One scenario that stood out was how somebody would be emotional and that the partner immediately turns to problem solving to try and "fix it" when in fact the number 1 need is emotional support and to know they're there. The problem solver makes things worse by shunning the emotional needs and working to minimise them - perhaps as an internal reaction to difficult emotions.
The goal of the therapy is to admit to each other that you depend on each other and that's alright. Moving forward, expressing this need for closeness and dependence. This runs counter to traditional couples therapy, which has indeed focused on problem solving and a supposed need for independence.
I've been applying some of the ideas to my own relationship that has, especially over the last 6 months, been quite turbulent. The results are looking good.
The book is called 'Hold Me Tight'. Very interesting.
In the context of the parent comment, providing emotional support for your wife is an emotional response, even if you decided to take that response for logical reasons. A logical response in this context would be ignoring the feelings your wife has and focussing on what can be done to solve the problem.
Alternatively you could listen all the time and that way your wife wouldn't have to reach a given threshold where she's emotional enough to take the actions that you notice. People have emotions all the time; we only describe people as "emotional" when they've gone past the point of being typical. That doesn't mean you should ignore them before that point. It'd be much less stressful for your wife if she could take about things before she was emotional about them.
This is why the logical approach fails - it's illogical to bottle up problems until they're much bigger, but that's exactly what we do.
To what extent?
So in technical terms:
> I recognize that if my wife is emotional and needs to vent,
Signal processing? Capacity management?
> that the best way to improve her mental state
State change management/processing?
But psychological thinking has it's very strange non-mathemalical logic... and vocabulary ;)
Nonsense! As a logical, clear-thinking engineer, I recognize that if my wife is emotional and needs to vent, that the best way to improve her mental state is to listen and give emotional support and ask her if there's any way I can help. There's nothing illogical or non-intellectual about realizing that, it's just a matter of learning from experience. In fact, people who regularly turn to problem solving and annoy their significant others are probably too driven by their own emotions of frustration and empathy.
A better example of how logical, intellectual approaches to people problems don't always work might be with character judgments. Many people can derive intuitions about people without consciously recognizing where those intuitions are coming from, and deciding whether or not someone is trustworthy is often impossible to break down to logical terms until it's too late.