What is Couples Therapy, and how does it really work?
Couples psychotherapy, just like individual psychotherapy, is a slow process that unfolds over time, where the implicit and unspoken ways of relating to each other, responding to each other, missing each other’s needs and feelings, feeling threatened by the other person’s emotional expression, all take time to become visible within the therapeutic relationship in a way that it can be reflected upon together and its deeper meaning can be understood.
We are all shaped by our past: through family relationships, work, friendships, and social- and gender conditioning. It is this complex web of internal experience that two people bring into a relationship where the ways of relating, ways of responding, ways of feeling, ways of avoiding, ways of rejecting and ways of protesting are all alive within us at an unconscious dimension of the mind.
As sessions unfold over weeks and months, and sometimes over a year or more, what has been hidden from sight, i.e. things that happen spontaneously and repeatedly within the private space of a couple, begin to be recreated in the therapy room, which can then be analysed, thought about and reflected upon.
Couples psychotherapy presents an opportunity to be vulnerable in front of your partner in the facilitative space provided by the psychotherapist, and to be able to listen differently. If there is one advice that I might give to couples, it would be to begin to listen to each other at a slow and respectful pace. Without being able to listen to the other’s internal experience, to be able to hold it in mind, to be able to respond to it with kindness, care and empathy, it is often very difficult for change to happen.
Of course, sometimes, a relationship can be stuck in destructive inter-personal dynamics, for instance, where each partner expects the other to exclusively meet all of their needs, without regard or consideration for the other. That is why the invitation in couples psychotherapy is to begin to listen, to empathise and feel what the other is feeling. Sometimes there is no one single way out of a conflict, but that is why each relationship requires a middle ground and compromise in a way that from two opposing viewpoints, a synthesis of something new can happen. Of course, in cases where there is ongoing abuse or harm, couples therapy may not be the appropriate route, and individual support is often needed.
Couples psychotherapy requires each participant to take responsibility for their role in the conflict, and invites them to think of how they would like to do their relationship differently to what has been familiar to them from their formative and family experiences. This is not an easy task because sometimes it can require a fundamental reconfiguration of one’s personality and way of being. For some couples, this work may help deepen love and commitment; for others, it may provide clarity about what is and isn’t possible in the relationship. Where there is a shared wish to continue together, the path to change through discomfort and suffering offers a welcome promise to a more fulfilling and loving future.
To learn more about the Couples Therapy that I offer, including fees, see Online Couples Counselling in Leighton Buzzard and Marlborough. If you would like to explore couples therapy with me, please feel free to get in touch to enquire.