Dissociative Collusion: Reconnecting Clients with Histories of Trauma in Couple Therapy.

This paper introduces the concept of "dissociative collusion" as a helpful theoretical and clinical tool for understanding and working with clients with histories of trauma in couple therapy. The paper describes ways to diagnose and treat dissociative collusion based on the integration of an object relations approach, a relational approach, and a narrative approach. Dissociative collusion, a unique version of the well-documented "couple collusion," describes relational unconscious dynamics where split-off aspects of one or both partners are mutually dissociated in a complementary fashion that becomes a part of the shared unconscious and is reenacted in destructive ways.

Couples therapy with childhood sexual abuse survivors (CSA) and their partners: establishing a context for witnessing.

This article proposes a clinical practice for therapy with couples in which one partner suffered sexual abuse in childhood. Such couples often encounter unique difficulties with physical contact, intimacy, sexuality, communication, and trust, and their relationship dynamic may be marked by reenactments of past traumatic relational patterns. This clinical practice is founded on the assumption that establishing the witnessing lacking during the traumatic event in childhood can break the traumatic reenactments in adulthood, and spur recovery.