Barbara Bloomfield - Couple Therapy: Dramas of Love and Sex

Couple Therapy

Dramas of Love and Sex

This is an original, creative way of unpicking relationship problems worth revisiting again and again for more insights.

Bel Mooney, Columnist, Daily Mail

Couple Therapy is a very innovative book exploring the private worlds of two fictional couples (plus one family) going through RELATE counselling. It is comic strip type graphic novel which highlights relationship issues in an exciting, easy and highly readable way. A must read for anybody experiencing problems in a relationship.

Cary L Cooper, CBE, Distinguished Professor of Organizational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University, UK, and President of Relate

This wonderfully creative book provides a unique insight into the Relate counselling room. It is written with clarity and integrity and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about Relate counselling.

Jenny Porter, Supervisor, Relate Cymru, and Tutor at The Relate Institute, UK

This graphic novel explores some of the problems we all face in our relationships and beautifully describes what goes on in the counselling room to solve them. I love the real feeling of being in the room that the cartoons convey and then the whats going on in the counsellors head commentary adds depth, followed by some excellent supervision of the work at the end of each chapter. Theres no dumbing down and the book gives real insights into the couple and family counselling process. Marvellous!

Gwilym Roberts, Chief Executive Relate Cymru, UK

This beautifully illustrated graphic novel provides an informative and accessible guide to systemic-oriented couple therapy, with accompanying comments and thoughts helping the reader to understand the way the couple feels and the therapist works with their problems. The book can be recommended to anyone who wants to get an idea of what happens in couple therapy.

Dr Andreas Vossler, Director of the Foundation Degree in Counselling, The Open University, UK

Full of the drama and humanity of couple therapy, Barbara Bloomfields thoughtful holding, interventions and reflections match the vivid characters illustrated by Chris Radley in this energetic graphic narrative that showreels fictionalised episodes from inside the confidential couple therapy room. Entertaining, reflective, moving and educational this is a riveting read.

Claire Williamson, Programme Leader, MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes, Metanoia Institute, UK

Open University Press

McGraw-Hill Education

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First published 2013

Copyright Peter Hawkins & Nick Smith, 2013

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A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-33-526337-0

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Couple Therapy

Dramas of Love and Sex

Barbara Bloomfield & Chris Radley

I would like to thank my husband, Ben, and family Livvy, Zoe and Anna for all their warm support. Many thanks also to our kind editor, Monika Lee, and her team, and all my wonderful colleagues at Relate.

Barbara Bloomfield

Thank you to Carole, the very therapeutic other half of our own couple, for everything, really.

Chris Radley

The three stories that follow are fictional and none of the characters or situations are based on real people. Rather, they illustrate some of the issues that couples and families bring to counselling and how a therapist might help their clients to resolve them.

CONTENTS

	Barbara Bloomfield is a Couples and Family Counsellor and Supervisor with Relate. She is also a former newspaper journalist, BBC radio reporter, producer and an author of several books including (2009).
	Chris Radley provides all of the illustrations in this book. He is a freelance creative consultant who has worked chiefly with overseas development and UK social needs charities, a wide range of writing and design and on assignments from political cartooning to graphic novels.
	Rudi Dallos is a Professor and Programme Director on the clinical psychology training programme at Plymouth University. His recent book publications include: (OpenUP, 2010) and Reflective Practice in Psychotherapy and Counselling (OpenUP, 2009).

Since I was a child I have always loved cartoons and remember how as a Hungarian child refugee it was through cartoons, such as the Beano , Topper , Roy of the Rovers and war comics, that I learnt to understand English. So it was a delight to be invited to collaborate on this graphic book, to write this introduction and also to offer some reflective commentary on the cases with Barbara.

There has been a considerable amount written about counselling and psycho-therapy. I will start by offering one more generalisation to add to the many: Therapy and counselling are multi-sensory activities. This may seem an obvious point, but if one looks at the mountain of textbooks which are predominantly words about therapy with very few pictures you might not realise this.

Therapy and counselling with couples involves being with two people and not just listening to their spoken word but perceiving the dance of their bodies, their gestures, facial expressions, sometimes their touches and even their smell. So, even when descriptions of sessions are presented eloquently and with passion the reader is nevertheless left with an enormous gap in awareness of what this looks like in practice. After all it is often the little things the quick fleeting smile, the meeting of eyes at a certain point, how a couples bodies orient to or away from each other that are so important.

We learn best and most fully when we use all our senses, and likewise couples need to be able to respond at multiple levels to each other. In turn maybe counsellors and therapists chose this activity precisely because it is theatrical, in its multi-sensory nature. They do not just want to be academics pondering over words. Most importantly counsellors need to look for where words and actions or gestures are contradictory. This is often a source of deep problems and confusion for couples what are you really saying?, you dont seem very sure?, we just have sex with no feelings of tenderness, etc. Showing such contradictions between words and bodies needs a visual presentation as well as a verbal one.