To begin, it’s not necessary for both of you to be equally on board. If one of you wants to do this and the other is at least willing, that’s usually a good enough place to start.
It can be strange when couples counselling begins to work. You realize you didn’t fully expect it would. It’s strange too that, even though you know your partner better than your therapist ever will, having that third person in the room can help you see and be seen by your partner in ways that feel fresh and pregnant with new possibilities.
It’s not magic. Love can’t be reduced to or fully captured by science, but there is a science to how love and attachment work: to how ruptures deepen and distances widen, to how injuries can be repaired and closeness restored. My role is to create the right conditions for you to stop talking past one another and have the sorts of constructive conversations that will close the distance between you, one shift at a time, one step at a time. When you get to the place where you see, feel and believe that your partner not only wants and needs you, but also wants to meet your needs, the problems that were keeping you apart are either resolved and left in the past or they become issues you’re able to tackle together, as a team.
You don’t need to read any books to get started or to know much about the process. In the first phase of couples counselling, most of the work happens in the therapy office, and we leave it there between meetings. Over time, the gains made in our sessions - in reducing conflict and misunderstanding, in fostering goodwill, communication, empathy and, ultimately, closeness and intimacy, - these gains begin to translate into changes that show up between sessions, sometimes because you’re creating the change intentionally and sometimes because it’s just happening naturally. It takes time to trust that these changes are real and lasting. In my experience, couples counselling doesn’t have to keep going until you get all the way to where you want to get together. You get far enough in feeling seen, heard, understood and cared for, in partnering successfully and having fun together, and you can take it from there.
— Leonard Cohen
If your relationship means something more to you than a set of tacit or explicit mutual agreements, then it’s what psychologists call ‘a primary attachment’ and what regular human beings call love. The bond you share is something natural: the stuff of biology and emotion, affection and affiliation. Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) works with what’s most natural and undeniable: your actual feelings and needs. The process has nothing to do with blaming one partner or the other for what’s going wrong. I’ll help you arrive at a shared understanding of the negative cycles that seem to recur and get you tangled-up and trapped. From this common ground, it’s possible to take a step back, to identify and to validate both partners’ underlying feelings and unmet needs. With understanding and empathy, the old, negative cycles get dismantled and fresh, healthy ways of connecting and partnering are co-created, in line with your values and where you are now in your lives. EFT for couples was one of the first research and evidence-based approaches to marital distress and has continued to evolve and develop as a gold standard approach.