Couples Therapy &
Marital Counseling
Benefits of Couples Counseling
Long-term relationships are both rewarding and challenging. People in enduring relationships can create a shared connection that offers closeness and comfort amid the many stresses that occur in life. At the same time, the inevitable misunderstandings and hurt feelings that arise can lead to profound feelings of doubt and distance. Couples therapy offers a way to build on the established connection and work through the conflicts to restore closeness and develop new ways of handling problems.
Couples therapy is helpful for enhancing relationships, as well as for resolving problems. It can be worthwhile early in a relationship to establish healthy communication before partners notice serious problems. It can also provide a space to work through relationship crises at any point in time, or to resolve unproductive patterns that become established later in a relationship.
Couples Therapy vs. Individual Counseling
One important feature of couples therapy is that both partners work on their contributions to the problem. For situations in which both parties agree that only one partner has an issue needing treatment – such as a substance use disorder or other mental health diagnosis - individual therapy may be important.
A couples therapist has an ethical obligation to serve the best interests of the relationship, for both partners. This sets couples counseling apart from individual therapy, where the therapist’s sole duty is to the individual they are treating. This means a couples therapist will strive to be balanced in offering understanding and support to both persons, while also expecting both of them to accept responsibility for their part in the relationship issues.
Substance Use Disorder Issues
A note about my expertise: I do not specialize in AODA/SUDS treatment so when I work with a couple in which there is a substance use problem, I generally require that the partner with that diagnosis also see someone with that specialty.
How I See & Practice Couples Therapy
I first began seeing couples in therapy as a graduate student. Even then, I was drawn to the unique rewards and challenges of working with the dynamics between two people together, alongside the individual characteristics each brings into the room. Since that time, I have continued to develop my skills as a couples therapist, through specialized training and continuing education. I now prioritize relationship counseling in my practice.
I believe the countless profound emotional moments patients have shared with me over the years have informed my couples work and made me a better therapist. I’ve had the privilege of understanding the impact a small gesture or offhand comment can have, let alone the betrayal of infidelity. It is this understanding – my ability to recognize and share in the pain each partner in a relationship feels – that allows me to help partners develop newfound empathy for one another.
Therapy Requires a Mix of Approaches
I have come to understand that therapy is more than any one technique or theory; as valuable as Gottman or love languages or any other approach might be, there is no one-size-fits-all treatment for relationship problems. Working with couples requires flexibility, attunement, sensitivity, and a sense of humor. It’s almost invariable in the course of working with a couple that there will be moments of laughter, as well as moments of hurt.
In some sessions we may be exploring the way each person has changed over the years—how decades of childrearing and work and partnership have molded new patterns and shifted identities. At other times we might strategize ways of dealing with a circumscribed problem: a child who is struggling, or a sudden illness, or some other life disruption. And throughout all of my work with couples, we are establishing a deeper mutual understanding, and developing communication patterns that allow each person to feel heard and seen again, sometimes after years of distance.
Running Experiments
There are sessions in which I make very specific recommendations – I like to think of it as “running the experiment” or “getting the data.” For example, I might ask:
What would it look like to try having one evening without phones and sitting down together, or setting aside one hour each week to talk together over coffee?
What would happen if the usual division of household labor was temporarily replaced with a different system?
Knowing that it’s only an experiment can allow people to try something they’re otherwise reluctant to do, which allows us to either identify a useful change, or discover important feelings that have been unknowingly at play.
Exploring Pain Points
In other sessions, we may be exploring deeply held feelings of resentment, or regret, or other painful emotions. The safety of the therapy office allows couples to reveal feelings that haven’t felt safe to air at home, while the guidance and containment of a therapist maintains an environment of mutual respect.
Even if a session can’t fully wrap up a painful subject with total resolution, partners often find they can get through previously unbearable topics without devolving into conflict and isolation. And through it all, we continue to revisit points of connection and commonality, important reminders of the value of working through painful discord, which affords both people the desire to keep going.
Balancing Resonance & Conflict
This last point leads to one of my firmest beliefs regarding couples therapy: to be successful it must include both connection and conflict, distance and desire.
I have seen couples whose former therapists have had them focus only on rekindling positive feelings without ever addressing underlying hurts. I’ve seen people who have been in therapy to work through the impasse that holds them apart without sufficient work on rediscovering the strengths that first drew them together.
These dichotomous approaches are rarely successful because as much as we would like simplicity, and no matter how comfortable it is to stake out a polarity in which one person is right and one is wrong, or an act is good or bad, life as a human being doesn’t lend itself to such easy conclusions. Good people sometimes do bad things and “bad” people – people who have only been problematic in our lives – sometimes rise to the occasion and offer an unexpected act of kindness or support.
Being Human, Together
Helping couples navigate the layers of history and feelings and memories that they share, and the conflicting emotions they feel toward one another, is at the center of my work with couples. I don’t shy away from the hardest feelings and I don’t neglect the affection couples hold for one another. I work to help couples realize they can face the whole continuum and even hold seemingly incompatible feelings at the same time, because that’s what it means to be human. We can love the people who hurt us the most and hurt the people we most love. And we can heal. Although I can’t promise every couple who enters my office will achieve the resolution they seek, I promise I will do everything I can to foster mutual authenticity, emotional safety, and enduring love.
Couples Therapy FAQ
Some questions and themes have stood the test of time. I’ve heard them from the very beginning, and I still hear them today. The following are common questions that come up in early sessions with many couples I work with.
“I love my partner but we have some serious problems that are bothering me more and more. They won’t agree to couples therapy. Should I see an individual therapist if my partner won’t come to couples counseling?”
If you are increasingly unhappy or concerned about your relationship, the first step is to make sure you have let your partner know that. Even if you’ve suggested couples counseling already, it’s a good idea to make sure you’ve conveyed that you are having serious concerns about the relationship, and that you aren’t just complaining about something that isn’t really a big deal.
If your partner still declines to try relationship counseling with you, let them know you are going see a therapist by yourself. One thing to note about this – and something worth mentioning to your partner – is that when people seek individual therapy because their partner won’t do couples work, there is a risk that they grow further apart. Tell your partner you don’t want that – you want the two of you to grow together – as an additional way of showing them their importance to you, and so that you’ve let them know they are risking that outcome by not joining you in relationship counseling.
“My partner keeps pressuring me to go to couples therapy but I think they just want to blame me and have the therapist take their side. I don’t want to be ganged up on by two people so I haven’t agreed to go. Now they are holding that against me too. Is there a way I can be sure that a couples therapist won’t just take their side?”
Many people whose partners suggest couples therapy are reluctant to walk into a situation that feels stacked against them. But a skilled therapist knows there are always two sides to any situation, and that it’s never as simple as only one partner needing to change.
A good therapist will ask both parties what they need to work on for a better relationship, knowing that both have contributed to the patterns creating the problems. So even if your partner tells the therapist you are the one who needs to change, trust that the therapist will see the mutual and reciprocal patterns that require both of you to do the work.
“If either my partner or I is already in individual therapy, would a couples’ therapist talk with our individual therapists? If so, would our individual sessions still be confidential?”
This is a decision you get to make; it really depends on what is best for your particular situation.
When I am the couples therapist, I ask partners in individual therapy to discuss with their therapist whether it would be most helpful to keep that process completely separate, or whether it would be helpful for the therapists to consult together. It is often the case that therapists who can touch base offer a greater level of understanding than what they can obtain without sharing their perspectives.
Therapists are not able to discuss cases without explicit consent from all parties involved (even if the therapists are in the same office), so if this would be helpful, both partners will need to sign consent forms. And this can be a restricted consent if that would be best. For example, the consent forms might allow the couples therapist to share their observations with the individual therapists, but not allow the individual therapists to reveal anything from the separate individual therapy sessions (a one-way street).