ABSTRACT

For couple psychotherapists, parenting issues are addressed within the context of the adult couple relationship manifested in all its conscious and unconscious forms. The couple therapist looks at how this kind of creative couple relationship can be established, within which parenting can occur. The therapist's understanding of this couple's difficulty came largely from the emotional experience of engaging with them in the course of their therapy. Parenting requires the acquisition of certain capacities, which are developed partly from past personal experience of being parented but are also drawn from the experience of others as parenting unfolds. One of the most common issues that interfere with the capacity to parent one's children is one's own need to be parented. The development towards the creative couple state in which parenting can occur is like all developmental steps in that it involves a loss of previous states of mind.