Relationship Pattern Board: Find Your Core Conflictual Relationship Theme

About the technique

The Core Conflictual Relationship Theme method, developed by Lester Luborsky in 1977, identifies the relationship pattern a person repeats across many relationships. From stories of specific interactions, called relationship episodes, the clinician and client identify three parts: the wish (what the person wanted), the response of the other (how the other person reacted, or was expected to), and the response of the self (how the person then felt, thought or acted). The method is set out in Luborsky and Paul Crits-Christoph’s manual (Luborsky & Crits-Christoph, 1998).

The CCRT is the formulation at the center of supportive-expressive psychotherapy, a time-limited psychodynamic treatment (Luborsky, 1984). Seeing the same wish and the same expected response in stories about a parent, a partner and a boss helps clients recognize a pattern rather than a series of unrelated conflicts, and gives therapy a clear focus. It is among the best-researched psychodynamic formulation methods, with reliability data reported in its manual. The treatment that uses it has randomized trial support: in a community mental health setting, dynamic psychotherapy was not inferior to cognitive therapy for major depression (Connolly Gibbons et al., 2016).

It suits adults, older teens and couples, especially when the same conflict keeps recurring across relationships. With couples, screen each partner privately for violence first, so a shared pattern never recasts abuse as mutual. Build the formulation together and test it against the client’s own stories. Framed carelessly, a pattern can sound like blame, as if the client causes everything that happens to them; keep the focus on understandable wishes and learned expectations.