The secret to saving your relationship: eight lessons from a couples therapist
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Loading... - Daniel Moser
- 23 Jun 2022
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Susanna Abse is the marriage counsellor’s marriage counsellor – 30 years in practice giving her peerless insights into the challenges couples face without making any dent in her curiosity and originality. This serene, witty 65-year-old is exacting but non-judgmental; I imagine you’d feel able to say absolutely anything in front of her, unless it was bullshit. You would trust her with your marriage, but you’d want to take your A-game.
Abse can’t begin to estimate how many couples she’s seen since her first in 1986, but puts it at tens of thousands of hours. She has worked with every kind of couple, from the ones who “bang their heads together and shout and stand up and walk out” (she calls these “doll’s house” couples in her book – people who break things without any sense of consequence), to the ones who think there’s never been anything wrong, and can’t understand why they’ve suddenly got issues.
She typically sees a couple weekly or biweekly. Her work is instinctive: a couple will continue to meet with her for as long as it takes. “I absolutely never know whether a couple will separate or not,” she says.
Post-Covid, there has been a rise in the number of couples seeking therapy, but it’s perhaps not as dramatic as you might expect. If the field is booming, it’s because millennials, and couples even younger, are seeking help earlier in their relationship – at a point when older generations would have just called it quits. The rise probably isn’t hurt by the popularity of shows such as the BBC’s Couples Therapy, which sheds a light on this usually hidden process.
When she started practising, “there used to be a rule that you never asked a question, as a psychoanalytic practitioner”, she says. “Now, most therapists are much more interactive and will ask questions directly about what the problem is.” Abse’s approach is distinctive in that “I never can see a person without asking about all the people who’ve been around them, or not around them. They are always in the context of a relationship with other people, or a missing relationship with somebody.”
In the 1990s, the work of the celebrated psychologist John Gottman was fashionable in marriage circles: published in 1983, the “four horsemen” theory was that you could predict which couples would fall apart from four red flags: criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. That’s fallen out of fashion, too, and Abse says “Lots of couples will be contemptuous at moments, or stonewall at moments. It’s a defence, isn’t it? Or a retaliation. My job is to trace it back to its origins, when it started between the couple, and then further back – what the meaning of it is for them as individuals in relation to their own childhood experience.”
Abse doesn’t do rules. So let’s just call this list eight essential truths for a happy relationship. Read More...
