Partners for Collaborative Solutions
CHOREOGRAPHING COMPELLING FUTURE REALITIES WITH COUPLES AND FAMILIES
The use of couple and family choreography, sculpting, and enactments strategies are not new and were masterfully used for decades by such family therapy pioneers as Peggy Papp (Papp, 1994), Virginia Satir (Satir, 1988), and Salvador Minuchin (Minuchin & Fishman, 1981). However, they used these experiential techniques to underscore problem-maintaining patterns of interaction and rigid role behaviors in couple and family relationships to help them to obtain a meta-position to see how they get stuck and how their unproductive interactions are perpetuating their difficulties. Although these pioneers would teach them more productive ways of interacting in sessions by offering them recommendations for more adaptive ways of being with one another, they tended to adopt a top down expert position in offering what they thought would be best for the couples and families, rather than soliciting the couple partners’ and family members’ expertise on what they thought an ideal treatment outcome will look like in action to them in the form of a choreographed enactment.
The exciting aspect of the future is that the sky is the limit in terms of the possibilities it can bring to the couples and families we work with. Once we have established well-formulated treatment outcome goals with the help of the beyond your wildest dreams (see description in Solutions Edge) or other pre-suppositional success-oriented questions with a couple or family, we can have them begin to pretend in session as if their wildest dreams have already begun to happen in the form of a choreography of their more preferred and positive couple and family relationship interactions. While they are engaging in their new solution-maintaining interactions and acting ‘as-if’ their conflicts and difficulties are solved, the therapist can have them further embody their experiences by paying close attention to how they are thinking and feeling differently about one another while in action. After they have had ample session time to practice their solution-maintaining interactions, we can solicit their feedback regarding what the experience was like for them, and any other tweaking or adjustments they think they need to make to further enhance and solidify their new solution-maintaining interactions. Over the next week, they should be encouraged daily to practice their new solution-maintaining interactions for minimally 30 minutes per day. The more they practice, the more rooted their preferred solution-maintaining interactions will become. In future sessions, we can amplify and consolidate their gains and have in place an action plan to follow in case a minor slip or temporary derailment should occur to quickly get back on track.