Breaking Up Is Hard: Separation, Divorce & Couple Psychotherapy
Jo and Phil were in their late-twenties. They had married within a year of getting together. Two years into the marriage, Phil wanted a baby but Jo wasn’t ready yet. They each had high-flying careers and Jo wanted to develop hers more before starting a family. Seven years later Phil, who was unhappy in the marriage, suggested the couple separate. Hoping to change his mind, Jo became pregnant with their child. Shortly after the baby’s birth Jo discovered Phil had conducted an affair throughout the duration of the pregnancy. On ending the affair Phil had asked Jo for a divorce. Very quickly, the couple became locked in a battle about caring for their child: Jo supervised and time-limited Phil’s contact with their infant and Phil enlisted the legal system to enforce contact rights. Given the young age of the child and the intractable position that both parents had adopted in relation to each other, the couple’s lawyers suggested they seek help.
Jo and Phil came to me via this referral route. Sitting in the room with a couple who arrive in such a warlike state frequently reminds me of what Clulow & Vincent wrote, ‘war is not too strong a metaphor to apply to the experiences of some who divorce….. and there are social pressures to treat partners as adversaries once marriage ends’ (Clulow & Vincent, 1987, p. 1).
Divorce is the legal process that brings a marriage to an end. It is separate from considerations about money, property or arrangements about children. Discussions about these matters constitute the terms of a divorce and have tended to take place in four main ways: mediation; the collaborative law process; solicitor-to-solicitor negotiations; court settlements. Jo and Phil’s case is one of two types of cases that generally come before family courts, namely, ‘private’ law proceedings, which involve disputes over residence and contact with children as a consequence of divorce. The other category is ‘public’ law proceedings where the local authority has intervened, in cases of child neglect, to make the child the subject of care proceedings.
Following the publication of the Family Justice Review (2011) chaired by David Norgrove the government has acted to unify the family court system, a measure that took effect in April 2014. Moreover, the system is now accessed through a non-litigious first point of contact – the mediation, information and assessment meeting (MIAM) – intended to accelerate the process, reduce litigation, increase the use of mediation and civilize the divorce process, reducing costs in the process; following a spending review, from April 2013 onwards the government has withdrawn legal aid from litigants in private law proceedings except in exceptional circumstances. The impact of this on many lower income families entrenched in high conflict divorces needs to be considered, as increasing numbers of couples will not be able to employ solicitors and barristers to help them manage disputes stemming from relationship breakdown. Many of their predicaments will be displaced increasingly into mediation and other out-of-court settings.
The family justice system performs an important role in resolving disputes that arise out of emotional responses to family restructuring, potentially securing outcomes that are just and protective of the welfare of vulnerable family members, especially children (Murch, 2012). A study conducted by the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationship (TCCR) in the 1980s found that the difficulty experienced by one or both partners in accepting that their marriage had ended was expressed in child contact and residence disputes (Clulow & Vincent, 1987). The study identified some significant behavioral patterns in the ways couples divorce - shot gun divorces, nominal divorces and long lease divorces - supporting what we already know, that the way people feel about what is happening to them becomes central to shaping their lives during the divorce process.
So how can psychoanalytic couple psychotherapy help in cases of separation and divorce? Is it possible to work therapeutically with couples locked in a high conflict divorce? Two highly regarded and well-respected couple psychotherapists, Avi Shmueli and Christopher Vincent, have contributed a wealth of thinking about this very complex subject in the book, How Couple Relationships Shape Our World: Clinical Practice, Research, and Policy Perspectives (Balfour, Morgan & Vincent, 2012).
Shmueli is Head of the Divorce and Separation Consultation Service (DSCS) of the TCCR. Arising from his work at this service, Shmueli proposes an innovative way of conceptualizing high conflict divorce by affording primacy to the importance of unconscious phantasy in shaping how external events are subjectively perceived and influence behaviour. He poignantly points out how easily therapists working with couples in high conflict divorces can forget that the two people now locked in an embittered battle were once lovers. Shmueli illustrates how high conflict arises from each partner’s inability to accept their marriage has failed to fulfill the unconscious hopes that underpinned their initial attraction to each other. He highlights the importance in enabling high conflict couples to mourn these losses appropriately so they may move on with their lives.
Vincent offers invaluable insights into the psychodynamics of high conflict couples. He reminds us that partners are in the process of losing a significant attachment figure in their lives, and that this inevitably has a significant impact on their emotional state and their ability to manage change. Understanding the significance of attachment for how couples manage divorce has been translated by the TCCR into its mentalizing service, ‘Parenting Together’, and a recently awarded contract from the DWP means that TCCR will be working with CAFCASS to reduce parental conflict over children in divorce cases.
An important practical aspect of working psychoanalytically with high conflict divorce couples is to remember that it may not be possible to apply the more ‘standard’ aspects of psychoanalytic couple psychotherapy. For instance, to provide psychoanalytic couple psychotherapy to couples may not be what is needed at this time as the couple are, after all, divorcing. The work here needs to be centered on gaining a joint understanding of how couple dynamics have been relied upon by each partner to maintain emotional equilibrium in the past and of how, without that relationship, each partner can be helped to find a new equilibrium in the future.
Additionally, couples or individuals are generally referred for therapy by their legal representatives, or in some cases by the courts themselves, at a time when they are under tremendous pressures resulting from ongoing external tensions as well as internal emotional conflict. Therefore, long-term therapy is not often sought or welcomed, and most often the persons referred will be more concerned with what is happening in their external worlds rather than be drawn towards becoming interested in their internal, unconscious processes. Couple therapists need to be mindful of this aspect of the work whilst simultaneously adhering to the boundaries of the session i.e. in arranging and conducting sessions, as ‘the structure of the session then offers a metaphorical lens through which to view the couple in particular circumstances’ (Shmueli, 2012; p.152).
“At the DSCS”, Shmueli explains, “the number and frequency of consultations are negotiated according to case requirements, and regular long-term work is sidestepped in favour of brief, targeted, need-based sessional work. It helps if the therapist has some basic knowledge of the divorce process”.
The other aspect of working with high conflict divorces is that generally one partner attends, or if the couple wishes to be seen then they are often seen individually rather than together. “Here”, Shmueli says, “the task of the psychoanalytically-oriented couple therapist is to keep the couple’s relationship in mind alongside maintaining the view that the couple’s statements are also symbolic descriptions of their own internal worlds. This helps us maintain the very important distinction between the concrete couple in the process of divorcing, and the internal psychological couple present within each of the respective partners”.
Couple psychotherapists know that to help partners separate amicably they will require help containing their internal object relationships, which over time each have become lodged in, and unconsciously enacted with their partner. In other words, partners are helped to separate by withdrawing their unconscious projections located in each other. Therapeutically this is done by providing each with the opportunity to make sense of their emotional states, enabling them to think about their current struggles in the context of their lives together.
Separation and divorce are deeply stressful life events. Nearly half a century ago divorce was found to take second place to death of a spouse (which ranks first in the ratings) and separation, which came in third, was considered to be more stressful than imprisonment (Holmes and Rahe, 1967); the situation is probably little different today. Interventions that take account of the affect regulating function of couple’s behaviour provide an opportunity for separating and divorcing couples to be helped in managing their painful and often very complicated feelings associated with the process. In fact, high conflict divorce couples like Jo and Phil can be helped to separate out issues pertaining to problematic relating between the two of them, from their roles as child-focused parents. As Vincent succinctly puts it, “The task of psychoanalytically-oriented couple therapists becomes one where we provide some therapeutic ways of helping them relinquish the fight and mediate their differences in the process of separating”.
References
Clulow, C. & Vincent, C. (1987). In the Child’s Best Interests: Divorce Court Welfare and The Search for a Settlement. London: Tavistock.
Family Justice Review: Final Report (2011). Published on behalf of the Family Justice Review Panel by the Ministry of Justice, the Department of Education and the Welsh Government. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications
How Couple Relationships Shape Our World: Clinical Practice, Research, and Policy Perspectives, edited by Balfour, A., Morgan, M., and Vincent, C. Karnac (2012).
Holmes, T. & Rahe, R. (1967). The social readjustment rating scale. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 11(2):213-218.
Murch, M. (2012). The role of the family court system of England and Wales in child-related parental disputes: towards a new concept of the family justice process. In: A. Balfour, M. Morgan and C. Vincent (Eds.), How Couple Relationships Shape Our World. Clinical Practice, Research, and Policy Perspectives. London: Karnac.
Shmueli, A. (2012). Chapter Five: Working therapeutically with high conflict divorce. In: A. Balfour, M. Morgan and C. Vincent (Eds.), How Couple Relationships Shape Our World. Clinical Practice, Research, and Policy Perspectives. London: Karnac.
Vincent, C. (2012). Commentary on Chapter Five. In: A. Balfour, M. Morgan and C. Vincent (Eds.), How Couple Relationships Shape Our World. Clinical Practice, Research, and Policy Perspectives. London: Karnac.
