Old Account of how Mark & Jutta got together again

Just – February 2025 – came across this account written 10 years ago of how Jutta and I got together again in 2013, and the journey thereto..

Braynes reunited

A contribution from Mark and Jutta Brayne to commemorations of the CCPE’s 30^th anniversary.

It’s well known, of course, that training in psychotherapy can have a dramatic effect on relationships and marriages. CCPE Masters theses have been written on the subject, and many readers of this volume will have their own sad and we guess also sometimes liberating experiences of therapy-related relationship endings.

But how many CCPE graduates can tell our redemptive, painful-but-eventually-joyful story of breakdown, emotional and spiritual awakening, CCPE psychotherapy training for both leading to separation, one second marriage, to a slow-rekindling friendship, to the end of said second marriage and, yes, re–marriage to original partner?

For much of this we have the CCPE, wonderful and contradictory place and community that it is, both to blame and to thank.

Several of our friends and colleagues have said the two of us should write a book about this convoluted marital journey. But would anyone believe the plot?

We met in the Soviet Union – yup, from the outset an unconventional tale, this – in the mid-70s when Mark was on his first foreign posting as Russian-speaking journalist with the Reuters news agency and Jutta was a gorgeous young secretary at the West German embassy in Moscow.

Marriage followed in 1977, and foreign postings that took us first with Reuters to East Berlin, and then with the BBC to West Berlin, Vienna and China, returning to London in 1988 with three kids and mid-life crisis galloping in from the horizon.

No need here for too much detail, but the storm duly broke, and we entered into – and took far too long to terminate – 18 months of quite useless Kleinian couple counselling, until in 1994 we both went, separately, to the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland where the lights finally went on.

Mark returned to London promptly to interview with Nigel, still (just) at the old Lancaster Road premises, for a place on the CCPE psychotherapy MA training which he started in 1995, while Jutta struggled on as a secondary school German teacher before embarking on her own full course at the Centre in 1998.

That’s when things get really interesting. One year on, Jutta goes on her first summer Sufi retreat at Horne Farm with Nigel, and returns to tell Mark, reluctantly, that the struggle is over and she wants a divorce.

Separation duly ensues, although to houses not far apart in High Barnet, where Mark spends the immediate weeks in his new home writing his CCPE MA thesis on the Personal Experience of the Foreign Correspondent. Jutta finishes hers, on the role of silence in transpersonal psychotherapy, in 2007.

Within 18 months, Mark (as men do) is “re-partnered” as they say in the trade, and preparing to leave the BBC, to move to the Cotswolds with his new wife, also by then training as a counsellor, and to work full-time as a therapist. Jutta, meanwhile is moving towards graduation at the CCPE, but working in IT with the NHS and using her therapy skills only part-time.

Things settle, sort of, but there is unfinished business, an open Gestalt. The Universe, or whatever, isn’t done with us yet. So when Jutta resolves finally to leave IT and seek a position as full-time therapist with the NHS’s IAPT programme, guess where the one job comes up for which she is offered an interview?

It’s at this point that any reader of a Romantic novel would twig what the denouement will be. Of course, the two crossed lovers will end up falling in love again and remarrying, for the job is on the North Norfolk coast, where Mark grew up, where his mother and brother still live, and where our family of five used to spend our summer holidays caravanning.

Mark’s regular visits to elderly mother, sans second wife who can’t really be done with his complicated family, now begin to include walks and dinners with Jutta, and even (gosh!) one brief evening moment of holding hands.

They also – a critical point, this – continue to meet at least yearly at national conferences and workshops involving their shared passion for EMDR therapy, and to increasingly enjoy each other’s professional and personal company.

But it takes more than four years (our readers at this point are beginning to wonder when it’s EVER going to happen) before, in 2013 and by now seeing a fair stack of clients at the CCPE mid-week  and delivering the occasional first and second year course lecture on trauma and brain science,  Mark suddenly, to everyone’s surprise including his own, comes away from an EMDR conference with Jutta in Newcastle, throws over his 12-year-old second marriage in the Cotswolds and moves to Norfolk.

He proposes – again – to a very surprised ex-wife who six months later eventually, in September of that year, says Yes on the top of Machu Picchu in Peru (as one does – corny or what), where both of us are preparing for a Sufi retreat led by Kim Shams Richardson of the CCPE-based UK Sufi Centre.

And (acknowledging that life with us both by now in our 60s now continues with its ups and downs) we guess we could say we are so far living happily ever after.

As Tolstoy says in the opening lines of Anna Karenina, all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. And yes, it’s taken us nearly 40 years to get here/there.

But thanks in no small measure to the CCPE, and to Nigel’s “yes” in that post-Findhorn interview with Mark in 1994, we made it in the end.