by Bari Smelson, LCSW, PhD

After my six years of co-directing the couples therapy program and 14 years as faculty at WCSPP, I find myself reflecting upon what I have learned as a teacher, psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, and couple therapist. Stepping into one’s personal identity as a therapist is essential to our work. At the start of each year, I ask my students:  Who are you, and how do you see your role as a couple therapist? The fundamental question I ask my students is the same one that I ask myself. Their answers inform and influence me as a teacher, promoting curiosity and self-awareness.  In my experience, students are eager to think for themselves and arrive at creative, informed psychodynamic formulations.  When I ask myself this question, I think about how I view my role as teacher, supervisor, mentor, co-director, and analyst. I view it as a responsibility and privilege to help each student become a change-agent, a truth-teller, a mirror, a private investigator, an arbiter, and an interpreter of each patient’s struggles.

Reflecting on my pre-social work self, I was an idealist, a feminist, a pacifist, and an egalitarian. As a high school teacher working in an inner-city Boston alternative public high school, my students had a variety of attendance and behavioral problems.  I taught US history, social studies, and ceramic arts. Every Monday, the students would discuss who in their neighborhoods was killed by police, gangs, or drugs. Given the context of violence and brutality which confronted them with some regularity, I became involved in the Harvard Project for Negotiation, which utilized examples of real-world conflicts to understand the value of conflict resolution. The project was an outgrowth of a book, “Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving in” by Roger Fischer and William Ury. The group brought these negotiation skills to schools in the Boston area. I developed a plan to create a negotiation unit for my social studies class. A monumental moment was when two kids were fighting and a student who was on the sidelines shouted, “Bari would say to use your negotiation skills.” The fighting stopped and we all sighed.

It was out of my interest in the psychological and social issues affecting these students, that I started studying social work. I became interested in family therapy, specializing in work with parents who had mentally ill adult children. My work centered around the pain, confusion, and self-blame experienced by parents when their adult child was diagnosed with mental illness, particularly schizophrenia. I was fortunate to receive training in Minuchin-style family therapy and group therapy, and ran multifamily groups. Upon returning to school for my doctorate, I began challenging the idea of mothers being blamed for their adult child’s mental illness. In my view, Bateson’s schizophrenogenic mother was unsound and damaging. My research highlighted the deep sorrow, lost dreams, anger, profound grief, trauma, and PTSD often felt by parents. It left them in a state of what Pauline Boss calls “ambiguous loss.” The focus of my private practice grew into helping individuals who had both mental and physical illnesses in their families. I also used my negotiation skills to help high-conflict families cope with many devastating issues. 

In 2005 I went for psychoanalytic training at WCSPP. Psychoanalysis became my guiding principle for treatment. It gave me a way to understand my patients and myself.  Among many theorists, I loved reading Sullivan, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Klein, Mitchell, Bromberg, Kohut, and Bowlby. Their ideas, along with systems theory, became the foundation of my work with both individuals and couples. 

So, when I think of myself as a couple therapist, I remain a feminist, a pacifist, a humanist, an egalitarian, and now, a psychoanalyst. Although I put down the rose-colored glasses, I still see most situations as “the glass is half full.” I am interested in power dynamics as they relate to society and family of origin. People might want to change the way they conduct their relationship, but as we know, early relationships have everything to do with how things unfold in one’s life. As couples interact, certain patterns develop that become their relational dynamic. In the treatment room, I look at people’s relational and attachment styles as they reflect the multiple transferences. I dig deep to find the trauma and dissociation. I examine body language. I have faith in the brain’s neuroplasticity. 

I conduct my sessions as a partnership. We co-create an environment where ideas and new behaviors can flow. I work hard, question why things operate the way they do, take a detailed inquiry — and take nothing for granted. Our job together is to bring forth curiosity and a deeper understanding of the motivation behind the behaviors. I encourage couples to talk about their sex life and try to have healthier arguments. I push them to discuss the concepts of comfort and need. And if they decide to end the relationship, I urge them to start the process with fairness. That doesn’t always work.

And what have my students brought me over the years?   I have incorporated them into my heart. Our interactions give me a sense of belonging. Their questions make me think about who I want to be as a clinician. They give me hope because this new generation of professionals is smart, inquisitive, creative, and committed. My goal as a teacher and administrator has been for them to question their own belief system, shake up the status quo and challenge the social conventions. We can only try every day to be our best selves. That gives life meaning.

I have come to believe that when people are happier in relationships, they treat others around them in a more loving way. And it pays itself forward. I am grateful to my students, supervisees, and colleagues who always push me to think about myself as a professional. I am fortunate to be able to keep working and teaching. With the deep conflicts in the world around us, my glass is not overflowing, but this work keeps it half-full.

Bari Smelson, LCSW, PhD, former Co-Director of the Couples Therapy Training Program, is a Clinical Social Worker and Psychoanalyst, who has extensive experience doing therapy with individuals, couples, and groups. She received her MSW from Columbia University and PhD from New York University School of Social Work.  She earned her certificate as a psychoanalyst from WCSPP in 2007. She held adjunct appointments at New York University and Mercy College and is currently faculty and supervisor in the Couples Therapy Training Program at WCSPP. She wrote a chapter called “Intimacy and Otherness in Multicultural, Multiracial and Interfaith couples in the book “Intimacy: Clinical, Digital and Developmental Perspectives, (2019), edited by S. Akhtar and G. Kanwal. Dr. Smelson is in full-time private practice in New York City and Hartsdale, New York.