A Marriage Therapy Session, Part 1

Jan 19

By Jay Slupesky

Crying Woman I figure that I lot of people must be curious about what a marriage therapy session is like. The marriage therapy scenes in television and movies never seem very authentic to me, with the possible exception of the HBO series Tell Me You Love Me. So I decided to write a script of a sample therapy session for you to read. Please know that this is not the transcript of an actual therapy session. This is a fictional session; it is the product of my imagination. I would never violate a client’s privacy!

This is a first session, so I have not met with the couple before. My goals in the first session are: (1) to build an alliance between myself and the clients by showing that they can trust me and that I understand their feelings, and (2) to begin to understand what issues are facing the couple and causing them to be in conflict.

So here we go…

Therapist: Welcome.

Husband: Thanks.

Therapist: So tell me a little about yourselves. How long have you guys been together?

Wife: Together for eleven years, and we’ve been married almost eight years.

Husband: Our anniversary is next month.

Therapist: I see. Did you live together before you got married?

Wife: Yes, for a while…a little over a year, I guess.

Husband: And we had another roommate too! It was an interesting situation.

Therapist: Wow! That must have been tricky at times!

Both: (laughter)

Therapist: Do you guys have kids?

Wife: Yeah. Two.

Therapist: Tell me a little about them.

Wife: We have a boy who is six. He just started kindergarten. And we have a daughter who is almost four.

Husband: I’ll say right off the bat that my wife is a great mom.

Therapist: That must mean a lot to you. You appreciate that about her a lot.

Husband: That’s true. She’s really good with the kids. I don’t have nearly the patience with them that she does.

Wife: It’s easy. They’re good kids. We’re really lucky.

Therapist: And is this the first marriage for both you?

Husband: Yes, for me it is. For both of us, actually.

Wife: Yeah.

Therapist: OK. Well, what brings you into my office? How can I help?

Wife: (to husband) Do you want to go first?

Husband: (to wife) No, you go ahead.

Wife: OK. Well, starting about six months ago I guess, I just started to feel distant from him, like something had changed. I didn’t know why. I knew I loved him as much as I ever did. I thought we were a happy family. But we just weren’t connected, you know? I worried about it all the time. And I would ask him what was wrong. Please tell me what is wrong. But he always said that he was fine, don’t worry about it.

Therapist: I can understand why you would be worried. You feared that something bad had happened to your relationship, something you didn’t even know about.

Wife: Exactly. And then after a while I started to wonder if there was someone else. He swore there wasn’t, but I didn’t know if I believed him. So one day I checked his emails. He had forgotten to sign out before he left for a doctor appointment. And then I saw all the emails from this woman that he works with. Someone who I had met at the office Christmas party, and I thought she seemed nice. I had no clue that she was talking to my husband behind my back. They were emailing each other, like, five times a day. And I read all the emails that he had sent to her, talking about how he wasn’t happy with me but felt like he had to stay because of the kids. (starts to cry)

Therapist: That must have felt like such a betrayal. And I can see that while you’re sitting here now, thinking about that day, it still hurts.

Wife: (still crying) I was furious. I had always trusted him. So now I find out that he’s got something going on with another woman. And then I realized, to add insult to injury, he’d been lying about it, denying it when I asked him. I felt like such a fool.

OK. That ends part 1. More to come in our next episode.

Tags: emotional affair, television

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 11:27 pm and is filed under About Marriage Therapy.

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