What I Did On My Summer Vacation (Summer Camp for Couples Therapy Geeks)
Every summer, while much of the city is at the cottage, a smaller and stranger cohort of us is in a room somewhere talking about couples for just under a week. I've taken to calling it summer camp for couples therapy geeks, which is not entirely a joke — there was a cohort, there was communal eating, there was a genuine sense of having found your people. This was my first year at Tavistock Relationships' Couple Therapy Summer School in London — this year's theme "Couple and Family Life in Transition" — and it will not be my last. It was one piece of a longer summer that also included real, unstructured time off — the kind with no reading list attached. But the London leg deserves its own paragraph.
The room made a case for the theme. Clinicians had come from Canada, the US, India, Poland, and Israel and from within Britain, which meant every discussion of "the family" was implicitly a discussion of whose family, in what context, under what assumptions — same-sex couples, blended families, assisted conception, polyamorous constellations, and the quieter question of how much our formulations still assume a family structure that stopped being universal a while ago, if it ever was.
What struck me most wasn't the theory. It was being in a room together, in every sense — many of us ate dinners as a group, we all went to the theatre together one evening as part of the course. There's a level of clinical thinking that only happens in person: reading a colleague's hesitation before they name what a case is really about, catching the moment someone's own countertransference flickers across their face. Nobody was there to win a point. It was genuinely collaborative — clinicians from at least five countries pushing each other's thinking, offering a different angle on a stuck case, holding each other's uncertainty without rushing to resolve it. That kind of exchange doesn't happen over email.
It's the same reason our weekly consultation happens in person. Every clinician on our team has standing weekly individual supervision or consultation, plus weekly group consultation, held in the room. Good couples work (or individual therapy for that matter) doesn't come from any one clinician's insight; it comes from that assumptions being tested, pushed, and refined face to face by other thoughtful people looking at the same material, week after week. The summer school was a concentrated version of exactly that.
I came home with a clearer sense of why I'll be back at camp next summer. If you're a therapist referring couples work our way, this is some of what's behind that referral: not a practice that treats couples work as one service among many, but one where the deepening is structural, weekly, in person, and ongoing.
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If you are experiencing physical, emotional, financial or sexual abuse in your relationship, traditional couples therapy is inappropriate for you. A basic sense of safety is a human right and a fundamental requirement for couples therapy to be beneficial. If you or someone you know is in an abusive relationship, call the
Victim 24/7 Support Line: 1-888-579-2888;
Assaulted Women's Helpline: 1-866-863-0511 (toll-free, 24/7, multilingual service available)
National Domestic Violence Hotline www.thehotline.org
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