notes on Couples Therapy
Welcome to the Sunday post. Catch up here.
From notes I took while watching the latest season of Couples Therapy.
“curious jazz music”
It’s so strange to think that I started watching Couple’s Therapy before covid.
I remember furtively watching it after seeing clients, before my family came home. I knew I wanted to watch it alone, to not be subject to anyone’s opinions of the clients or the therapist. In the past I’ve asked myself why I want to watch this show—I’m a therapist, so maybe it’s better if I don’t watch it, because what if it’s like a version of labor? What if I only watch it on my workdays? What does it mean if I’m drawn to watching it on my days off from work?
As a therapist, I’ve treated couples and I find working with couples the hardest. And, like all therapists, I’m sure I’ve made mistakes. I also know I’ve improved in how I work with couples over the years. For several years I even decided not to see them as clients, and instead, read about them, referred them to other therapists who specialize in couples, and I watched Couples Therapy. Working with individuals, I’ve suggested they watch the show with their partners. Occasionally an individual client invites their partner to a session, and once I was seeing people in person again, I remembered why I love working with couples as well as why I don’t.
I just recently changed my public profile to say I’m open to couples again.
“tender mellow music”
Orna Guralnik is the therapist on the show. She has a beautiful miniature Husky who sometimes accompanies her to her well-appointed office. Instead of a clock face staring back at the client Orna turns an enormous hourglass. She has a fine wood bookcase filled with volumes I want to spy the titles of. Seeing her bookcases remind me of the ones I used to take in whenever I was in my therapist’s “office” which was a room in her house before covid. I loved that her bookcase was a mixture of cookbooks and eclectic psychology books. Her house, too, often smelled of the herbs she used to cook with that came from her garden, which I got to see more of once covid arrived and we had to meet on the tiled porch of her backyard.
This season like all previous seasons is totally bingeable. I watch the show with captions and enjoy the captions of the interstitial music nearly as much as the music.
We are back in the room.
“ethereal synth music”
Here’s what I love about Orna: her face, her clothes, the way she sits on the edge of her seat while still looking comfortable, and the way she tucks a leg underneath herself on the chair.
I love the sound of her voice, which I think lends to her overall vibe of groundedness. Her hair is often brushed straight, with a messy part, or it’s parted in a clean line, and sometimes I get the sense that we’re seeing her at the end of a busy day because her hair is slightly astray, flyaways cast like a halo around her head. Occasionally Orna will have an elaborate braid, and this season (maybe in previous seasons too?) she also has a rattail, which is fascinating to me because the last time I had one mine was dyed blue and I was in my early-20s. Her rattail looks mixed, like a silver or white, one braid that sort of lives among the rest of her straight brown hair. Orna is often adorned in rings, necklaces, and ear cuffs, and she has a thin, branchy tattoo on her arm. Her hands might be cupping a solid mug as she listens. Orna might be my age or a bit older. I like looking at the lines in her face.
We usually see Orna’s clients for the first time in the waiting room, a camera trained on them as they sit. As a season progresses we also get to see the inside of couples’ apartments, the homes they’ve co-created, alongside many evocative scenes of couples in the streets of New York—florid, colorful, set to
“tender indie rock”
The show depicts a range of relationship territories, personal affects, identities, and issues. There are queer relationships, straight relationships, open relationships, polycule, and co-parents. There are trans partners, cis partners, two spirit partners. There are affairs and there is ethical nonmonogamy and monogamy. There are nuclear families and group houses and co-parents living apart. Clients bring in dissociation. Dissociative Identity Disorder. OCD. ADHD. Narcissism. Childhood trauma. The latest season actually begins with a voiceover of Orna reflecting on the effects of childhood experiences on adults and how these shape who we become. We are shown images of the couples, and one three-person polycule, along with photos of each person as a child imposed on the adult we will see in therapy.
Up front: I’m not interested in talking shit about the clients/patients. If you do an internet search on any of the couples, there’s a vomit pool of reddit comments. I will say that there are times when I notice I have a strong reaction to a person’s behaviors—most often the cis het males. There are irritating people and irritating couples, just like real life. If I get bored by a particular couple I try to notice why. To the show’s credit, there are rarely boring couples or moments—the pacing and editing keep the story moving. In this current season, I found myself a little disinterested with one couple and then a bunch of stuff got unearthed and then I was invested again.
Does Orna make mistakes? Yes, though in my eyes, they’re subtle and normal and when repair is needed, she does it. Does the show’s frame make mistakes? Possibly/probably.
And then there is all that we do not see. The couple are the only ones who know the inside of the relationship.
“unsettling ethereal music”
How do these couples expose themselves this way?
“pensive melancholic music”
I’ve been in couples therapy as a client twice. As I tried to write about these experiences, I found myself not wanting to even rehash them with myself, let alone readers. Let’s just say this: even as a therapist it’s incredibly difficult to find the right therapist.
How much of my experience of this show is as a past client in couples therapy vs. as a therapist? How much is simply as a voyeur?
There are shifting shadows in the office. When the office appears darker, Orna’s hair might be more upkempt.
In moments Orna searches for words, which feels against the scripted reality show format.
Sometimes she looks tired, the lines in her face becoming more pronounced.
In this mode of therapy—psychoanalytic work—Orna is bringing consciousness to the unconscious. I know from experience that this can sometimes be as exhausting as it is rejuvenating.
I once took an 18 second video of the show, a montage scene of the various couples in their homes. Orna in voiceover says, We all are motivated by and endlessly evolving and changing unconscious. You never get to a point where you’re honest with yourself and you can just sit there and relax. There’s always something new that’s gonna, like, mess things up. As she says this clients are pulling a can out of a cupboard, writing on a pad of paper, talking on the cellphone while driving.
“hopeful delicate piano”
The show also lets us peek into conversations Orna has with colleagues—her clinical advisor, and a peer advisory group of therapists. Watching these scenes is revealing a whole other layer, a part of the work that I love and miss, now that I am working from home, in private practice, with not a lot of time or energy to meet with other therapists. Discussions of treatments methods happen, talk of countertransference—there is a particular juice in these scenes I appreciate.
After I watch Couples Therapy I always wonder if the couples watch themselves in the show afterward. I feel grateful for their extreme exposure. We are basically asked, as an audience, to love these couples. And I do, often.
“sensitive folk music”
I didn’t want the season to end, I never do. Relatedly, I looked up when the next season of In Treatment will air and learn that it was cancelled.
More than one of the clients mention that they ask themselves questions Orna might ask them—in other words, they have internalized Orna to some degree. Of the five therapists I’ve worked with over time, I’ve internalized the voice of two.
At the end of this season, Orna’s dog speaks! The dog says “I love you”!
We don’t yet know if there will be a season 5 of Couples Therapy.
The closing credits play over the sounds of the office being reset.
In my own office, the chair might get scooted forward, the room divider carried from one spot to another, a tissue box replaced from the side table to my desk, blinds shut, a used mug set in the sink, the small clock transported from the tray table on the ottoman in front of my chair over to the desk, the light switched off, the window opened or closed, the alarm set before walking across the yard, past the hoja santa, the cacti, the succulents in their orange, yellow, and turquoise pots, crossing that liminal space of decomposed granite between my work and my home.
sounds of office door being closed, footsteps walking away