Relate counselling was once the go-to service for any struggling marriage with its trained therapists appearing as a regular authoritative presence on TV and in magazine problem pages.
Now, the counselling charity has been put into administration due to financial struggles arising from a drop in NHS, school and local authority contracts and risng costs, according to The Guardian.
The charity’s central body has made 80 staff, including 40 counsellors, redundant with immediate effect and has six weeks to find a buyer or partner to merge with in order to stay operational – although local independent branches will not be affected.
Originally set up in 1938 as the Marriage Guidance Council, it became Relate in 1988 and had Princess Diana as patron, and later Ruby Wax as president – with clients either seeking help directly or being referred for counselling or mediation by health care professionals, social workers or legal services.
While the difficulties the charity is facing arise from financial issues, the news has sparked an outpouring from clients of Relate’s relationship counselling service who claim that its counsellors failed to recognise emotinally abusive situations.
Speaking to , women who have used the service claim they were encouraged to stay with abusive partners, while others say they were encouraged to prolong their sessions when there was clearly no hope of reconciliation.
One woman who was, unusually, counselled via email and believes the therapist laid the blame for relationship issues solely at her door, rather than recognising the signs of emotional abuse.
A spokesperson for Relate said: ‘Relate works to the most rigorous clinical standards in relationship counselling.
‘Couples come to us at a very vulnerable time in their lives and the process can be difficult and take time.
‘We have positive feedback back from an overwhelming majority of people we have helped over many decades. We can’t comment on individual cases but always try hard to resolve concerns with care and sensitivity’.
Here, speaks to some clients who ended up seeking help from psychologists or Women’s Aid when they felt the support they received from Relate was not only lacking, but made their problems worse at a vulnerable time.
‘I told her he lied and got violent – but she sided with him’
I began having marriage problems when my daughter was six months old.
I had always suspected my husband was unfaithful. In fact, I now know that he had been unfaithful from the day we met, but things had come to a head then when I discovered some messages/sexting between him and another woman.
This led to rows where he would tell me if was a one off; I was delusional; I was controlling.
We didn’t know the word then but he constantly gaslit me to the extent where I thought I was going mad, that maybe it was just a minor transgression.
He had given me Chlamydia when our daughter was four months old, but even then he said it was me who had contracted it and it had been lying dormant.
He said the whole problem was my trust issues, it wasn’t anything to do with him and that he was just a new dad and had done something silly, it wouldn’t happen again.
I was so unhappy and so confused that I suggested Relate. The first counsellor we had was an older man.
We went about three sessions with him, told him our story.
He agreed with my ex husband that yes, it was my trust issues, that I really had to learn to trust him otherwise the marriage would never work.
My husband was about to go on a friend’s stag do which I was understandably nervous about but the Relate counsellor told me I had to let him go, and I was being over the top.
I did ‘let’ him go – only to find out a few months later that it was on the stag do where he met a much younger woman, spent the whole stag do with her and carried on the affair once back here – whilst we were still seeing first therapist.
We then had to change therapist as timings no longer worked so went to a female therapist, again slightly older than us – explained all the issues, trust etc and how I felt he lied all the time and would get violent with me if I ever questioned him.
He would sit in the sessions with her bleating on about how difficult I was to live with and she’d side with him, always calling me out.
Little did she (or I) know that he was embroiled in a couple of affairs and would blatantly lie throughout our sessions – she never caught him out or questioned him.
Two nights before our fifth session with her I finally caught him out in what he was up to and I chucked him out.
He walked out on myself and our then 13-month-old daughter without a care in the world. I remember the therapist then chased me up when we didn’t turn up for our session and we owed her for it.
I told her exactly what had happened, that he’d lied the whole time and quite clearly duped her and me and that I was in an absolute state. I never heard from her again.
When I look back at those sessions, which cost about £70 a pop, I realise what an absolute waste of time they were.
Not just that, they also often provoked more arguments and distress instead of helping. The whole thing was a mess.
They didn’t seem to be able to discern when there was dishonesty going on, were very much on one particular side, they didn’t seem to be particularly well trained or skilled in dealing with relationships – I got much more comfort advice from my girlfriends.
Stacey Griffiths
I was told not to nag him after a hard day at work
About three and a half years ago I contacted Relate because things had not been good with my husband for a few years.
I was given a Zoom call for £120 an hour which he refused to attend. I was recommended to attend myself.
I had to fill in huge amounts of information to send beforehand so the therapist was aware of my situation, our relationship history etc. All of this was meant to be read by the therapist beforehand.
She was five minutes late to the Zoom appointment and hadn’t read any of the paperwork I’d spent hours filling in. She wanted to hand write all of her answers and kept asking me to stop so she could complete the forms.
After 40 minutes I started to explain why I had come along and that my husband had refused and wanted to get in to discussing my concerns, instead she stopped me and said it wasn’t fair of me as he wasn’t there to defend himself!
I mean ‘no s**t Sherlock’! That was half the problem, he was refusing to acknowledge his behaviour could in any way be to blame for our relationship problems – instead he liked to tell me everything I was doing wrong.
He worked long hours in the emergency services. I feel like the lady had a huge bias towards them and kept telling me how stressful his job must be, and couldn’t I just give him a break and not nag him after a hard day at work. The misogyny coming from this therapist was unbelievable. I left the session in floods of tears.
Thankfully I’m no longer with him but I’m in therapy myself, through close friends and family have come to realise how mentally abusive the relationship was.
I’ve since learned about covert narcissism and every single thing I’ve been told and read basically summed up the 20 years we were together.
Being heard and believed by family, friends and my therapist has helped me come to terms with many negative awful beliefs I had about myself. The experience I had with Relate really set me back at a very very hard time in my life where I had actually considered ending my own life.
I would not have recommended anyone use Relate after my experience and it doesn’t come as a shock they have gone into administration judging by the quality of their therapists and the extortionate costs.
Alice Charles
I had to go to Women’s Aid to be taken seriously
I saw Relate in late 2016 after I told my now ex-husband I wanted a divorce. I had hoped that they would be able to help us navigate separating amicably.
The counsellor we saw asked me if I was sure that I wanted to divorce after I had told her about my husbands’ behaviour since I I had told him I wanted a divorce.
He moved back into the marital home from rented accommodation as it was ‘his money and his house’. He had stopped my only access to money by cancelling the joint credit card and was no longer giving me any money.
He insisted on buying all the food himself that I was to then cook. He was being verbally abusive and involving the children, aged nine and 12, in divorce matters by telling them I was taking all his money resulting in them being physically abusive to me.
He told them I had had an affair, and that they would have to leave school (private) due to me taking all his money. Solicitors were involved and trying to sort out him paying me maintenance and he told the children the actual figures of what was being discussed, and had threatened to throw me out of the house.
I was totally flabbergasted that she would then ask me if I was sure that I wanted a divorce. I felt as if she had not actually listened to me and that what I said wasn’t really that bad.
Because of that experience it took me many more months and an escalation of behaviour before I then went to Womens Aid – encouraged by a friend who told me that this behaviour was not ok.
I thought it was because he wasn’t hitting me and I had instigated the divorce.
Womens Aid took it seriously enough and would have put the children and I in a refuge due to the emotional and psychological harm that was occurring. We moved into rental accommodation paid for by my elderly grandfather.
Given these were meant to be trained professionals at Relate and that actually coercive control became an offence in 2015, I am still horrified that the very clear red flags were ignored. I should have been signposted to Womens Aid at that point.
I am now an accredited divorce coach specialising in post separation abuse because I want to ensure that no women feels alone and that its her when she is divorcing a difficult or toxic person.
Elizabeth Dunne
Our therapist ‘strung out’ the sessions
My husband and I were having a rough time. We were working together growing our business, had two small children and spent lots of time taking the work home with us, leading to arguments.
We hadn’t had sex in years. And I felt that the emotional labour was being completely born by me, with my ex having very little to do with the children or the running of the household.
I recall one of our sessions during which I shared with my husband my frustration around his lack of help with the housekeeping. We had made a deal when he had first started our business that I would do all the cooking and looking after the children, as I wasn’t working at the time.
Two years later, when I joined the business, I had neglected to change our arrangement, the result being that after working a full day, I then found myself doing the laundry, emptying the dishwasher, cooking all the meals and mostly putting the children to bed.
I was absolutely knackered, as a result. Our Relate counsellor turned to my husband and said, ‘Is there a reason you don’t empty the dishwasher?’ to which he replied, ‘It’s boring.’
Well, yes, clearly it was boring, but our counsellor let that fact hang in the air, along with other similar comments to indicate that my husband had no intention of changing his behaviour around the housework and there was never any suggestion from her as to why he should.
The next two-three sessions dragged on, with my husband having to be persuaded to attend. He clearly had no interest in talking about our relationship, even if our counsellor did.
He stopped going while I continued, although on reflection I felt that the whole process could have been done and dusted within three sessions, rather than six.
I think after session one or two with Relate, it was pretty clear that the relationship was unsalvageable but our counsellor strung it out as long as she could – at least that was my feeling, as I started to attend the sessions on my own after two or three.
When we got to session six, she let me know that the relationship was over – something that had been pretty clear at the start.
Afterwards, I recall sharing my thoughts with a friend who acknowledged that six seemed to be the magic number when it came to Relate even in cases such as ours that were never going to lead to any sort of reconciliation.
I didn’t feel my therapist added any value to what I already knew but she did validate my own feelings towards our marriage and she perhaps escalated its demise
Suzanne Noble, Sex Advice for Seniors
The therapist blamed me for everything
I had ‘online’ relationship counselling with Relate some years ago. It took the form of written messages and I still have a copy of my initial exchange with the Relate counsellor in which I describe the issue with my relationship at the time, including a typical example of an issue, along with her response to this.
Her response included suggesting that my raising an issue was a way of trying to get out of having sex, that I shouldn’t have spoilt the nice atmosphere and that my (then) boyfriend sounded totally reasonable. I think the relationship counsellor had some blindspots.
It was only years after this relationship ended that I really realised how abusive his behaviour was. Back then nobody talked about ‘gaslighting’ or ‘DARVO’.
This stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender, where a manipulative person turns the blame back on the person who has confronted them.
After hearing about Relate today, I sent a copy of the original exchange with the Relate counsellor to psychologist Hope Bastine to ask for her thoughts.
She replied to say that this raised so many red flags for her:
Samantha Rea
Some names have been changed