Love in Translation: Working with Common Conflict in Couples' Communication

Couples often arrive in therapy naming “communication” as the problem, yet what unfolds in the room may involve far more than poor word choice. Clinicians often find themselves challenged by the intensity of couples’ conflicts, where blame, defensiveness, withdrawal, misunderstanding, and competing interpretations can block connection and collaborative problem-solving.

This training translates relationship science, communication theory, and couples therapy practice into a concrete clinical framework for helping couples better understand and work through common conflict patterns. Rather than treating conflict as something to eliminate, the course explores how clinicians can help partners slow down reactive cycles, clarify what is underneath the presenting argument, and move toward more respectful, emotionally attuned communication.

Dr. Corey Petersen, MA, MS, Ph.D, LCMFT, brings a strong background in communication, psychology, and marriage and family therapy to this topic. Her doctoral work in communication studies, clinical experience with couples, training in Gottman Level I and II, collaborative couples therapy, dyadic coping, and domestic mediation inform her practical approach to helping clinicians assess conflict, teach communication skills, and maintain a structured therapeutic stance with couples.

Dr. Petersen’s approach uses communication theory, clinical examples, psychoeducation, and applied exercises to help clinicians move beyond general advice about “better communication.” Participants will explore the therapist’s role in couples work, including how to treat the relationship as the client, avoid taking sides, hold hope without imposing values, and attend to safety and boundaries when conflict becomes more complex.

This course covers common destructive communication patterns, including criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling, while also helping clinicians distinguish between solvable and perpetual problems in couples’ relationships. Participants will explore the Circle of Conflict framework, positions versus underlying interests, dialectical tensions such as autonomy versus connection and stability versus change, and practical strategies for de-escalation, repair, structured dialogue, and collaborative problem-solving.

Key Takeaways

• Understand what “communication problems” may really mean: Learn to look beyond surface-level arguments and identify the communication styles, listening patterns, emotional responses, and underlying meanings that shape couples’ conflict.
• Assess conflict with greater clinical precision: Explore tools for distinguishing destructive communication patterns, solvable versus perpetual problems, positions versus interests, and different types of conflict, including relationship, data, interest, structural, and value conflicts.
• Use practical interventions to slow escalation and support repair: Gain strategies for helping couples de-escalate, take responsibility, use soft start-ups, make repair attempts, practice structured listening, and work toward more collaborative problem-solving.

Why This Course?

• Practical structure for difficult couples sessions: Couples work can become overwhelming when partners are activated, defensive, withdrawn, or competing to be understood. This course offers a clearer framework for assessing what is happening and deciding how to intervene.
• A communication-informed approach to relational conflict: Dr. Petersen integrates communication theory with couples therapy practice, helping clinicians recognize how tone, language, meaning, listening, power, and interpretation shape conflict in real time.
• Clinically grounded and ethically attentive: The training addresses not only skills and interventions, but also the therapist’s stance, cultural humility, no-secrets policies, safety concerns, triangulation, and the importance of supporting the couple’s goals without imposing the clinician’s values.

Learning Objectives

• Identify and analyze the communication patterns and behaviors that contribute to destructive conflict cycles in couples, including criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.
• Differentiate between solvable and perpetual problems in couples therapy, applying assessment strategies informed by research.
• Utilize the Circle of Conflict framework to distinguish between positional arguments and underlying interests, values, and needs driving relational tension.
• Demonstrate evidence-based interventions—such as soft start-ups, repair attempts, and mindfulness-based de-escalation—to guide couples toward collaborative problem-solving.
• Integrate communication theory principles to help clients recognize and manage dialectical tensions (e.g., autonomy vs. connection, stability vs. change) within relationship dynamics.
• Apply experiential and dialogue-based exercises to cultivate empathy, improve perspective-taking, and strengthen emotional attunement between partners.

Couples’ conflict can feel chaotic, repetitive, and difficult to contain, but it can also reveal important information about partners’ needs, fears, values, and hopes for the relationship. Join the Telehealth Certification Institute for this practical training and strengthen your ability to help couples slow down conflict, understand each other more clearly, and engage difficult conversations with greater skill and care.