How Therapy Can Help Your Relationship

Couples decide to seek counseling for a variety of reasons. While a couple’s presenting concerns vary widely, there are some fundamental ways in which the couple—and its individual members—can benefit from therapy.

1) Therapy Isn’t Just About Problems

Good therapy focuses on a couple’s presenting concerns, while also identifying areas where the couple excels. Many couples come to therapy with the expectation that the experience will be largely problem-focused. While it’s important to make space for clients to discuss the problems in their lives, it’s equally important for therapists to draw on clients’ strengths, and identify ways in which clients can apply those strengths to other areas of their lives.

Ex: A therapist may ask a couple to detail a time in their lives when the problem was not present. A detailed exploration of what was different about that time often highlights solutions that weren’t previously evident.

2) A Therapist isn’t part of your personal circle

Yes, this can be a good thing! A therapist/client relationship is different than a friendship or a familial relationship. Many of us have friends and family members we can confide in and discuss our problems with. However those people are part of our inner circles, and because they’re human, they may have emotional investments in your relationships! For example, you and your partner may have shared friends, or family members, who by nature have an emotional attachment to the well being of your relationship. Your therapist, on the other hand, has no ties to your personal relationships, and can offer insight/feedback that’s relatively unbiased.

For example, your father may be your go to person for advice, but if he has a close relationship with your partner, it may be difficult for him to advise you on relationship matters.

3) Therapy makes the covert, overt

Therapy invites honesty and openness that isn’t the norm in everyday interaction. By virtue of attending therapy, you are shining a light on problems that exist within your relationship. While this can be difficult and scary, it’s also an opportunity for couples to unhitch old issues that have been bogging down the relationship for a long time. 

4) Therapy is a Stepping Stone

Therapy isn’t meant to be forever, nor is it supposed to be a quick fix for a serious problem. Rather, good therapy provides people with the tools to solve their problems on their own. In this sense, therapy can help jumpstart a future of less conflict, better communication, and greater understanding.

Consider this analogy: About two years ago, I decided I wanted to learn to play guitar. I didn’t have any illusions about becoming a rock star, but wanted to learn enough to be competent. I took several lessons with an excellent music teacher, who helped me learn the basics and inspired me to play! It didn’t make sense for me to pay for a lifetime of guitar lessons, but the several I did have gave me the tools I needed. Now I’m able to pick up new songs on my own, and continue to evolve on my own. Good couples therapy can be the same, in that the therapist helps the couple learn more about themselves and the ways in which they interact, while helping them develop the skills to that will empower their relationship long after he therapy is over.