What We Might Learn in Couples Therapy

Couples Therapy can be a very helpful place to go when it feels very hard to get through to our partners, when we are arguing too much, or are feeling isolated and lonely within a couple.

Like many things that help our relationships, couples therapy has a habit of sounding appallingly unromantic, involving patience, gruelling work and a host of embarrassing conversations about matters it would be much nicer never to have to think about – let alone discuss with a partner and a trained stranger. Our culture teaches us to trust and follow our feelings. But couples therapy knows this is to be a disaster, for our feelings are for the most part errant and encoded with primitive responses from a troubled past. So instead, it encourages a far wiser response: standing well back from our first impulses, neutralizing them through understanding and where possible rerouting them in less self-punishing and more trusting directions.