Discussions of Fatherhood in Male Batterer Treatment Group

The aim of this study was to examine how men who have perpetrated violence toward their partners and participated in batterer group talked about being a father and how they perceived their own fatherhood. The discussion in the group was analyzed qualitatively by using the methods of content analysis. In traditional fatherhood, they talked about avoidant, passiveness, distant, indifference, and authoritative controlling ways of acting. These men also created an image of themselves as active and caring fathers, thus including empathy and nurture in the concept of fatherhood. This new fatherhood was considered an achieved goal and an objective for the men as being a father. Talking about fatherhood in these groups is important as fatherhood and relations to children are both an important motivator toward nonviolence.peerReviewe

Affective Arousal During Blaming in Couple Therapy : Combining Analyses of Verbal Discourse and Physiological Responses in Two Case Studies

Blaming one’s partner is common in couple therapy and such moral comment often evokes affective arousal. How people attune to each other as whole embodied beings is a current focus of interest in psychotherapy research. This study contributes to the literature by looking at attunement during critical moments in therapy interaction. Responses to blaming in verbal dialogue and at the level of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) were investigated in two couple therapy cases with a client couple and two therapists. Video-recorded couple therapy sessions were analyzed using discursive psychology and a narrative approach. The use of positioning, a discourse analytic tool, was also studied. ANS responses of the participants, including the therapists, were measured as electrodermal activity. The findings demonstrate how identity blaming, i.e. positioning the other person in ways counter to their preferred identity narrative, was accompanied by increased electrodermal activity in most participants. In the two cases studied, blaming centered on the themes of loyalty, trust and parenting. It is argued that identity blaming in these thematic domains increases the arousal level of the partners, since disloyalty, unfaithfulness and irresponsible parenting threaten the stability of the relationship.peerReviewe