COUPLES THERAPY

A couple may seek therapy for many different reasons: recurring conflict, emotional or sexual distance, infidelity, difficulties surrounding parenthood, a significant life transition or the sense that the relationship has reached an impasse. Partners do not necessarily arrive with the same request, the same account of what has brought them there or the same understanding of what is at stake. This divergence is not treated as an obstacle to be resolved, but as a point from which the work can begin.

Although a relationship may carry hopes of closeness, responsiveness and mutual understanding, these hopes are often accompanied by frustration, misunderstanding and repetition. What is described as a “communication problem” does not always concern only how the partners speak to one another. It may concern the points at which their different ways of desiring, seeking closeness and relating to the other meet—and fail to meet. Love and intimacy do not abolish this difference, nor do they make either partner the complement of the other.

Therapy may explore the distance between what each partner asks of the other and what each desires, fears or repeats within the relationship, without this always being clear to them. A complaint directed at the other may, for example, coexist with a way of participating in the relationship in which the same difficulty continues to recur. The work therefore also turns to the position each partner occupies within this repetition.

Both partners can be heard in the sessions, without the therapist taking up the position of judge, mediator or expert who determines which account of the relationship is the correct one. Attention is directed to the points at which the partners’ expectations, demands, fears and desires meet, conflict or do not coincide.

Couples therapy does not begin with the predetermined aim of either preserving the relationship or bringing it to an end. It does not presuppose a lost harmony to which the couple ought to return. It may allow what has remained caught in mutual accusations, silences or repeated confrontations to be spoken, and the way in which the relationship has been constituted to be reconsidered.

The work requires the voluntary participation of both partners and a basic willingness, on each side, to speak not only about what the other does, but also about what concerns them personally. This does not mean that both must arrive with the same motivation, the same degree of involvement or an already shared goal. The possibility of articulating their differences is itself part of the therapeutic process.

Recognising each partner’s position does not imply equivalence or a symmetrical distribution of responsibility. Violence, coercion, intimidation and coercive control are not treated as a mutual “communication problem”. Where the basic conditions for free and safe speech are absent, or where there is an immediate risk of harm, joint couples therapy may not be appropriate. In such circumstances, safety and access to suitable support take precedence.

Therapy may open a space in which the couple can reconsider not only what is no longer working, but also what continues to bind them. What question is posed by what repeats—and what, perhaps, might be invented differently between them?