Laurie Abraham - The Husbands and Wives Club: A Year in the Life of a Couples Therapy Group

A Year in
the Life of
a Couples
Therapy Group

LAURIE ABRAHAM

Touchstone
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2010 by Laurie Abraham

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Touchstone hardcover edition March 2010

TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact
Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949
or business@simonandschuster.com.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event.
For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Designed by William Ruoto

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abraham, Laurie

The husbands and wives club : A year in the life of a couples therapy group/
Laurie Abraham.

p. cm.
A Touchstone Book.
1. MarriagePsychological aspectsUnited States. 2. Marital conflict
United States. I. Title.
HQ536.A223 2010
155.924dc22
2009023303

ISBN 978-1-4165-8547-3
ISBN 978-1-4165-9391-1 (ebook)

For some years now, Ive read with an eye, or ear, to who gets it right about marriage. This wasnt conscious much of the time, other than perhaps in my predilection for fiction that is character driven, spinning on the axis of human relationship rather than plot. But as a result, a fair number of my books, the novels mostly, have at least one or two scribbled effusions like, My God, thats it! Or, Exactly right. Or just check marks being, in the world of magazine editing from which I come, the indication of appreciation for a particular word, sentence, or idearestrained, but no less the loving for it.

In magazines, my niche has become something like feminism, psychology, and sex, and the politics thereof. (My first big piece in that realm, published in 1999 in the now-defunct Mirabella magazine, was a ten-thousand-word opus on female sexual desire and the evolution of sex and marital therapy.) When you cover such topics for magazines, the peg, or news hook, is usually the latest therapist-guru or how-to book, and over time I began to see patterns in the way relationships were conceivedand to be able to detect ideas that were richer, fresher, and potentially more useful to readers. The more I delved into modern psychological thinking and research, the more, too, I was drawn to earlier sources: to Freud and to other psychoanalysts, to family therapy pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s.

Which brings me to this book. The idea for it, or rather for The New York Times Magazine piece that inspired it, came now nearly five years ago. As I remember it, Id just read Paula Foxs Desperate Characters and admired how shed nailed the choppy river of dialogue, spoken and unspoken, that perpetually runs between spouses.

Oh, did I forget to mention it? Im married, eleven years, and so an expert in how one couple constantly communicateseven when, or maybe especially when, we think were not. I wanted to write nonfiction about marriage at different developmental stages the way Fox wrote fiction: close-up, textured, real. I knew it wouldnt work to just interview husbands and wives. Even if I spoke to people repeatedly, so that they perhaps began to open up, it would be difficult to capture the feeling of their relationships, the split-second shifting of mood and intention. Although for an earlier book on health care and poverty Id been a journalistic fly on the wall, hung out with various members of one family hour upon hour for several years, I couldnt imagine replicating that with couples. Too much downtime, which, granted, there was a fair amount of in my reporting for the health care book, but there also were relevant events, such as visits from home health nurses, hospital stays, and doctors appointments. What was I going to do, ask some couple to call me before they fought, or made tender love?

In any event, I never seriously considered that. My mind quickly went to couples therapy because I specifically wanted to explore how couples liveand live through (or not)their troubles. My husband and I saw a marriage therapist together and found it moderately helpful, and, as Ive suggested, I was interested in therapy as an entity of its own, its theory and practice. Summing it up in a sentence, my overall question became: How does marriage work to tear people downleaving them feeling bitter or diminished, dulled or lostand if that process can be interrupted, if a therapist can lift spouses out of the muck of their own making, how does it work?

After I decided I wanted to follow a therapy group, I contacted several people who run them for couples, among them a Philadelphia therapist named Judith Coch. Over coffee near my office at ELLE magazine in Manhattan, I told Coch I wanted to spend a year attending her group and also have permission to interview her and the couples outside of it, possibly in their homes. Id try to faithfully represent the members and her thinking and technique, but neither she nor her group would have any say over what I wrote. If I was at all confused about what she was trying to do with the group, Id ask her about it. Coch was cautiously excited. Confidentiality is an ethical mandate for therapists, and to decide to stretch it for an outside observer, certainly a journalist, wasnt something she could do lightly. Yet here was an opportunity to educate the public about the benefits of marriage therapy, and the group form in particular. (Im sure she didnt mind the attention, either, though after three decades as a therapist, she was professionally well established.)

After reading much of my workand, without telling me, contacting former subjects of my magazine piecesCoch broached the project with the new group she was forming. It was to include three couples who were continuing from the year before and two new ones. Theyd meet one weekend a month, for one or two six-hour sessions. The groups used to meet biweekly, but Coch increasingly found that getting both members of five separate couples, many with children, to show up so frequently was impossible. The monthly sessions would also allow people to enroll who lived beyond the immediate Philadelphia area, and in the group Id follow, the couples drove as long as three hours to get to Cochs office in Center City Philadelphia or one she has near her summer cottage on the Jersey shore.