensive efforts to enroll the couple members to make it as life-like as possible and there were multiple moments when both the participants and I forgot that this was a constructed reality.) This entry is written in the first person as a description of how I approach this work. This is not an...