14th June 2025 Lecture

Couples as Parents 

Parents Under Pressure:  How the challenges of parenting can impact and even threaten the couple relationship with particular reference to raising a disabled child.

A lecture by Kate Thompson, psychoanalytic couple psychotherapist and co-editor and co-author of the book, Couples as Parents (Routledge 2024).  Chaired by FPC member and couple psychodynamic psychotherapist Sophie Corke. 

To be held online from 10.00am to 12.00noon on Saturday 14th June 2025, by Zoom. Attendance is free of charge for all FPC members and will count as 2 hours CPD. The lecture will not be recorded. To book a place please email admin@thefpc.org.uk 

Kate ran the Parenting Service at Tavistock Relationships for over 10 years where she and others developed their knowledge and ideas about the particular challenges for couples of becoming and being parents through the life stages of their child or children. The recent book, Couples as Parents, came partly out of this work and explores both how becoming parents impacts the couple relationship and also how the quality of the couple relationship influences parenting. The particular challenges of “two becoming three” often take parents by surprise and where there may have been an anticipation of something joyful, parents can instead find themselves struggling and feeling pushed apart. This is a particular developmental stage which individuals and couples may need help to work through, particularly for parents who find strong feelings from their own childhood being reawakened and to some extent relived through their child. Couples as parents may need help to strengthen their relationship in the face of turbulent feelings and to mourn the losses that children bring. They will need to develop a capacity to hold their child in mind and come together to think about them as a “parental couple” an idea developed by Kate and others. 

Kate’s talk will hone in on both the internal and external pressures, including oedipal anxieties and narcissistic wounding, that threaten the boundary around the couple relationship for many parents. Kate will make particular reference to parents raising a disabled child, who are likely to come under acute strain which may leave each of them feeling isolated rather than being able to pull together as a couple. Drawing on her own often very moving work with these couples, Kate will illustrate how they can be helped to come to terms with the disillusionment and pain that can be associated with parenting under such difficult circumstances.

Kate Thompson is a couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist with over 25 years of experience working with couples and individuals. She adapted the Couple Therapy for Depression model to work with perinatal services and for couples where there is substance misuse and within perinatal services.  Having led the Couple Therapy for Depression training project within the NHS for over 10 years, she now supervises for Tavistock Relationships (TR) within the team.   

Alongside running TR’s parenting workshop for over 10 years, Kate co-facilitated Parents as Partners groups for families with disabled children and is particularly interested in how the couple relationship intersects with the parenting one.  This interest grew through her funded work in projects focusing on parents caught in conflictual separation. 

Kate is co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, and has edited and co-authored  Engaging Couples: New Directions in Therapeutic Work with Families, (Routledge, 2018) and a special edition of the Journal of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis on Divorce and Separation, (Phoenix, 2021).  Kate writes for a variety of publications, lectures in the UK and abroad and has a private practice in South West London.