Individual Couples Adjustment Therapy (TIAP): a New Resource for Couples in Conflict

The Individual Couples Adjustment Therapy It is one more tool in the treatment of problems related to the area of life as a couple. The assumptions on which the TIAP approach is based are the following

1. Relationship conflicts as such do not exist. There are the problems of each person as an individual.

2. A couple is the sum of two radically different individuals. with a singular and unique history, with a family, ties, environment, principles, values, education, experiences and large or small traumas, which give rise to two necessarily different personalities, no matter how great the affection and attraction towards them. another is experienced.

3. Therefore, the problems are not the couple’s as such, but the product of the internal mobilization of past conflicts (of an entire life) of each of its components when colliding with those of the other, and the consequent emergence that occurs when trying to make life compatible with a person who also brings a baggage of values, but also of deficient aspects, immature, when not manifestly pathological.

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TIAP Features

Except for what happens in the initial interview, in Individual Couples Adjustment Therapy, instead of working together with the two components of the couple (as is usually the case in most modalities of couples therapy), The intervention is developed individually. Each member of the couple will undergo apparently individual psychotherapy, on days and times different from those of their partner.

The practical characteristic that defines this type of therapy is that the therapist will work with a double objective:

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1. The greatest self-knowledge, maturity, development and assumption of personal resources acceptance of limits, and suppression of projections and introjections of relevant figures.

2. At the same time, as the therapist knows the strengths and weaknesses of both components, The practice of behaviors that will facilitate self-knowledge in both can be promoted. knowledge of the other, knowledge of others, knowledge in general, overcoming the usual amounts of aggressiveness and resentment, the result of a frustrated and frustrating common life experience (at least in certain aspects), the management of tolerance to frustration, and the de-idealization of unrealistic expectations, which so many sexual conflicts generate, and which are nothing more than somatizations; That is, the expression through the body (in this case the sexual organs) of unresolved emotional or affective conflicts.

Framing Individual Couples Adjustment Therapy

The members of the couple will not be able to comment on the content of the individual sessions in their private or social life. as happens in the components of any group psychotherapy. However, the effects of these sessions must be recognized by both oneself and the couple so that the therapy can be considered to offer results.

Advantages of TIAP

TIAP constitutes a field of individual advancement that is assembled, in parallel, with the evolution of the other, advancing in time the possibility that said individual advances are reflected in their coexistence, in their verbal, emotional and sexual communication.

This parallel and complementary enrichment allows that, from the first sessions, both members of the couple begin to be able to perceive important benefits for the relationship, only through the portion of empathy and psychoaffective knowledge of the other, frequently obtained in just two or three sessions.

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The fact of working exclusively with the therapist, without the presence of the other member in the office, allows the free expression of opinions, evaluations and feelings which, with the partner in front, would sometimes not be possible due to shame, shame or aggressiveness.

There are many who, when working with the traditional methodology, do not make it past the first session, or, at most, and with heroic efforts, endure a few sessions, clearly insufficient, abandoning the therapeutic work with the aggravating circumstance of having poured into the joint sessions opinions and feelings that will condition the rest of their potential coexistence.