This workshop is intended for clinicians who are interested in the dynamic, challenging territory of couples therapy. Romantic relationships inherently hold the human dilemma that we cannot open to love without opening to where we have been wounded in love. We all have dragons. Their job is to protect the gold; in the most fundamental sense, the continued existence of our essential self. Our dragons protect our wounded hearts. We might say dragons continue to breathe fire until the core wound they are protecting is recognized. In this way, the dragon dance is a call for mutual healing.

Sometimes this dance is one in which partners become polarized. Relational polarization is a specific type of conflict dynamic that frequently presents in couples therapy as an irreconcilable impasse: the endless argument that returns again and again but goes nowhere. Typically, in this condition, each partner is convinced they hold the correct view – and each partner’s dragon can become fiercer and more entrenched. In a polarized dynamic, the emotional field between partners is dominated by a sense of life and death, all or nothing, no middle ground, no room for compromise, no one has my back – I am on my own.

In a polarized dynamic, the gravitational pull from partners to take their side can be intense for the therapist. In the context of this pull, it can be extremely helpful for the therapist to imagine that partners caught in this dynamic are representing opposing positions along a values continuum. Some common examples are: saving-spending, work-play, dependency-independence, spontaneity-planning. In this way, the task of the couples therapist is helping partners recognize that each of their positions holds value for the whole.

In this workshop, the presenters will share an “origin story” of their struggle around the decision to have a child, and will illustrate an approach to helping couples identify, and work through their polarized dynamic. They will emphasize the need for couple partners to encounter and work collaboratively with each other’s core wounds in order to shift out of the dragon dance into one that is depolarized, adaptive, more secure and more gratifyingly intimate.