There’s
nothing easy about relationships, but in his new book – –
Nicholas Rose shares case studies and insights from his work as a sex and
relationship therapist in London.
I caught up with Nicholas for a behind-the-scenes look
at the book and what it tells us about queer relationships.
What was the inspiration for turning some of your
counselling experiences into a book of case studies about relationships?
Actually this book might never have happened if not
for the COVID-19 pandemic and the year of lockdowns.
Extra time, combined with a powerful desire to offer
something, make full use of my time and distract myself from my feelings of
helplessness and impotence, pushed me to try to put into words what has driven
me to work as a therapist with relationships and to share what I have learned.
How does reading about someone else’s relationship
help us navigate the reality of our own relationships?
It is natural for us to think about our own situation
when we engage with the experiences of others. While we all know that
comparison can be unhelpful, the ways in which other people experience and
think about life can often be wonderfully enlightening and freeing.
My hope in writing this book was that it might help
readers with their relationship dilemmas while also giving an insight into
therapy so as to make it more accessible.
There are so many misconceptions about what therapy is
and I hope my book goes some way towards dispelling some of them.
Was it difficult to choose which case studies to
feature? Was everyone happy to be featured in the book, or are there some
couples who didn’t want their relationships laid bare in public?
At the point when I started to write the stories, I
got very stuck because I really wanted to protect the confidences of all my
patients. My solution in putting these stories together was to work with a
writer who was able to construct the framework of the stories, allowing me to
identify the potential moments of therapeutic change and to formulate my
response in each situation.
We spent many hours talking about the concerns people
bring to therapy and as we explored and wrote the initial chapters that’s how
ideas came about for the examples we have chosen.
One of the case studies that resonated with me was
Marcus and Tian – a couple who were navigating shifting from monogamy to
non-monogamy. Is that one of the most common topics that queer couples bring to
a counselling session?
Relationship structures are often a concern with which
partners struggle. Underneath the practical elements of what the changes may or
may not be are the partners feelings and needs which often need time and focus
in order to be fully understood.
When needs and feelings are understood the partners
can quite quickly find ways to move forward.
Taking that example of a couple figuring out how to
open up their relationship, I found your reflections interesting in terms of
the difference between structure – such as deciding what the ‘rules’ are – and
process or how to navigate what can be tricky emotional terrain. Are our
relationships doomed to fail unless we’ve figured out how to engage our
emotional intelligence?
When you use the term emotional intelligence I tend to
think of the way in which we all share a process of how we make meaning from
our experience. Experience being the feelings that arise in response to
information from our senses followed by the thoughts that aim to help us make
sense of those feelings – of course, those thoughts are then the source of
further feelings and thoughts.
Neuroscience tells us that we cannot stop our feelings
but what we are able to do is carefully consider the thoughts that we then have
as a result – taking time to pause and reflect enables us to sometimes find
differing ways of thinking about things. With those differing thoughts come
differing feelings!
What do you hope that people feel when reading your
book, Better Together?
I hope that people feel a sense of calm, energy and
empowerment when they read the book.
My hope is that readers have an experience of the
words generating an internal dialogue whereby new possibilities and questions
about their relationships provide a means of understanding what has yet to be
understood.
SOURCE: MEANS HAPPY
No comments:
Post a Comment