I will share and outline my experience of working with couples in my organization in Holland. Although the contexts and resources are very different in other countries in the world I believe that the program has areas of adaptation to your different contexts.

 

In 1991 a team of 11 part-time therapists started a project in working with couples in a clinical context. 5 couples, work together in a group with the mental health team in a residential setting for 7 weeks, day and night, from Monday morning till Friday afternoon.

 

The couples are locked in their own patterns, most of the time with psychiatric symptoms. In all psychotherapy processes, we are trying to get the life stream more fluid.  Reconstruction, healing and resilience are guiding words in the processes. We as therapists intervene on a personal level, on the interpersonal-couple level and in the family of origin. Working with individual, couple, family therapy and group therapy methods in verbal and non-verbal program sessions, they get several possibilities to look in the mirror of how they are doing. They are create with the 4 other couples and the team a new manual for themselves as persons and as couples to live their life in a more wished way, together or separated. We follow up with the couple group with an after-care-program, with sessions in 3-6 weeks.

 

The University of Groningen measures results. 75 groups have done this program with a total of 358 couples. 68% of them have significant success results. After 11 years we have introduced an out-patient-group program for different specific psychiatric problems like depression, anxiety, domestic violence and sexual violence. In each group 4 couples come for 12 days together during 4 months.

 

In the workshop we will describe and expose some of the ways we work with couples, in designing the group program with couples, using the outcomes of the 12-years clinical group program and then encourage reflective discussion from participants experience and contexts to comment and make contributions in the designing of group programs for couples