This important style addresses a common problem in therapy land. Here’s how it goes: couples get referred from their child’s therapist or show up with stress from a blended family or with a challenging young adult kid. Their marriage may not be great but both spouses are presenting with a clear goal of co-parenting help. The error is that therapist assumes or drives the therapy goals towards their individual and marital stressors instead of helping them with coparenting, believing the parenting struggles will resolve when the marriage problems are addressed. This is not usually the case, but worse, it could lead couples to believe their marriage is more broken than they realized—“we thought we have parenting problems but now we see that our marriage is messed up!”--and thus demoralization zaps energy out of the work.