www.WrensJournal.blogspot.com

The short quote below is from an interesting article in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine about a yearlong couples-therapy group led by a Philadelphia psychologist named Judith Coché. Seems to me the benefits of the couples group are very similar to the benefits of participation in a Franklin Circle: accountability to the group, the benefiting from shared experience and observation of changes in behavior, and the isomorphism (see excellent definition below.) I wonder if Ben Franklin has influenced Coche’s work.

Professional-led groups for people with discrete emotional or physical conditions — Coché has run them for overweight adults and learning-disabled adolescents — have become ubiquitous in the last three decades. More recently, couples education, especially the premarital sort, has taken off inside and outside of religious groups, spurred in part by federal financing from the Bush administration. But the type of ongoing experiential group Coché runs, which is heavily dependent on mining the interactions among the members in the so-called here and now (“Sitting here for six hours you just know what it’s like to be married to him,” Coché muttered to me once, out of earshot of the offending spouse), aren’t terribly common.

When Coché lists the virtues of the group over other forms of therapy, she cites the “Greek chorus” effect, a term that captures how members begin to harass one another, if politely, about the habits corroding their marriages. “In a group, there’s an experience of being held accountable for one’s own behavior,” Coché told me, adding that it’s more powerful to be called out — or cared for — by a civilian than by a professional. “I’m a paid consultant. I’m a nonperson.” Other benefits she cites are the often-silent products of group dynamics. No matter how ultimately prosaic their woes, members are startled to see reflections of themselves in the other marriages — My God, I do that, too — and if one person musters the strength or resolve to make a change, somebody else may consciously or unconsciously follow. The principle of isomorphism also comes into play, she said, meaning that as people forge intimate connections within the group, the enriching encounter in that system may spread to the other system: the marriage.