Healing Corporate Couples

Psychology has maintained a strong bias toward the individual: most people thinking about entering therapy think about going on their own, and most therapists are primarily trained to work with individuals. Although an estimated 80% of therapists do see couples, a great many are not formally trained for the work, even though working with couples is recognized as more challenging than working with individuals. And marriage and family therapists, who are trained to work with family units, account for only roughly 12% of the profession.

Given this state of affairs, imagine my surprise upon seeing a lead story in The New York Times recently about two men—not a same-sex couple—who are together seeing a couple therapist! The pair admittedly have some pretty serious issues, and both have been in individual therapy before. Why wasn’t that enough? Well, as cofounders of a start-up, their relationship is paramount to both of them. The article’s title tells us the pair sought therapy for anger management, but I found it telling that the word anger never appears in the article. No—these two sought therapy for the same range of communication issues typical of any couple.

In my own clinical practice, I view romantic relationships as taking precedence over work relationships, and guide couples to treat them that way. However, this is my bias, and there’s nothing to say priorities can’t be reversed for others. In the case of these two men, the success of their working relationship is more important at this time than any romantic relationship. Clearly they are treating it as such. Ultimately, I’d say what matters is not so much how we prioritize types of relationship, but the qualities we achieve within those relationships. (Though I suspect that closer scrutiny of the on-again/off-again status of these two men’s respective romantic relationships would mirror the issues they face as a “corporate couple.”)

What would I do if a corporate couple were to come to me for therapy? Many of the psychobiological principles I present in Wired for Love to guide couples would apply. Here are some examples.

Creating a couple bubble allows partners to keep each other safe and secure. The article describes an incident in which the two men were not on the same page with each other in an important meeting with an executive. If they had learned to create a bubble in which it was “the two of us against the world,” they could have avoided this. Instead of antagonizing each other, they would rally around their common cause. They would think about protecting, rather than blaming, each other. This is especially important in the corporate world, where the pair spend so much time with other corporate players.

Partners relate to one another primarily as anchors (securely attached), islands (insecurely avoidant), or waves (insecurely ambivalent). Even from this short article, we see that one man is a self-reported island who describes his social anxieties and isolation as a child. The other describes having “no boundaries” and being “totally enmeshed” in a relationship. So right there we have a wave. A wave and an island can have a successful partnership. But it does take work.

Partners can avoid conflict when the security-seeking parts of the brain are put at ease. These two men appear to have frequent fights and arguments. They are in the habit of setting each other off, and they don’t know how to calm each other. They are unaware, or so it seems, of the automatic ways their brains cause them to react, and because they are unaware, they are unable to regulate themselves quickly and efficiently.

Partners who want to stay together must learn to fight well. At least we can say that these two men are not reluctant to fight. But their tendency to fight in public places and to fight in ways that exhaust them are likely to signal the downfall of their relationship if they don’t find better ways.

This barely skims the surface, but I think you can see that a psychobiological approach can help corporate couples in many of the same ways it helps those in romantic relationships. Now, if we could just overcome the strong bias toward individuals, I think we could be onto something here…

References

Doherty, W. (2014). Bad couples therapy: Betting past the myth of therapist neutrality, Psychotherapy Networker. Retrieved from http://daily.psychotherapynetworker.org/daily/couples-therapy/bad-coupl…

Holson, L. M. (2015, April 17). Anger management: Why the Genius founders turned to couples therapy, The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/fashion/anger-management-why-the-geni…

Tatkin, S. (2012). Wired for love: How understanding your partner's brain can help you defuse conflicts and spark intimacy. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger.

Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT, is the author of Wired for Love and Your Brain on Love, and coauthor of Love and War in Intimate Relationships. He has a clinical practice in Southern CA, teaches at Kaiser Permanente, and is an assistant clinical professor at UCLA. Tatkin developed a Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy® (PACT) and together with his wife, Tracey Boldemann-Tatkin, founded the PACT Institute.