It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye yesterday was a bittersweet day. Our clinical research group lost one of its founding members, Kirstee Williams (on the left). Kirstee defended her dissertation yesterday, passed with flying colors, and is now Dr. Kirstee Williams! We are so proud of her, but this means she must move on in life. I personally owe a lot to Kirstee, as she was an integral part of my learning process in the group.
It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye
She took me under her wing, mentored me in the concepts of the circle of care, and helped me to become a better therapist. She means a lot to me and I will miss her dearly.
Kirstee has and is doing really important research that has far-reaching implications for couples and therapists trying to help couples. It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye she has applied a contextual lens to infidelity treatment and challenged therapists to not automatically look to the relationship as the reason why men betray their relationships. Kistee really opened my eyes to why affairs occur. For more informative blogs visit self blown
I, like many people, held a belief that if someone strayed from the relationship, it must be because they are unhappy with their partner and the relationship. In reality, 70% of men stray for other reasons, such as sexual curiosity and opportunity, and many of these men report being happily married.
This is significantly different than the 40% of women that seek affairs for reasons other than the relationship. It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye. It follows that therapists should not look at the relationship without first assessing power differences in the relationship and how these might have affected the decision to engage in infidelity.
Kirstee developed a model for the treatment of infidelity, called The Relational Justice Approach, which will be coming out in Family Process this month. It is a guide to help therapists incorporate contextual factors, such as power processes, into the treatment of infidelity.
I assisted Kirstee in an examination of actual therapy sessions in which infidelity was the reason couples sought treatment. We wanted to understand how contextual factors such as gender and power affected therapists’ ability to help couples through this difficult time. It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye. We found that couples were only able to talk about the affair in constructive ways when they were relating in mutually supportive ways.
That didn’t always mean that the conversations were positive. Sometimes this meant that a woman was able to express her anger at her male partner, but he let himself be vulnerable enough to be affected by her pain and take in her experience. Even though she was angry at him, experiencing him as relational made the process of working through the betrayal easier for both partners.
