ABSTRACT
One supporting pillar of DT is empathy, as described in Chapter 4. It is an attitude, and a skill, involving the grasp of another person’s experience, pain, and emotional meanings, and “feeling into” them while continuing to hold onto one’s own subjectivity. Empathy also requires a “mindful gap” between self and other: we are not simply projecting, identifying, or agreeing with the other when we are truly empathic. This chapter describes an exercise we use to help couples assess their own empathic attunement with their partner, called Role Reversal, which asks each person to “play” their partner (one at a time) while being interviewed by the therapist with a standard set of questions. Partners are interviewed, in their roles, about what the experience is like, giving partners and therapists an idea of how well they understand the other partner, and are themselves understood. This chapter also describes another procedure, used in all the DT sessions - the Wrap-Up - where therapists bring the couple into a circle, and offer some interpretations, observations or education about what came up in the session. There is a summary Wrap-Up of the DT work. Within this Wrap-Up is a plan to follow up on the couple’s progress in six months. This chapter includes an account of the six-month follow-up.
