Coupleworks Blogs
While we can’t hug….
Physical closeness outside of our bubbles is something that many of us have been missing during the lockdowns and pleas for social distancing over the past year. For me so much of what that has meant is encapsulated in the title of a book that I have been...
Loneliness in our relationships
If there is anything positive that’s come out from this current Covid pandemic is that issues of loneliness and isolation experienced by so many especially during this last year are firmly at the centre of our awareness. Organisations such as Campaign to End...
What does it take to get through
Melanie Reid, the Times magazine columnist, wrote recently that, ‘Bravery is a concept I’ve always been suspicious of. I’m not sure it exists. Mainly it’s what you do when there isn’t really an option to do anything else. Bravado, though, that’s something else...
Developing Our Resilience in a Time of Pandemic
Resilience may be defined as ‘the capacity to adapt to and recover from adversities and difficult situations’ and it suggests ‘the presence of flexibility and elasticity that allows for an adjustment to misfortune and challenge’. Resilience may be understood as...
Kintsugi
THE JAPANESE ART OF SHOWING US THE STRENGTH AND BEAUTY IN HEALING AND REPAIR ‘The world breaks everyone and afterwards, some are strong at the broken places.’ Hemingway wrote this in his seminal work ‘A Farewell to Arms’ but it feels relevant to...
A link
Coupleworks sometimes find it useful to link everyday news items to real experiences of one of our couples. A news item which illustrates this was reported recently:- The North Circular is not a motorway….it is a main road running through both private dwellings...
Anxiety
Anxiety is the new epidemic running parallel to Covid-19, and there is no mask, social distancing or vaccine to combat it. Even with the second lockdown ending this week, people are more stressed and anxious than ever before with no assurances that the world will ever...
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,...
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