The Dog Ate My Homework!

Jeff Levy, LCSW
(originally posted on Branching Out: The Live Oak Blog, April 2014)

Jessica came to see me because she believed her 5 year relationship with her husband Derrick was in jeopardy.  In her first session, she shared that while she knew they loved each other, they had not been intimate for over three years.  Because of a conflict they had about infidelity, she felt paralyzed to participate in any kind of intimate contact.  This was a topic they no longer spoke about, though she thought about it often.

​Jessica explained that her husband didn’t know she was in therapy.  I asked Jessica if she was willing to tell Derrick that she was seeing me in an effort to open some communication between them; that she was wanting to work on this issue.  She was receptive to this idea and felt like it was a good start.  I gave her the homework of telling Derrick that she had started therapy.  A week later, she returned to therapy and said she had not told Derrick and that she felt like a failure for not being able to follow through on a “simple assignment.”

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