How Crucible Counseling Works
David Schnarch’s Crucible Therapy for couples is much less popular than the Gottman Method or Sue Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy. Schnarch’s approach to treating couples requires the therapist to go through a grueling course of personal growth and development that enables them to help couples change their relationships. Traditional methods of counseling focus on teaching skills, while Crucible therapy focuses on creating deep, lasting change in individuals, couples, and families.
Schnarch taught that the “person of the therapist” is the critical factor that makes most marriage therapy ineffective. Not only do many therapists lack understanding of the fundamental dynamics of marriage, but they also lack the ability to stand strong in the face of deception and manipulation, so they fall prey to the same defensive tactics that are creating problems in the marriage they are trying to treat.
When Schnarch trained therapists, he focused on helping them overcome the same personal weaknesses they would be helping their clients with. Rather than teaching skills, he focused on increasing each therapist’s differentiation of self — the ability to enter into a close relationship with another person without letting go of their own integrity. Before he died in 2020, Schnarch appointed a small group of clinicians to carry on his work after he was gone. These therapists continue the work of Crucible Therapy by training a new generation of healers.
Unlike Gottman and EFT, Crucible Therapy focuses on dealing with what’s happening in the actual therapy session. Cruicible therapists learn to identify and confront deception and manipulation as it happens in session, instead of trying to figure out what might be happenign in the marriage outside of the therapy office. This requires the therapist to be able to handle the pressure of confronting clients on their behavior right now, and it also requires the therapist to be able to see and understand how manipulation works.
Therapists have wounds from childhood just like everyone else, and these wounds contribute to difficulties in the therapy office. When Schanrch trained other therapists, he focused on helping them grow out of their own defensive mechanisms so they could offer more courage and kindness to their clients.
Crucible Counseling requires the therapist talks straight to the clients, demonstrating what it looks like to be honest and brave without resorting to anger and defensiveness. Clients learn how to confront themselves and each other by watching their therapist work through actual situations that occur in therapy.
Schnarch called marriage a “people-growing machine” because when you refuse to grow up, your marriage suffers and you suffer the consequences. If we were all willing to just have cats and live alone, we would never have to undergo the kind of personal growth that is needed to create and maintain a long-term romantic relationship.
