- Couples Counseling
- 5 mins
Our relationships with romantic partners or spouses can be sources of validation, of support, joy, of hope and of purpose. But when things go awry, these powerful positives we depend on can turn into their exact opposites. Because our partners and spouses are the closest people in our lives, the way they act towards us impacts us like no other. Add to that cohabitation, financial responsibilities, and sometimes children, compounded by all the stressors people encounter in our ever-more-stressful world, and the opportunities to hit hurdles seem endless. In fact, it’s normal to run into them; nothing in life, relationships included, is always perfect. Good relationships take work, and more people than ever recognize this.
Couples counseling or couples therapy--once considered a less important, or even indulgent, add-on to regular psychotherapy--has become a common practice for couples who value their relationships, are certain there is a path past the rocky spot that they’ve found themselves in, and know they need some guidance finding it. If you’re considering it yourself, know that couples therapy works—with one study pointing to couples being 70 percent to 80 percent better off afterwards than those who don’t go—if you’re willing to work at it.
Anxiety about the unknowns of couples counseling can sometimes prevent people from getting started. It shouldn’t. The following tips for what to expect from therapy sessions can help ease your concerns, so you and your partner/spouse can feel confident taking this important step in living more happily and continuing to build a life together.
Expect To Learn How To Communicate
You and your spouse or partner are sitting on the couch together, or on separate couches, at the therapist’s office. All the formalities have been taken care of—so what happens?
You’ll talk. But therapy, even for individuals, is no casual conversation. It’s very specific kind of guided discussion. For couples, because there are two people in the room who may have differing perspectives and ways of communicating, it is even more important to appreciate the parameters, and keep the discussion on track and productive.
Your clinician will likely ask, after getting to know you, why you are there; you’ll explain what problems you are facing that you want to address through therapy. When a relationship is at a particularly volatile point, even this can cause one party to want to jump in, interrupt, complain—even yell. In couples counseling, you learn to yield time to let your partner be heard, and will be granted the same opportunity. You can anticipate hearing your partner or spouse’s positions, some which may be uncomfortable to hear, or immediately make you want to rebut them.
Throughout this, the therapist will be guiding you, observing you, learning about your relationship and determining where you and your spouse might be talking past each other, accidentally antagonizing one another, or intentionally picking at each other. The therapist will help you see what you’re doing, when you’re doing it, and why, and help both of you develop strategies to identify those behaviors and work on them.
It may sound like an intimidating prospect, but it’s nothing to fear. The better you get at having these discussions, the easier it gets—and more importantly, the stronger your relationship will get.
Expect Your Life To Be Your “Homework”
You can (and will) explore what leads to disagreement, difficulty, and dysfunction, in a session, but translating understanding into action can be tough when you’re out there living life: paying bills or deciding who picks up the kids. With couples counseling, daily living is your homework.
Plan on using the insights gleaned from each session in your real life between visits. Then, in the following session, you and your therapist will evaluate how you’re progressing. Be prepared to discuss each week where you succeeded, where you could do better, and why.
Expect It To Take Time
Finding strategies to understand a partner, to cope with difficulties together, and to appreciate and navigate each others’ positions, limitations, and boundaries, probably won’t happen immediately. You might not feel like you’ve overcome major relationship hurdles in a week or a month of therapy. Improvement may be gradual, you may backslide or, as some studies indicate, even have to go back after a few years of completing therapy the first time. But as long as you’re in it together for the long haul, you’re moving forward.
Expect Some Tools To Help
Couples counseling requires, as we’ve discussed, an openness to having a particular kind of guided, sometimes challenging conversation in sessions, a willingness to work on your relationship in your day-to-day life, and a commitment to long-term improvement.
That means there’s a lot to know, to do, and to think about to get the most out of couples therapy. These days, your therapist might give you some online resources to help.
Virtual client onboarding is an emerging new method for helping you benefit from therapy and keep it top-of-mind. Before your first session, a therapist that uses virtual client onboarding will send you a link to a list of short, informative videos created by experts that discuss everything you need to know about couples therapy. You’ll be asked to review them before your first session. Learning those best practices will keep you from heading down unproductive conversational paths and prevent other behaviors that work at cross purposes with your success in therapy.
Virtual client onboarding can also play an important role in your couples counseling long after you start. Reviewing modules together before each session, or after a missed session, can keep you active in therapy, so it doesn’t become an obligatory chore in the background. You can even view onboarding materials after an argument, to help you remember the steps you should be taking to find common ground and reorient yourself, together, to always communicate more clearly and relate better.
Just as couples therapy has gotten more popular, virtual client onboarding is catching on. So if your therapist has it available, take it seriously.
Your relationship is important. With couples therapy, you’re treating it that way—learning to better empathize, compromise, and understand one another, and remember those things that brought you together. It just takes work and care; things that have gotten you this far already. So get started!
