In depth, rather than in increments.

Private Couples Intensive

Four hours · one couple · Alexandria

People come for this before a marriage, when two lives are about to be formally joined and neither has looked closely at what each is bringing. They come when one of them feels betrayed, and the question has become whether something can be rebuilt rather than whether it should be. They come having become very good partners and no longer lovers — the household working, the affection polite, and a question neither of them has found a way to raise. They come in the quiet years, when the last child has gone and nothing is wrong and nothing is alive either. And they come because two calendars will never produce a weekly hour. Premarital couples are welcome.

What happens inside is built around what the two of you are bringing.

Expressive Arts Couples Therapy Intensive

Saturday 5 December, 9am–2pm · up to three couples · materials provided

Up to three couples, five hours of movement, image and dialogue in one sitting. Materials are provided, and no art experience is needed or wanted.

The reason for working this way is simple: a pattern that is hard to describe will often simply arrive. It shows up in how two people place objects in relation to each other, in who moves first and who waits, in the colour one of you reaches for and the margin the other leaves at the edge of the paper. Nobody has to characterise it or win the argument about whether it is real. It becomes present in the room, and then there is something to look at together.

Making something is also slower than speaking, and the slowness is the point. A sentence can be revised before it leaves your mouth. A gesture usually cannot.

Working alongside other couples changes the room as well. There is less of the self-consciousness that comes of being the only two people in it, and something steadying about others being at the same work on the same day.

Two kinds of couples take these. Those who would rather get somewhere than keep arriving. And those already in therapy, with me or with someone else, who want the same material through a different lens: in the body rather than in conversation. These are built to sit alongside ongoing work, not to replace it.

The next one is Saturday 5 December, 9am to 2pm, at the Alexandria office. Three couples, and places are limited. We speak first, briefly, so I know the group is right for where the two of you are.