We attended Drummond Street 8 or 9 times to talk about how our arguments seem to come out of nowhere and get nasty pretty quickly. The counsellor said that we would work on this problem together, that she wasn’t going to give us an easy recipe because we need to both understand why we do this and then develop skills we can use after counselling has finished.
She wanted to know about our relationship including how we met, what the early days together were like, what our lives were like before we got together – what we brought to the relationship – and from that she made some hypotheses about our difficulties now. It was a down to earth approach; she wasn’t acting like she was an expert but was encouraging us to think for ourselves, to problem solve.
As my partner and I have been together 12 years, have young children and there are lots of pluses so we were pretty motivated to come to the weekly sessions. We learned about ways to understand where our anger comes from, handle conflict better, take responsibility for the outcome we wanted and do less blaming. There were even a few laughs in the sessions and the counsellor gave us a sense of hope from the start because she could see that our problems weren’t too overwhelming if we slowed down and thought instead of being so reactive. We were able to leave feeling a bit stronger as individuals and as a couple.
