Couples Therapy When You’re Not in Crisis
Kris Silvestry, MA, LPC, NCC, ACS, CCTP
I think we have somehow gotten the idea that couples therapy is where you go when something is wrong.
Someone cheated. You are fighting constantly. Someone is thinking about leaving. You can't communicate anymore. Something happened and now you need someone to help you fix it.
But what if nothing is actually wrong?
What if you really love each other? You like each other. Things are good.
Can you go to couples therapy then?
Absolutely.
I feel really strongly about this because I did it.
Before my husband was my husband, he was my boyfriend, and we went to couples therapy.
We weren't in crisis. We weren't trying to save our relationship. We were talking about whether and how we wanted to build a life together.
And I am forever grateful that we did.
We talked about communication. Family culture. Expectations. Money. Gender roles. Future children. Parenting. What marriage meant to each of us. What we learned from the families we grew up in. What we wanted to carry forward and what we wanted to do differently.
It helped tremendously.
But I think one of the biggest things it helped me understand was that being with someone when life is good and you don't have a ton of responsibilities is very different from building an entire life with someone.
Because eventually, shit hits the fan.
It just does.
Someone gets sick. Work becomes overwhelming. A parent needs help. Money gets tight. You have children and nobody has slept. Someone is grieving. The schedule becomes completely insane. One person has absolutely nothing left to give.
That was what I wanted to understand.
Who is this person when life isn't easy?
How do they respond?
Can they hold the ball for a while if I need them to?
Can I hold it for them?
Because a partnership is not always going to be 50/50.
There are times when one person might only have 20% to give and the other person has to carry 80%. Hopefully, there are other times when that flips.
For me, part of building a life together was knowing that when things got really hard, neither one of us would be standing there alone.
Couples therapy gave us a place to start talking about that before we had children and careers and family responsibilities and all of the things that eventually come with building a life together.
Those conversations helped shape the family we are today.
I will forever be grateful for that.
You don't have to wait until something is wrong
This is probably the biggest thing I wish more people understood about couples therapy.
You can go because you want your relationship to stay healthy.
You can go because you're thinking about getting married.
You can go because you're thinking about having children.
You can go because you keep having the same silly argument and you're curious about why.
You can go because you grew up in completely different kinds of families and you're realizing that what feels completely "normal" to one of you feels completely foreign to the other.
Or maybe you've been together for years and somewhere between work, kids, practices, appointments, laundry, bills and figuring out what everyone is eating for dinner, you realize most of your conversations have become logistics.
Who's picking up the kids?
Did you pay that bill?
What's happening Saturday?
Do we need milk?
That doesn't mean your relationship is broken.
It doesn't even necessarily mean you're unhappy.
Sometimes life just gets really, really full.
And maybe you want some space to find each other in it again.
That is enough of a reason to consider therapy.
And there is research behind the idea of doing relationship work before things completely fall apart.
A randomized controlled trial published in the Journal of Family Psychology looked at an evidence-based relationship-enhancement program for couples. Researchers found improvements in relationship satisfaction and what is called dyadic coping, basically how partners respond to and cope with stress together, compared with a wait-list group.
The effects were modest, and I think that is important to say. Therapy or relationship education isn't a magic formula and nobody should promise that it is.
But the idea that couples can intentionally work on communication, coping and connection before they are in severe distress is supported by research.
To me, that makes sense.
You don't have to wait until something is broken to take care of it.
People can wait a long time before asking for help
We also know that people can live with relationship difficulties for a long time before reaching out.
A 2021 study by William Doherty and colleagues, published in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, looked at 270 couples entering couples therapy.
The researchers found an average of 2.68 years between the onset of serious relationship problems and beginning couples therapy.
Interestingly, the study also challenged the often-repeated idea that couples wait an average of six years before seeking help.
That doesn't mean every couple waits 2.68 years.
It doesn't mean there is one perfect time when everybody should go to therapy.
But it does tell us something important.
People can spend a significant amount of time living inside a problem before deciding it is finally "bad enough" to ask for help.
It doesn't have to get that bad first.
Sometimes the most important conversations are about things you haven't even thought about
This was such an important part of my own experience.
When you're dating someone and things are going well, you're not necessarily sitting at dinner saying, "We should probably define what gender roles mean to each of us."
But maybe we should be.
Because every single one of us walks into a relationship carrying the culture of the family we grew up in.
Who handled the money?
Who cooked?
Who cleaned?
Who stayed home when a child was sick?
Who remembered that the kids needed new shoes, there was a birthday party Saturday and somebody needed to make the dentist appointment?
What did being a "good mom" look like?
What did being a "good dad" look like?
Did people talk about feelings?
What happened when someone was angry?
How was conflict handled?
What did holidays look like?
How involved were grandparents and extended family?
How was affection shown?
What did marriage mean?
What did partnership mean?
You can have incredibly strong beliefs about all of these things without even realizing they're beliefs.
They just feel like "how things are."
Until you fall in love with someone whose family did things completely differently.
Neither person necessarily has to be wrong.
But you do have to talk about it.
For us, having those conversations before we were married gave us an opportunity to think about what we wanted our family to look like.
Not just my family.
Not just his family.
Ours.
And I don't think we would have gotten as deep into some of those conversations on our own.
What do you actually talk about in couples therapy?
Whatever is happening between you.
Sometimes it is communication. Sometimes it is intimacy. Sometimes it is parenting, money, extended family, division of responsibilities or expectations.
Sometimes it is the mental load.
Sometimes it is resentment that has quietly built up.
And sometimes you can't even explain what feels different. You just know you don't feel as connected as you used to.
At Peace of Mind, couples counseling isn't about sitting in a room while a therapist decides which person is right.
It is about slowing things down enough to understand what is happening between two people.
Relationships develop patterns.
One person does something. The other reacts. That reaction triggers something in the first person. Before you know it, you're having the same argument you've had 47 times even though this particular version supposedly started because somebody didn't empty the dishwasher.
The dishwasher probably isn't the whole problem.
Being able to slow the interaction down and see what is actually happening underneath it gives people an opportunity to understand their own responses and communicate differently.
What if your partner doesn't want to go?
This happens.
One person says, "I think we should try couples therapy."
The other person hears, "Our relationship is terrible."
Those are two very different statements.
You don't have to force someone into therapy who isn't ready.
Individual therapy can still give you space to understand your own communication, boundaries, expectations and reactions. It can help you look at what you are bringing into the relationship and get clearer about what you need.
Because relationship patterns are reciprocal, changing your own responses may affect the way the two of you interact.
But I want to be careful about how I say that.
Individual therapy isn't a secret way to change your partner.
It doesn't guarantee that your relationship will change.
And it certainly doesn't mean that one person is responsible for fixing everything.
Your own work can still be valuable even if your partner never joins you.
I wrote a whole post about this one, if that is where you are right now: What to Do When Your Partner Won't Go to Couples Therapy.
What if one person is already thinking about leaving?
This is different.
When one person is already leaning toward leaving and the other desperately wants to repair the relationship, traditional couples therapy may not always be the right first step.
There is a specific approach called discernment counseling that was developed for couples in this situation.
Rather than beginning with the assumption that both people are ready to repair the relationship, discernment counseling creates a short-term process for figuring out what each person actually wants to do.
That may mean staying as things are for now, moving toward separation, or committing to a defined period of relationship work.
If both people decide they want to work toward repair, couples therapy may come next.
The important distinction is that therapy should not be about pressuring someone toward a predetermined outcome.
Domestic violence is different
This needs its own section because domestic violence is not the same thing as communication problems, recurring conflict, or feeling disconnected.
If domestic violence is present, Peace of Mind does not recommend or provide couples counseling.
That is a hard no for us.
For purposes of our practice, domestic violence includes physical or sexual violence, threats, intimidation, stalking, coercive control, isolation, financial abuse, technology-facilitated abuse, or a pattern in which one partner uses fear or control over the other.
Domestic violence is not a mutual communication problem.
According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, couples counseling is not recommended with an abusive partner. Their guidance specifically explains that abuse is not a relationship problem that both people are responsible for fixing together.
That distinction matters tremendously.
The American Counseling Association's clinical guidance on intimate partner violence also advises against conjoint couples therapy when current intimate partner violence is present because of potential safety risks.
Those risks can include a partner retaliating for something disclosed in a session, using information learned in therapy to exert additional control, or pressuring a survivor to accept responsibility for abuse that is not theirs to own.
We do not ask a survivor to sit in a room with the person harming them and "work on communication."
We do not treat abuse as something both people created together.
And couples counseling is never a condition for receiving help.
A survivor can access individual counseling, advocacy, safety planning and support without the abusive partner participating.
There is clinical literature discussing highly screened conjoint interventions for certain narrowly defined situations involving partner violence. That does not change our policy.
Peace of Mind takes a survivor-safety approach.
If domestic violence or intimate partner violence is present, we do not provide couples counseling.
Relationships are not always 50/50
I keep coming back to this because I think I understand it even more now than I did when my husband and I first went to therapy.
A partnership cannot always be 50/50.
Life doesn't work that way.
There are seasons when one person has more to give.
There are seasons when the other does.
There are times when you are going to need someone else to hold the ball because you simply cannot hold one more thing.
And there are going to be times when you need to be that person for them.
Interestingly, researchers actually study something very similar to this.
It is called dyadic coping, which basically looks at how two people in a relationship communicate about and respond to stress together.
I love that there is research language for it, because in my own life I think about it much more simply:
Can you hold the ball when I can't?
Can I hold it when you can't?
That doesn't mean one person carries everything forever.
It doesn't mean you stop having needs or boundaries.
And it definitely doesn't mean an unhealthy or abusive imbalance should be reframed as one person simply "carrying more."
It means that in a healthy partnership there is enough trust to know that when life gets heavy, you aren't carrying it alone.
For me, that was one of the biggest things I wanted to understand before getting married.
I wasn't only thinking, "Do we love each other when everything is great?"
Of course we did.
I wanted to understand who we were going to be when shit hit the fan.
How would we respond to each other?
Could he hold the ball when I couldn't?
Could I hold it when he couldn't?
How were we going to function as a family when life wasn't easy?
Those were much bigger questions.
You are allowed to take care of something that isn't broken
We do preventative things everywhere else in our lives.
We get physicals. We go to the dentist. We exercise. We try to take care of ourselves before something becomes a major problem.
Our relationships deserve care too.
You don't need to wait until you can't stand each other.
You don't need a huge problem.
You don't have to prove that you're struggling enough to deserve support.
Sometimes couples therapy can simply be two people saying, "We really love what we're building, and we want to be intentional about how we build it."
That was what it was for me.
My then-boyfriend and I went to therapy and talked about the life we might have together someday.
That boyfriend became my husband.
We had the children we talked about.
We built the family we were imagining.
Of course it isn't perfect. No family is.
And there were a million things neither of us could have possibly predicted sitting in those sessions all those years ago.
But we had already started asking some really important questions.
What kind of family do we want?
What kind of parents do we want to be?
What do we expect from each other?
What are we bringing with us from the families that raised us?
What do we want to keep?
What do we want to do differently?
And when shit hits the fan, because eventually it will, can we trust each other to hold the ball?
Those conversations mattered tremendously.
They helped shape the family we are today.
And I am forever grateful we had them before we "needed" them.
What's the first step?
If you're reading this thinking, "Nothing is terribly wrong with us, but I would actually love to do this," that is enough.
You can reach out to Peace of Mind for a free 15-minute consultation and talk with us about what you're looking for.
Our couples therapists see clients in person in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, and through telehealth when both partners are physically located in New Jersey at the time of the session.
You don't need a crisis.
You don't even necessarily need a problem.
Sometimes wanting to understand each other better, take care of your relationship and be intentional about the life you're building together is reason enough.
Sources
Doherty, W. J., Harris, S. M., Hall, E. L., & Hubbard, A. K. (2021). How long do people wait before seeking couples therapy? A research note. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 47(4), 882-890.
Zemp, M., Merz, C. A., Nussbeck, F. W., Halford, W. K., Schaer Gmelch, M., & Bodenmann, G. (2017). Couple relationship education: A randomized controlled trial of professional contact and self-directed tools. Journal of Family Psychology, 31(3), 347-357.
National Domestic Violence Hotline. Should I Go to Couples Therapy With My Abusive Partner?
American Counseling Association. Clinical guidance on intimate partner violence, treatment of victims and treatment of battering perpetrators.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash.
