Couples Therapy
It doesn’t scream ‘romance’ does it, but good couples therapy can help you to find ways to reconnect, to unearth some of the stuff getting in the way, to find ways to learn to listen, connect, love and grow. To look at life together from the same direction.
How Does Couples Therapy Work?
Love grows strongest when we feel truly heard, understood, and appreciated. It can last a lifetime if we’re willing to work through conflicts and let go of resentment without getting defensive. Good couples therapy gives everyone a chance to speak, feel valued, and reconnect. It helps to bring back warmth, laughter, and the good stuff. Here is a bit on how…
Learn to listen and ditch drama
Therapy challenges us to let go of some of our worst fears about love and relationships, like the idea that being vulnerable always leads to getting hurt, or that trying to explain ourselves is pointless because no one will ever truly listen. Instead, we’re given the space to unlearn these old scripts and see that we can be understood. We can also start to really feel each other’s pain and suddenly, we’re not just reacting we’re seeing things from their side. We begin to take care of each other, and an incredible realization emerges: this person isn’t actually our enemy. Like us, they just have some pretty bad ways of expressing very real, very human needs. Couples therapy is like a classroom for love one most of us never got to attend. Too often, we don’t admit we don’t know how to love properly until we’re already angry, exhausted, or ready to give up. But one of the most hopeful, and surprisingly romantic, things we can do is to say ‘I want to learn to do this’.
Find healthy ways to connect
Feeling disillusioned…it isn’t like it used to be, you don’t talk, can’t hear each other, everything is an argument, sex and intimacy are off the menu, don’t want to spend time together. You ask..‘how did we get here?’. Couples Therapy sounds like a lot of patience, hard work, and awkward conversations about things we’d rather avoid. When society has done its best to sell us the ‘fairy tale’, to find ‘the one’ and to ‘trust our feelings’, this doesn’t account for things often being messy, reactive, and shaped by past baggage. Therapy can help you understand what happens between you, to learn to drop the blame, to find forgiveness and find healthier ways to respond. Being part of a couple is one of the toughest and most wonderful things, the biggest opportunity in life for growth. Unpacking some of the couple dynamics and learning some skills can be a game-changer. In the end, couples therapy isn’t about picking sides or proving who's right. It’s about learning how to truly hear each other, break bad habits, and build something stronger.
Build awareness and empathy
When we say "Why don’t they just…?" we're missing a huge part of the picture. We’re not seeing the years, especially the early ones, when we and our partners were shaped by thousands of little experiences. We don’t see how some of their and our current behaviour was learned back then as a way of adapting just to get through life. If we could change them, we’d need a time machine to rewrite their whole childhood. Is it any wonder that trying to rebuild a person from the ground up, like many couples try to do, often doesn’t go the way we hoped. Therapy can help uncover why we ourselves behave the way we do, what ‘unfinished business’ from the past we may be acting out in the relationship. We more self-awareness, as well as compassion and curiosity for our partner’s world we can learn to empathise more, have healthier dialogue and even sit with some of the imperfection we all have as human beings.