Workshop #07 — Couples & Families
A process-oriented model for working with couples and families
Joseph Zinker and Sonia Nevis developed an elegant Gestalt approach to systemic work — one that is effective, relatively easy to learn, and immediately applicable by practitioners already experienced with couples and families. This seminar teaches the model as a working craft.
Orientation
Functionality in the midst of dysfunction
The model unfolds across five steps and three stages of intervention. It takes a positive-psychology stance — competency-based and de-shaming — meeting the couple or family system in what it can already do well, before working with what it cannot.
This requires a particular mindset. The practitioner must be willing, and able, to look for functionality in the midst of dysfunction; to attend to process rather than content; and to work at the boundary of the system rather than inside any one member of it.
The seminar is skill-based throughout. Participants leave with the practical ground from which to apply the model in their own clinical or organisational work.
Underlying themes
The theoretical ground
The Zinker–Nevis approach draws together a wide field of Gestalt theory. These are not abstractions to be recited; they are the working assumptions that shape what the practitioner notices and how they respond.
- 01
Phenomenological observation
Seeing what is actually present, before interpretation.
- 02
I-thou dialogue
The therapist meets the system as a presence, not a technician.
- 03
Styles of contact
How each member reaches, withdraws, or interrupts contact.
- 04
Working with resistance
Resistance read as a creative adjustment rather than obstruction.
- 05
Paradoxical theory of change
Change occurs when one becomes what one already is.
- 06
Field theory
The couple or family understood as a living, organising whole.
- 07
The cycle of awareness
Sensation, awareness, mobilisation, contact, withdrawal.
- 08
Organismic self-regulation
Trusting the system’s own capacity to find balance.
- 09
Working at the boundary of the system
Intervening between members, not within them.
- 10
Tailored therapeutic experiments
Designed in the moment, for this couple, on this day.
- 11
Aesthetic appreciation of systemic dynamics
Reading form, rhythm and pattern in the encounter.
- 12
Polarities and support
Holding opposites; offering what is needed to risk new ground.
The stance
The work begins not with what is broken, but with what already functions — and proceeds with a skillful, de-shaming attention to the life of the system as it actually moves.
Learning outcomes
What participants take away
- A working understanding of the Zinker–Nevis model of systemic intervention.
- A first repertoire of the skills the model requires in practice.
- A grasp of the principles that hold the model together.
- The capacity to attend to process rather than content in a family or couple session.
- The ability to see, and to work with, the ‘between’.
- The ground from which to apply the model within one’s own practice.
Seminar shape
How the days unfold
The seminar moves between framework, demonstration, supervised practice and theoretical deepening — returning often to the live work in the room.
Opening
Introductions in the group; presentation of the framework of the model; questions and discussion.
Demonstration
A live demonstration of working with the model, followed by deconstruction and discussion.
First practice
Participants practise with the model; supervisory feedback and group discussion.
Deepening
Introduction and explanation of further theoretical underpinnings to the model.
Second practice
Further practice with the model; supervisory feedback; theory drawn back into the work.
Close
Wrap up and checkout — what has shifted, what travels home.
For practitioners
What the seminar offers
Participants gain a working knowledge of a process-oriented model for couples and families, together with a first set of the skills the model calls for.
They become familiar with the theoretical underpinnings of the Gestalt approach to systemic work, and with the particular discipline of working at the boundary of a couple or family system rather than within any one of its members.
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