COACHING COUPLES

Curious to expand your 1:1 practice into working with couples?

Are you a family life sciences coach looking for practical, advanced tools to support couples in building their relationship?

Open to cutting-edge approaches to emotional and relational well-being?

This 4-hour training equips you with a fresh toolkit for working with couples.

The focus is on discovering what “the relationship” needs.

Join us for a groundbreaking, experiential and interactive program with couples session stories and simulations to heighten the integration of your learnings.

Getting familiar with this advanced coaching method empowers you to serve couples working through disconnection, distrust, betrayal, loss, abuse, addiction, conflicting parenting styles and sexual styles.

For me the book's the real value lay in Part 2 as the authors explore their practice with couples, sharing both case studies, stories and models which coaches could adopt for this work. I emerged from the book with a deeper understanding of this area - impressed with how the two authors had adapted coaching for this area of work, and in awe of the great work they are doing.

- Quote from world’s top 10 coach Jonathan Passmore’s review of Social Therapeutic Coaching: A Practical Guide to Group and Couples Work (Routledge, 2024)

COACHING COUPLES TRAINING

Saturday, November 9
11:00pm-3:00pm ET/ 8:00am-12:00pm PT/ GMT 16,00-20,00 (UK)

Fees: $315

Appropriate fee scale for international participants. Email info@groupandcouplescoaching.com for more.

Led by coach, author and speaker Carrie Sackett, MS, PCC.

Carrie is a widely respected pioneer and innovator in couples, group and family coaching. She trained at the East Side Institute (New York) and The Somatic School (London). And earned her Masters in Strategic Communications from Columbia University.

Next Couples Coaching Seminar occurs in March 2025 – sign up for our 2025 wait list

Dive into coaching couples with confidence. This seminar covers 4 key areas of social therapeutic coaching.

  1. Belonging: Get introduced to a group-based understanding of human development. Partners deepen their experience of being seen and heard within the group of three—couple + coach.

  2. Shifting the Practitioner Lens: Move from a 'me' to a 'we' perspective by abandoning inherited concepts and outdated modes of thinking. This gives you elasticity in building with the deeper issues at hand.

  3. The Power of Improv/Theater Performance: Explore this metaphor for life and its applications in assisting couples to break out of their communication and emotional patterns and into a capacity to be authentic and to create with their partner’s authenticity.

  4. Seeing the 'We' in Emotions and Language: Understand the collective aspects of emotions and communication in order to co-create more intimate and meaningful connection in the session with couples. Your clients will discover the power and joy embedded in these tools for continuously creating their relationship.

TAKEAWAYS

Learn a powerful set of conceptual and practical tools to help your clients transform their marriage, relationship, parenting and sex life:

  • Communicate to Connect. Co-create space for couples to take emotional risks, say hard things and be vulnerable.

  • Unbottle Emotions. Create with emotions (clients and yours)—big and small, rather than manage or deflect.

  • Gain Relational Awareness. Support couples to see their impact on each other in the moment as it unfolds.

  • Take Responsibility. Guide couples beyond blame, shame and judgement.

  • Move Beyond Problem Solving. Incorporate play and creativity into the relationship.

  • Reflect and Facilitate Growth. Mirror back the couple's progress and activities through the ‘we’ lens.

  • Embrace Uncertainty: Challenge yourself to let go of the need for certainty, resolution and compromise, and leverage your discoveries to guide couples to do the same.

RECOMMENDED READING FOR THIS WORKSHOP

especially Chapters 7 and 8, The Social Therapeutic Couples Coach and Couples Coaching Nuts and Bolts

Excerpt from Social Therapeutic Coaching, pp. 161-2

Marriage is one of the most powerful institutions in the world. Even as it transforms and evolves, it continues to have a hold over us—whether as a form of life we want to emulate, or one we want to reform or rebel against. For all the diversity in today’s romantic arrangements, the heterogeneous married couple remains the societal norm and overdetermines how we think about partnerships.

Social therapeutics carries its method into couples work by relating to the couple as a group. The relationship—the sum greater than the individuals who make it up—is the unit of growth. A practitioner introduces in a consultation call, “My job is to help you both identify what the relationship needs, and then to support you and us to create that together.” This comes from the understanding that the relationship has been co-created by the participants. Perhaps the relationship needs more patience, more intimacy, better listening, harder conversations or forgiveness…There can be years of hurt and pain build into the couple’s dynamic. Often one spouse is looking to point the finger at the other as the cause of the relationship troubles. However, that kind of accusation is akin to pointing to a house, zeroing in on one brick and saying, “You see, he laid that brick. That’s a crooked brick. That is the problem with this house!”

The coach is continuously pointing toward ways both have created the tensions, failures, joys, hurts, frustrations, growth and curiosities in their marriage. This does not imply “equal blame.” In social therapeutic couples work, we try to help couples get out of blame, judgement and measurement mode and into a build-with-everything-there-is mode, including all the horrible, messy stuff. A social therapeutic coach might say, “If there is a side to be taken, I intend to take the relationship’s side. In bringing me into your relationship, we open the possibility of performing it in a new way. I say performing in the sense of breaking out of your tired scripts that you have been repeating for a long time and are telling me you want to get beyond. We will create new lines and new scenes together.”

  • This is what I have been looking for! Both training in and experiencing Life Development Groups is changing my practice in a profoundly hopeful and humanistic way.

    Silvia Llacera, PCC

  • I felt a lightness after training with Carrie. I learned that I could let go of my need to get couples to a certain point. She introduced tools for connecting in a different way that’s more organic and can help my clients grow.

    Susan Holt, Chair, Family Life Coaching Association

  • I have experienced the power of social therapeutic group and couples work. It has changed my own life and my practice as a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Sackett and Dabby teach tools for emotional closeness. I encourage practitioners of all types to immerse themselves in it.

    Aneil M. Shirke, MD, PhD, FABPN, FABP

The Future of Coaching

What is the ‘we’ lens?

This podcast answers the question of why coaching is positioned to offer the most transformative tools to the world, in this moment of heightened uncertainty, stress and disconnect.