Coupleworks Blogs
Why Little Things Matter
2020 will go down as a year in which almost everything changed, but one thing that has not is the usual outpouring of the Christmas advertisements. MacDonald’s asks ‘Are you Reindeer Ready?’, whilst Tesco, encouraging us all to indulge ourselves, proclaims...
Managing Uncertainty during Lockdown
For therapists, uncertainty is an issue that often comes up in therapy and never more so than now. It feels that over the past eight months when the first lockdown started, couples therapy sessions became more focused on uncertainty and anxiety than I can...
It’s not all doom and gloom
Nights drawing in, Covid anxiety, winter blues, Christmas panic, it’s all going horribly wrong Or is it? Many therapists are currently inundated with enquiries. Each client bringing their own dilemma, or needing a place to reflect, or wanting...
Couple Roles in Lockdown and Beyond
Often, relationship counsellors will see individuals on their own. The huge advantage of coming to a couples counsellor, rather than one who deals with issues solely around individuals, is that a long and intense training allows us to ‘see’ them...
When Couples Lie in Couple Therapy
As a therapist, I assume clients will be honest with me, naive as that might sound. This is not to say that people will be completely transparent; I appreciate that we all need to protect ourselves from our wounds and sometimes withhold things that might be difficult...
Fear and Relationships
Speaking of his life experience Nelson Mandela wrote ‘I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid but he who conquers that fear’. And fear has as I know from my clients been high on...
The Presence of Uncertainty
‘The events in our lives are transformative and yet, in the moment of experiencing them, we do not know in which ways they will be transformative. It is unknown.’ (Viktor E. Frankl) We know that complying with the ever-changing restriction rules, and managing the...
Articulating the Importance of our Closest Relationships
Celebrating Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year this weekend was a very different experience this year. Covid 19 prevented many people attending synagogue services and participating in the familiar customs. The rule of six made it difficult for families to...
Midlife crisis for couples.
Partnership is like a human, it goes through many life stage changes . Feelings fluctuate and need to be shared but when things feel vaguely estranged, sharing is hard. The couples will have gone through many different things which life throws at them...loss,...
The hated familiar
This blog only touches on the Pandemic. Some will be relieved to hear this. We have all read interesting and well researched material on the last 5-6 months depending on where, geographically, people were cited. I think, however, that we need to...
Resilience and COVID-19: How trauma in life can sometimes be a resource in how we cope
It’s always curious to me that when I start thinking about what topics to write about for a Coupleworks blog I start to see articles, podcasts and radio programs about it. Weird. It’s as if the collective unconscious has come together and feels the need to give voice...
Denial, Recognition and Stress
‘The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another’ William James Over the past two weeks Dawn and Kathy have been exploring some of the effects that lockdown has had both on our patterns of working as therapists – virtual therapy...
Dealing with Anxiety in a Time of Uncertainty
Over the last few months, since the emergence of COVID19, I have often thought that ‘Love in a Time of Cholera’, the title of the book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, has been a fitting description of the focus of my work with clients. Many alterations in the therapy,...
The effect of lockdown on the therapist and the client
Who would have thought that at the beginning of March when lockdown started and we were all in a state of shock that three months later we would all still be coming to terms with this global pandemic and the unknown implications for the future. Rarely before in my 20+...
Covid19 and our Green Secret Weapon
The Germans have a word for it, as they do for so many experiences that seem without a neat description in our own language. Waldeinsamkeit is their word that refers to the feeling one has while being alone in nature, and is described as...
Acknowledgement
I prepared this blog some weeks before the shut (prefer that to lock) down. I then re read it during the start of the Pandemic and found little to alter. Now, crossing fingers that we are nearing the back end of restriction, I have read so much which bears...
Books for Couples
Quarantine fatigue is real. After two months in lockdown, Groundhog Day has become a reality and to help us all through the ‘new normal’ our therapists have put together a list of books and Podcasts that we have found useful and often recommend to the couples we...
How do we agree on coming out of lockdown?
One of the things that has happened in the last few weeks are significant changes to our language. Words like ‘pandemic’ and ‘lockdown’ could be used fairly dispassionately at the beginning of 2020. Today that has significantly changed as those words are now highly...
Domestic Violence and COVID-19 Lockdown
As we enter week six of lockdown several domestic abuse charities and campaigners have reported a substantial increase in calls to helplines and online services since lockdown conditions were imposed. The UK charity Refuge reports calls to its helpline have...
IVF during Coronavirus
There are many hidden and private tragedies that seem almost to be sub plots of the worldwide drama that envelops us all in this strange time of Covid19. All the news we get appears to revolve around the worldwide pandemic and its traumatic...
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