3pm: The jury is continuing to hear evidence from the 37th witness in the trial, Relationships Australia relationships counsellor Carmel Ritchie.
Ms Ritchie said she noted that after Allison Baden-Clay told her the affair began on August 27, 2008, the couple had celebrated their anniversary on August 23, 2003.
“I confronted him immediately, he is now honest and takes responsibility,” she said.
“He blames me for the depression. She said she had spent the past 10 years saying ‘I am not depressed’.”
Ms Baden-Clay said she surprised him by asking him “What’s wrong with us?” and he told her he wanted to leave the relationship.
She said Ms Baden-Clay told her she thought her husband was having a mid-life crisis.
Ms Ritchie read her assessment of the consultation to the jury.
She said Ms Baden-Clay told her Mr Baden-Clay was “ambitious and leader-like”.
She said Ms Baden-Clay felt her husband had high expectations of her and her children and she felt as though she was not good enough.
“Gerard did not understand about depression and he told Allison that it is all in her mind and generally get over it. Gerard blames Allison’s depression for the affair,” she read.
“Gerard says Allison is not the girl he married but then, Gerard has also changed. He used to be kind and emphatic but changed in the past couple of months to a ‘look after myself-only’ attitude.”
She wrote that Ms Baden-Clay told her the goal she had was to look after herself and to look at her parenting, while Mr Baden-Clay’s attitude to the affair was to “wipe it clean”.
“She has unhelpful beliefs about a wife’s role and is a conflict avoider,” she read from her assessment of the consultation.
Ms Ritchie said Ms Baden-Clay told her she had spent the last 10 years saying “I’m not depressed”.
She said Ms Baden-Clay’s mood was of relief on the day of the appointment.
“I think that she left with hope, I think that she was hopeful when she went, I thought she was in a good mood because she was actually doing something to help herself,” Ms Ritchie said.
Ms Ritchie said the next appointment was on April 16, 2012.
She said Ms Baden-Clay and the accused turned up in the waiting room.
“Allison introduced me to Gerard and then I took Gerard into the counselling room,” she said.
Ms Ritchie said Mr Baden-Clay told her about his achievements rather than his personal attributes.
“He said he worked in real estate, was the president of the chamber of commerce, vice-president of the P&C and was in the Real Estate Institute of Queensland,” she said.
She said she asked Mr Baden-Clay if he could outline what he saw were the problems in the relationship.
“He said: ‘Allison does not trust me, she questions me, she says yes when she means no. Allison’s disappointment with her life and I used to blame Allison for disappointments in my life’,” she read to the jury.
She said Mr Baden-Clay told her he wanted to build a future together, wanted to get on with life, not to regress and to “wipe it clean”.
Ms Ritchie said the reason he came to counselling was because his wife wanted him to.
“Because Gerard had come, my total focus was the affair so I had to go straight into some kind of treatment for the affair, so I then began to explain to Gerard what had to be step one in trying to heal the damage in this affair,” she said.
She said step one involved him sitting and listening to his wife’s feelings about the affair every second night until their next appointment.
“Gerard felt that was in the past and I explained that past was very present and painful for Allison, so that was the step that he had to take,” she said.
“I found Gerard was very resistant to that, he felt that was regression, and so I had to reiterate a number of times what had to happen and this was absolutely step one.”
Ms Ritchie said that eventually, Mr Baden-Clay agreed he would sit down and listen to his wife’s feelings for a minimum of 10 minutes – no more than 15 minutes – and that any talk of the affair was to be limited to that time.
“There was to be no talk of it other than that,” she said.
“To simply listen was his role.”
Ms Ritchie said the rest of the session together was spent explaining the listening exercise to Ms Baden-Clay.
She said Mr Baden-Clay never gave her any information about the current status of the affair or that it was continuing.
“I thought she was very hopeful when she left, you know? Something was being done about this,” she said of Ms Baden-Clay’s mood on April 16.
Ms Ritchie said she asked them to see her in a fortnight.
“I considered that relationship was in a crisis and two weeks was plenty of time,” she said.
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