Relationship Counselling Archives | Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy

This is the first in a series of blog posts about couples therapy. In this post I want to talk about what Mary Morgan from Tavistock Relationships calls a ‘couple state of mind’.

Why if our partner is ‘right’ for us don’t they understand us completely? There are limits to how much we can ever fully understand or know another person. As we move from away from the early stages of being in love or infatuation it can be disappointing when our partner doesn’t live up to our expectations, ‘You aren’t the person I married!” or “You’ve changed since we first met.”. What we mean is “You haven’t become the partner I imagined you would be.”

When we become a couple we are two separate people with our own ideas of what it means to be a couple and what each of us should be prepared to offer and can expect to receive. These ideas are likely to be based on how we experienced our parents’ or carers’ relating to each other, as well as the community and culture we grew up in. As a couple we will inevitably be sharing psychic space as well as physical space, the tension between wanting to be held and close and wanting our own space and freedom can be challenging.

At times we might find our sense of our self and our reality is threatened by our partner’s version of what is happening. For example, we might feel our frequent phone calls and texts show how attentive and caring we are but our partner may feel overwhelmed and claustrophobic. One of us may feel it is important to regularly spend time apart to not become tired of each other, but this might make our partner might feel rejected and isolated. These polarised positions highlight the difficulties of holding two perspectives on what it means to be in a couple relationship.

Couples coming to therapy often do not have a sense of themselves as a couple. Thinking about what your relationship needs is not the same as thinking about what you need. This may sound obvious but it is easy to lose sight of when you are finding life is a struggle. One role for the couples therapist is to help partners contain or tolerate their differences long enough to create a shared space to think, a couple state of mind. A couple state of mind can be understood as a third perspective, a position which gives a couple a chance to step back, look at their relationship and explore what they could hope for and create together.

Couples therapy also gives each of us the chance to see our partner relating to the therapist, showing ways that two people can think together in a close and trusting way. Seeing someone as familiar as your partner connecting with another person can be surprising, they can be revealed in a different light. The therapist offers a safe and supportive environment where a couple can think together and explore a couple state of mind, to see if they can continue to develop as individuals whilst enjoying the closeness and intimacy of being a couple.

Morgan, M. (2018) A Couple State of Mind: Psychoanalysis of Couples and the Tavistock Relationships Model. London. Routledge.

Angela Betteridge is a couple and family therapist working at our private practice in Lewes. She is available to see adolescents individually or with parents /carers.

Apparently January is the month when more couples file for divorce than any other. The reason given for this? After what is often a stressful festive period, couples spending extra time together suddenly realise that they don’t have nearly as much in common as they once did. Whilst this may well be true, I wonder if there is more to this story than meets the eye.

Being in a relationship is hard. There are no ifs and buts about it. There is no such thing as the fairytale relationship. There are plenty of reasons for this but some of the most credible come from anthropological and neuroscience studies which support each other in suggesting that the things that bring us together and then keep us together are different. And those differences are largely down to the different chemicals our brains emit during those processes – dopamine vs oxytocin.

Add to the mix the paradigm shifts in the place relationships take in modern life vs that of our distant and much more recent ancestors and we can get a real sense of why life-long pair-bonding (or even long-term monogamy) is a challenge. Consider for instance that marriage has only relatively recently – the last couple of hundred years – become an institution based on romance. As odd as this may seem, this was never the case and marriage has a much longer history of being associated with financial gain, land rights, lineage, convenience and convention. It was generally assumed that the role of marriage was not one of romance or passion.

From an anthropological perspective us humans are also living significantly longer than we did only a couple of hundred years ago. How does this apply to relationships? Well with a lifespan of perhaps forty of fifty years, we would live just about long enough to raise kids. Now we can potentially be with the same person for 40, 50 or 60 years.

Lastly there have been significant changes to how we live in terms of community. Few of us now belong to tribes or live communally with our families. For many of us, we are geographically distanced from many in our families and no longer part of strong local communities. This puts further pressure on our primary relationships to meet all our needs.

Relationship, couple or marriage counselling can be an extremely beneficial environment in which to explore how we can find our own way to balance our need for excitement and novelty with our need for safety and security, within the context of a single romantic relationship. Contrary to what many people think, couple counselling does not mark the end of a relationship, but can in fact be a conduit to a new beginning.

Perhaps the best definition of a perfect marriage or relationship is one that I came across as a virtual bumper sticker which read ‘a perfect marriage is just two imperfect people who refuse to give up on each other’.

Mark Vahrmeyer

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A Couple State of Mind

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