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Couple Therapy: The Basics by experienced couple psychotherapist Molly Ludlam provides a detailed overview of the field for both therapists and couples who might be seeking help in this area. In other words, it’s the book I wish I had read several years ago. Ludlam gives full credence to how rich, complex and challenging the therapy can be, and throughout this book she respects the difference between individual and couple work. This would have been a useful eye opener as I made the leap from individual to relationship therapy.
Ludlam writes in a highly accessible way, detailing what is involved in treatment with illustrative case examples. The book provides a good flavour of what is involved in this work, and the challenges that practitioners will face. It is written for potential clients considering therapy, as well as therapists wanting to train in this area or those at the beginning of the work. Ludlam writes in a way that engages the reader, poses thought provoking questions, and points to ways to gather more information including in a cultural context, i.e., films, books and TV. Part of the book’s appeal is that it illustrates the paradox of couple relationships and therapy – so much cultural value and significance is placed upon the couple relationship, and yet couple therapy is often sought at the point of crisis rather than as an investment into often the most significant relationship of one’s life. Couple therapy is often the last resort when everything else has broken down, and this gives a certain edge to the therapy and projects a pressure to act onto the therapists, that can be hard to resist.
Ludlam starts by charting the evolution of a couple, with an account of the projective qualities involved in attraction and forming the relationship, to the developmental aspects of (ideally) mature dependency. There is a useful understanding of the way that mutually dependent relationships paradoxically only survive when they allow partners to be healthily separate