ABSTRACT
Couple therapists can talk to their clients about the problems that occur at home, but real change doesn’t tend to happen until they can address the partners’ immediate, affective experience as it occurs in the consulting room. Experienced couple therapists track the affective events that occur in each partner throughout the course of the therapy session; they can usually describe the exact sequence of events that preceded a significant moment. Therapists may or may not choose to intervene in response to any particular affective event, but they recognize that those events are occurring and thus have a choice about whether to intervene and how to intervene. Those decisions are based largely on the therapist’s understanding of the meaning of the affective events, so the therapist’s model for understanding affective events is a crucial component of the therapy.
