Couples’ therapy is a specific clinical skill that requires advanced study and an internship during which a therapist is trained to create space for couples and families of all types to deepen their understanding of themselves together in various ways. This space can transform a couple’s and family’s life experiences through learning to become more vulnerable with each other, learning to offer empathy and compassion when stuck in blame and judgement, practicing accountability for harm caused in relationships, learning each other’s trauma history to serve each other better and understanding the deeper wisdom behind each other’s conflict styles. The goal of couples and family therapy is not always to stay together.
For some people there is tremendous power in realizing that they truly do not want to be together. Therapy can help make those realizations conscious. I teach Indian couples and families to learn to break up more consciously if that is what they choose, to ask for time apart with intention, to create more structure around privacy and consent in shared domestic spaces and to accept and engage with each other’s sexual truths in a more relational way.
Rajeev was a growth-oriented person with good experiences with therapy during his college days. He was aware that there is more to romance, sex, marriage or long-term relationships than meets the eye. Without understanding how trauma naturally shows up in our adult relationships—especially the safe, secure, long-term ones— and how to address it, Rajeev knew that we can quickly become dejected by our own fantasies about how easy and nice a good relationship ‘should’ be. The romantic movies we watch leave us with the message that if you find the right person, everything will just naturally flow. Nothing could be further from the truth.
So, it was Rajeev who contacted me first, asking for a family therapy session with his wife and his mother also in attendance. He said he only wanted one session during which he could use my couple therapy skills to explain to Bindu and Ninaben that they were both being, in his words, ‘overdramatic’. He said that although the first two years of his marriage had passed in jubilant celebration and an easy, natural flow of being together, there had been a lot of conflict lately. He was suddenly feeling as if he was being pulled in opposite directions by his mom and his wife.
He labelled himself as ‘helplessly stuck in the middle’. From being a harmonious family, they were slowly becoming fragmented. Although he knew it had something to do with trauma, Rajeev wanted help to go deeper. While he was able to trust Bindu and himself to navigate everyday marital conflict together, he was getting frustrated that he had completely lost desire for sex—and, in some ways, for Bindu, whom he still loved deeply.
Bindu, being the partner with the higher libido in the relationship, needed sex and physical touch for connection. Touch was her primary love language, but the more she asked for it in the ways that she did, the more resistant Rajeev became to her demands. And the more resistant he became, the louder, angrier and more intense Bindu’s feelings of rejection and abandonment would get. This spiral would push Rajeev to go to his mother’s house next door to distract himself. He would help Ninaben with domestic chores and wait for Bindu to calm down. This behaviour would make Bindu feel even more abandoned because she thought her partner had left her when things were difficult and there was no one there to soothe her pain.
The expectation to hold Bindu’s intense feelings would make Rajeev more hostile. However, while at his mother’s house, Rajeev had to hear her constantly bring up stories of his father. Ninaben would confess that she felt that had he been alive, she would probably have been better off. They would have been living in a better apartment, in a busier neighbourhood, in a larger city with a more secure financial provider. She would then nudge Rajeev to have children so that her own life could have more meaning and security. Rajeev would resist this pressure too, he would experience a ‘shutting down’ and experience immense frustration.
When Rajeev went back to his own apartment, he would find Bindu curled up in bed, crying. They would fall asleep without discussing their argument further. This would happen at least once a week. Rajeev expressed feeling like a terrible partner and wanting to run away from all of this. He could not believe that this was the same family system that over a year ago was living in almost perfect harmony. It had been one year since Bindu and Rajeev had found themselves in this cycle, and also one year since they last had sex.
The tension in the room was so thick you could cut it with a knife. It was a bustling Thursday afternoon six weeks into our therapeutic alliance, and there was enough mutuality and comfort in the room to teach this couple to start digging under their surface level feelings. I thanked Rajeev for sharing deeply in the first session and validated his understanding of looking below the surface that he brought into the room with him. Looking at his stooped shoulders, I asked, ‘Rajeev, how do you support your wife when she is angry with you?’ Bindu, an introverted, energetic woman in her early thirties, angrily looked on.
Bindu had earlier finished narrating her experience of feeling like her beloved husband didn’t want her. She had taken up thirty minutes of session time, breaking down multiple times, to frame questions such as ‘What has changed? Why don’t you want me anymore? Can you tell me what I can do better? What do you need from me?’ Rajeev had a more detached, observant demeanour about him. Each time Bindu asked him why, he seemed to physically retreat from her question. His shoulders would drop, his chest would deflate and he would quietly roll his eyes and look towards me.
This excerpt from Neha Bhat’s ‘Unashamed: Notes From The Diary of a Sex Therapist’, has been published with permission from HarperCollins India.