Couples in Conflict: Bridging the Systemic Divide

There are many relationship education programs that have been proposed to help couples in conflict. But nearly all rely on teaching couples a standardized set of behavioral communication and/or conflict management skills. Some have offered emotional regulation or positive bonding skills. But these programs lack a focus on helping couples identify and directly alter their systemic interaction patterns. Nathan Hardy, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at Oklahoma State University is working to address this research and intervention shortcoming. With an MRI grant Dr. Hardy and his team are comparing how systemic interventions perform against traditional behavioral interventions in couple relationship education. They hypothesize that systemic interventions will more strongly benefit couples around their common conflictual issues to a greater degree than skills training.

 They are developing a systemic couples relationship education program recruiting 60 couples to be randomly assigned to one of three interventions: 1. Behavioral only intervention, 2. Systemic only intervention, and 3. Combined systemic and behavioral intervention. They will be testing the effectiveness of these programs on several indicators of relationship functioning. The research questions are: Do systemic interventions out-perform behavioral interventions in couple relationship education for conflictual relationships? What is the perceived usefulness of a systemic intervention in couple relationship education for conflictual relationships compared to the perceived usefulness of behavioral intervention?

Developing modules designed to implement systemic training can benefit the relationship education field by introducing more relevancy to couples’ unique patterns and promoting self-governed changes that can benefit their relationship. This gets educators away from a top-down expert approach that does not adequately integrate collaboration in understanding and altering relationship patterns with couples. Furthermore, these modules would potentially be useful for couple therapists who sometimes struggle with a clear systemic approach in their clinical work.