Sheri Rosenfeld, dancer and couple therapist, writing with Jill Scharff, psychoanalyst, looks at couples’ various concerns, mismatches, and difficulties in reaching shared goals. Using the language of partnered dance to help life partners improve their communication and care for each other, she brings the lessons from ballroom dance to understanding these couple relationships. She conveys her understanding of the couples who seek her help, whether friends in trouble or couples in her therapy office, in the metaphors drawn from dance.
There is a delicate balance of body and mind within a couple. It is at this point of balance that a therapist has the leverage to change the couple’s dynamics. Using many vignettes from the ballroom and from the field of couple therapy, Sheri Rosenfeld shows how the fundamentals of dance apply to creating a successful love relationship in everyday life.
Not only for dancers and therapists, this book is for all partners who want to understand themselves and their couple relationship. How and why do you connect with another and choose to become a couple? How do you each manage your worlds as independent beings coming together to create another being, that is the relationship? How do you navigate the complex road in a relationship? What does it feel like, what does it mean, what does it take to be coupled, to be in relationship filled with nuance, passion, confusion, pain, complications, and enduring love? Reading this book, a couple can find new ways to get attuned in mind and body and find the change they need to become a creative couple.
Sheri A. Rosenfeld practices psychotherapy in Washington, DC and has been a life-long dancer with training in multiple dance disciplines. She earned a Masters in Social Work at Catholic University and is a graduate of the International Psychotherapy Institute. She holds multiple United States titles in ballroom dancing.
Jill Savege Scharff is a physician psychoanalyst, co-founder of the International Psychotherapy Institute, clinical professor of psychiatry, Georgetown University in Washington DC, Senior Fellow, Tavistock Relationships in London, and adjunct member, International Psychoanalytic Association’s Committee on Couple and Family Psychoanalysis.”