Let's talk about couples therapy

No, we're not 'broken'.

Where we all want to get to right? But sometimes we need a little help.

If you’re doing couples therapy you don’t tell anyone right? Because seeing a couples therapist means your relationship is broken, and nobody wants to admit that. Imagine deciding to see one when you’re engaged. I can feel the metaphorical curtains twitching even as I type.

I admit, it took me a while to tell some friends we had decided to seek help with our relationship and some people still don’t know (I guess they might now). While the stigma attached to individual therapy has rightly reduced over the years, it still lingers with couples therapy. While it feels broadly accepted now that seeing a therapist for yourself is a positive step towards managing your mental wellbeing, seeing a couples therapist will trigger whispers in the street that a relationship is ‘on the rocks’.

What if we saw couples therapy in the same way we saw individual therapy? As maintenance for the wellbeing of a relationship. My own therapist recently explained it to me like getting an MOT on a car, you do the work to maintain the high value item in your life so that it doesn’t break down. What if all couples did a course before they got married? Would divorce rates reduce? Would a few more couples avoid throwing £30k at a wedding only to find themselves burning the photos three years later?

I have to admit that at the start I did feel like asking for help, at that particular point in our relationship, was a failure. Being engaged was supposed to to be one of the happiest times of my life, instead I felt lost. I was trawling an online directory of therapists when I should have been building Pinterest boards.

Both of us entered into the experience with feelings of trepidation, our own expectations of what it would be like, and what it would achieve. I don’t think my partner will mind me saying this but I definitely had higher hopes than he did, maybe because I had my own previous positive experiences with individual therapy.

One of the things I will always remember was how we both acknowledged that we were taking a risk. We talked about how it could lead to the end of our relationship and we both accepted that we were comfortable with that being a possible outcome. And I’m glad we did.

The most impactful aspect for me, was the way our therapist created balance. It was me that suggested we seek help. It was me that expressed dissatisfaction with certain aspects of our relationship. Because of this I think it’s fair to say that my partner entered into it with the expectation that it would be about him changing things to make me happy. Instead, the therapist created a level playing field for us to identify ways of being that were unhelpful for our relationship and helped us both adapt our individual behaviour to create more balance between us.

Our therapist also helped us identify and understand some prominent dynamics between us that were blocking us. This was fascinating as they felt fairly obvious once they were pointed out to us - but there was so much value in the identification. We could, and probably would have, continued for years without truly seeing some of what was playing out between us and why.

It also really helped with our communication. Better understanding each other and where we were coming from helped us become more measured in the way we spoke to each other. We both got better at holding our own emotions to make a bit more space for understanding the point of view of the other person.

There is so much expectation put on weddings and planning them (that’s for another essay) but no one really talks about preparing for marriage. I know certain faiths have rituals around this but as an atheist I’ve very much found myself feeling around in the dark on this one. For me, marriage is about a long term commitment to continue to work on a relationship every day. It’s about growing together as individuals and as a team. Couples therapy has helped me prepare for marriage.

We are certainly not perfect or ‘fixed’ in any way, we are human beings who work hard at our relationship. I’m not sharing this to blow my own trumpet about our relationship but more to demonstrate that getting help shouldn’t come with the stigma that it still does. Even now, I catch myself saying “we only had about eight sessions”, like if we’d needed more we’d be really broken.

I still think about when I started to tell a few friends about what we were going through, one told me her and her partner were about to do the same thing and another asked for my therapist’s contact details. It amazes me how much we speak to our female friends about, but the inner workings of our relationship is often not a topic of discussion. What if we spoke more about our experiences, shared when it was hard and what we did that helped? We’re all different, obviously, but there is no shame in getting help, from friends or a professional - at any stage in a relationship.

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You might have noticed that things have changed a bit around here. You can read more about the new focus for my writing here. I’m currently in the process of working to rename and rebrand my Substack publication.

I’m also moving to a new payment model. Every Friday I’ll be releasing a personal essay, like this one, about something we don’t talk about but should. Intermittently I will continue to write my open and honest reflections on running a business of one as a freelancer. These posts will now be for paid subscribers only, so that I can really lean into talking about the hard bits of freelancing without fear of the impact it will have on my business. Becoming a paid subscriber will also give you access to my ‘Business Truths’ archive which contains three years worth of similar content.

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