I wanted to offer a different perspective here. I am not judging anyone who chose or experienced things differently from me. My comment is self-reflection.
I used to think our couples therapy was “toxic” because my therapist validated my husband’s feelings and concerns and not just mine. Back then, I knew what the problems in our marriage were and they were almost exclusively his. Though I vaguely acknowledged that I probably contributed something to the dysfunction, I couldn’t articulate how. I saw our therapist validating him as a way of enabling him.
I thought a licensed therapist should help him see all the things he needed to change. I came in armed with therapy-speak like “mental load” and “emotional labor”, tearfully explaining why my husband was f-ing up and how much he was hurting me. I was waiting for the Terry Real moment — for the therapist to turn to him and show him wounded child.
I had heard this from women in my life and on TikTok. I adopted their words as the language for my own unhappiness. I was unhappy! And it was definitely my husband’s fault.
But then I noticed that loads of those same women divorced, fell in love, and then were making similar complaints in short order about the next man. And then the next. Was the problem just immature men? Or was there a common denominator in the women too?
In truth, it’s probably
both. To be clear, I knew my husband had his role. He did need to grow. But the light bulb moment for me was when I realized that my power resided in how I chose to conduct myself — in how I treated him and how well I chose to love him, regardless of whether I felt he “deserved” it.
I had to learn how to step out of my own pain and frustration so I could hold his. I learned how to create joy and peace for myself and not outsource it to him or others. I gave cheerfully rather than counting all the things I thought were unfair. I cultivated gratitude in place of bitterness and resentment. By focusing on myself, I (slowly) stopped obsessing over his faults.
Over time, he reciprocated. Never exactly in the way I wanted. And I learned to accept and love him as he was, not for who I wanted him to become.
I went first. Not him. I changed and that changed our marriage. I do not see that as losing myself. I felt 10-feet tall for the first time in a long time. I actually liked myself and my life, which I was actively writing in my own hand, not his.
To be clear, I don't think a therapist validating your spouse's perspective is toxic. I'm glad you were able to alter your perspective and retain your marriage. I don't think anyone is thinking the men are the only problem. It is the dynamic. It is the dance. I don't think many divorced women are remarrying and facing the same situation. Most divorced women I know never want to reenter that arena because they know the fights will be the same. That there is something inherent in hetero marriage that can leave you trapped in a soul destroying situation. I also think that some pairings are particularly painful to each person. And if it doesn't get better, aka neither one of your feels loved and respected the way you want to be loved and respected, it is best to get out than to continually inflict harm on one another all in service to an ideal, aka the never ending marriage.
I love this for you! It really makes me happy that you were able to navigate towards this new dynamic. I know exactly what you’re talking about with people leaving a relationship, just to find themselves in a similar situation. It’s something I’ve feared for myself, and so I’ve spent the last several years learning to tend to my own needs, validate myself, focus on the things that bring me joy, appreciate the good around me. But, for us, this ended up making things worse. I think the dynamics of our relationship are just far too tangled and our dynamics have become incredibly toxic. Outside of the relationship, I can find peace of mind, happiness, joy. But together, it’s just constant conflict. I mean, am I missing something?! Does it take more than a few years?! How’d you do it?! I really love the life we built together, but I don’t like who we’ve become together. It’s just wild…
I’m so glad you’ve grown so much and have peace and joy regardless of what your spouse does! Only each person knows if/when enough time has passed to see whether anything will take root. For me, it took a few years. Our growth was so slow, we almost missed the new shoots coming up.
I avoid couples who wear the longevity of their marriage on their sleeve. There should be NO prize for staying married. I am divorced, and I stayed married way too long. It's normal for people to change and grow. It's nice to grow at the same rate and in the same direction, but it's not a given. There should be no shame for moving on when it's necessary.
I’d make a terrible couples counselor if the goal was simply for people to stay married. I think divorce can be a healthy thing. To my mind, the first question isn’t whether or not people should stay married or to separate, it’s to explore the meaning of their relationship and understand themselves more thoroughly. Then, they can make a more informed decision of how they would like to move forward.
Yes! It would be good if we all avoid praising people who wear any of their "accomplishments" on their sleeve -- whether it is a long marriage, the number of children/grandchildren they have, or their career accomplishments. The best, most honorable people I have known in my life don't show any of it "on their sleeve" - they are not publicly lauded and applauded (so many pretend to humbly accept praise, but in fact they set up the situation in which they are "surprised" by public praise!), but instead quietly keep doing what is right. May God send us more of these, please.
Also, Cindy, asking rhetorically, how is it that you affirming or complimenting his essence is going to make a dent in his behavior when the patriarchy is raining down on him with validation of his behaviors?! You can’t compete! Just a bit of affirmation for ya! 💗
I had a useless couples therapist who couldn’t spot coercive control, took his side in everything, and gave me “intimacy exercises” instead of an escape plan! She just helped him torture me further. For a year.
Oh my god that phrase “intimacy exercises instead of an escape plan” could have been the title of this piece! I’m so sorry that happened but sadly I think it is all too common when therapists aren’t trained to identify these forms of abuse.
The problem with couples therapy lies in incentives. You're paying for every session with them. The longer you must go to couples therapy, the more money the therapist makes. It's a perverse system. I'm not saying couples therapy can't be helpful or won't help one's relationship, but you have to go in with one simple fact in mind: they want you to keep attending.
I went to couples therapy with my then-husband after I had discovered his affair, when I was undergoing treatment for cancer. My ex (himself a therapist) was refusing to end the affair but was also resisting divorce; effectively he wanted me to accept the affair and his continuing abusive behaviour. He reported dreams or fantasies where he drove us off a bridge, or struck a knife into the kitchen table, and also exposed me to actual health risks during my chemo. He also competed with my life-threatening illness by saying he felt suicidal (because I wanted him to make a choice). But the couples therapist treated all this as if the risks were equal and she couldn’t call him out because that would be taking sides. I felt he was using the therapy room to continue his attacks on me. Some years later, after divorce, I wrote to her to challenge her neutrality. I said, if you had seen physical abuse you wouldn’t have stayed neutral, so why allow psychological abuse in the room? She responded to acknowledge my letter but didn’t answer the challenge.
This is exactly what I need to read right now as my husband and I start couples counseling next week. Thank you for sharing!
I have also been harmed by therapists in the past- I had a therapist see me and a former partner while he was in active addiction- which is WILD and soooo unethical. Looking back I'm furious at how much money I spent when I clearly needed to leave that relationship ASAP. She was also my personal therapist which is even grosser.
Also the thrall of monogamy culture and lack of sexual education for many many therapists and confronting their own biases really impacts marriage family counseling. I had a therapist shame me and my oldest child's son when were attempting open relating... while I'm glad I am no longer in that relationship, I do see how harmful her insistence on us stopping our other relationships instead of actually MEETING US where we were at reinforced some awful beliefs about sexuality and intimate life. Not to mention other individual counselors who have shamed me.
Thankfully now I have a wonderful personal therapist, and this couples counselor we meet with next week after in initial intake seems well versed and skilled. He understood right away what I meant when I mentioned the gender care gap and gendered norms in cis-het marriages. so wish us luck!
My couples therapy was pretty bad, and expensive, and didn't save the marriage. After the first meeting, the therapist pulled me aside to tell me that the marriage was abusive—that I was being abused. But instead of having the sense to get out then, I stuck it out for two more years trying to become somebody my ex would be nice to.
I think our therapist was trying to get me to realize that the situation was hopeless, but my conditioning to never give up was too strong. I don't know if the problem was that the lesson wasn't clear, or that I was just too dull to grasp it.
Was our therapy a success or a failure? I'm still not sure.
Well, I am glad that therapist did that but I also know that sometimes we cannot see the abuse until we see it with our own eyes. And yes, the conditioning to make it work is SO strong no matter your background. You put in the work, you stick it out, you try another therapist. This is what I wish we could address more. That forever love is not the goal if it doesn't feel like love.
That's great the counselor privately told you their concerns! Did the therapist offer your trauma-related/abuse-related resources like an abuse counselor? That might have been a next step. It has got to become more normal for all counselors to first STOP and assess (really, truly, deeply) assess whether there is any chance that abuse is happening. Almost like, counselors should send the couple individaully to an abuse evaluator or something. Ofcourse, malignant abusers will know how to play off this...
Ooooh, can't wait to listen! I do think that for the first time people are unpacking something that we have just assumed is a positive for the ways it can do damage.
I am finding a particularly harmful couple's therapy guru (particularly in Christian and Catholic ciricles) is called The Gottman Institute. They are nationally (possibly internationally) known and lauded. They claim that they rule out abuse first, but how do they rule it out? Their therapist missed the boat on tons of stories I have heard. Also, how often do they rule out the abuse? There should be a "check" done at least once a month during therapy to be sure no red flags of abuse are there. Horrifyingly, Gottman Institute also claims that only a small percentage of the couples they "help" are dealing with "characterological" (as opposed to "situational" anger) abusive person. I think they are dead wrong on the magnitude of the problem. I think many, many couples are dealing with a characterologically abusive person (ie permanently abusive rather than situation to situation). All of their researched seems skewed due to this. I really think they are dangerous if they so easily dismiss abusive persons. Besides - look at their website - the Gottman couple's own photo is EVERYWHERE on it -- totally look like it's about them, not about helping others. Wish the Christian world would wake up to them.
I am also pretty suspicious of the Gottmans who inevitably appear in so many articles on couples therapy. I hate their four horsemen and also did you know that it is his THIRD marriage?
I am a woman who was married to a woman and yet this all rings true. My individual therapist reported our couples therapist after she reached out tried to triangulate the individual therapist and attempt to enlist her in abusing me. It was horrible. She berated me, yelled at me, accused me all the while under the thumb of my narcissistic ex. She told me my partner was owed sex. That if I want in the mood we should open our relationship (inside the first month of seeing her) and after months we were still working on the question she asked the first day about what’s wrong with the relationship that only my ex answered. I never got to.
In my opinion, as someone who trains relationship therapists and founded a relationship therapy training organization in Boston, one of the biggest challenges within the field of relationship therapy is that too many therapists start by working with individuals and transition into working with couples later in their careers. The skillsets for individual and relational therapy are completely different.
Managing what partner A needs, partner B needs, the differences between the two (and the potential unresolvability of the differences), and the effectiveness of the interaction cycle between two people is a ton of work. And that's just with two people. :)
I had a supervisor who told me that you begin to get decent at relationship therapy about 15 years into your career. As someone who just started his 17th year doing relationship therapy, I think he's absolutely correct.
No accountability system will completely eradicate bad services. However, until we get a more effective review and accountability process for therapists, in which relationship therapy is nationally recognized as a separate license within the field of psychotherapy, and therapists have to undergo even more rigorous training (i.e. continuous supervision) to be able to legally (not just ethically) practice it, we'll have a higher percentage of therapists who provide poor relational health services.
I super agree! I needed a lot of specialized training to work with couples – without it, there was just no way I could bring my individual skills to couples.
The Intimacy from the Inside Out (IFIO) method, which is Internal Family Systems applied to couples — is a great modality, as long as people are doing their own individual work as well.
I’m a couple’s therapist and agree with your post.
For the most part couple’s therapy works well with general relationship issues.
Where there is abuse, it often doesn’t work and can be damaging. This is apparent if the abuser blames the partner continuously, and won’t take personal responsibility for their reactions.
The problem is that it can take a while before it becomes apparent, and, as you say, many people don’t realise their partner is abusive. It needs the therapist to call it out and refer the abused person to individual therapy.
The therapist needs to be vigilant to the abusive person coercing the therapist in to the system. It’s very challenging work.
I'm a therapist (I only work with individuals, not couples). What I've seen again and again in my 15 year career is that therapists can only go as far with their clients as they themselves have progressed, so unfortunately you run into a lot of couples therapists who reinforce sexist, abusive, patriarchal ideas because they are not liberated from those ideas themselves. The best couples therapists are not trying to preserve the relationship. They're trying to help the clients figure out whether the relationship should continue. I am very selective about which couples therapists I refer my individual clients to for this reason. A good couples therapist who has done their own work can be a valuable ally for women who are trying to get their husband to understand that the unequal division of household labor is breaking their marriage and not a trifling matter. Good ones will also call out abuse when they see it. Therapists know that they risk losing the clients if they say something one half of the couple doesn't want to hear, so sadly too many play it safe and avoid ruffling feathers. In my work with individuals, I don't tiptoe around calling out abuse when clients describe it. I've heard too many stories over the years from women who stayed too long in relationships and couldn't understand why previous therapists didn't label abuse as what it is. So I tell women directly, "What you are describing is rape," or, "What you are describing is abusive." Sadly I have to have these conversations far too often. Sometimes clients drop out of therapy because it's easier to fire a therapist than to end a marriage, but more often, women are grateful to me for not reinforcing their partners' (and our culture's) gaslighting.
This is so congruent with my experience - my ex and I happened to be seeing the same therapist separately (he recommended her to me) when we started dated. When the blowups started, we saw her as a couples therapist (should have gotten an independent opinion instead). For years, I was told to look at abuse as a scared little boy expressing himself. That set up a dynamic for the whole relationship. I think she didn’t believe me when I described abusive behavior like screaming at me; I think she assumed I was exaggerating. When we were in the process of breaking up, we went back to her. I hadn’t yet put the pieces together and came off to her as a quitter.
A year after our divorce, he approached me and apologized. He owned all of it. We got our original friendship back. He is happily married to a better fit, became a stay-at-home homeschooling (for more rigorous academics, no less) dad to an amazing daughter (nobody who knew him before would ever have believed that).
Our therapist had totally mind-fucked me about the gaslighting. It would
Oof. I am so sorry to hear that you had this experience. The majority of therapists agree that it is unethical and poses a conflict to see two members of the same family at the same time, and definitely unethical to do individual and couples work at the same time. Sadly there are a lot of bad therapists in the world, but there are also some good ones, if you can find them.
I wanted to offer a different perspective here. I am not judging anyone who chose or experienced things differently from me. My comment is self-reflection.
I used to think our couples therapy was “toxic” because my therapist validated my husband’s feelings and concerns and not just mine. Back then, I knew what the problems in our marriage were and they were almost exclusively his. Though I vaguely acknowledged that I probably contributed something to the dysfunction, I couldn’t articulate how. I saw our therapist validating him as a way of enabling him.
I thought a licensed therapist should help him see all the things he needed to change. I came in armed with therapy-speak like “mental load” and “emotional labor”, tearfully explaining why my husband was f-ing up and how much he was hurting me. I was waiting for the Terry Real moment — for the therapist to turn to him and show him wounded child.
I had heard this from women in my life and on TikTok. I adopted their words as the language for my own unhappiness. I was unhappy! And it was definitely my husband’s fault.
But then I noticed that loads of those same women divorced, fell in love, and then were making similar complaints in short order about the next man. And then the next. Was the problem just immature men? Or was there a common denominator in the women too?
In truth, it’s probably
both. To be clear, I knew my husband had his role. He did need to grow. But the light bulb moment for me was when I realized that my power resided in how I chose to conduct myself — in how I treated him and how well I chose to love him, regardless of whether I felt he “deserved” it.
I had to learn how to step out of my own pain and frustration so I could hold his. I learned how to create joy and peace for myself and not outsource it to him or others. I gave cheerfully rather than counting all the things I thought were unfair. I cultivated gratitude in place of bitterness and resentment. By focusing on myself, I (slowly) stopped obsessing over his faults.
Over time, he reciprocated. Never exactly in the way I wanted. And I learned to accept and love him as he was, not for who I wanted him to become.
I went first. Not him. I changed and that changed our marriage. I do not see that as losing myself. I felt 10-feet tall for the first time in a long time. I actually liked myself and my life, which I was actively writing in my own hand, not his.
To be clear, I don't think a therapist validating your spouse's perspective is toxic. I'm glad you were able to alter your perspective and retain your marriage. I don't think anyone is thinking the men are the only problem. It is the dynamic. It is the dance. I don't think many divorced women are remarrying and facing the same situation. Most divorced women I know never want to reenter that arena because they know the fights will be the same. That there is something inherent in hetero marriage that can leave you trapped in a soul destroying situation. I also think that some pairings are particularly painful to each person. And if it doesn't get better, aka neither one of your feels loved and respected the way you want to be loved and respected, it is best to get out than to continually inflict harm on one another all in service to an ideal, aka the never ending marriage.
I love this for you! It really makes me happy that you were able to navigate towards this new dynamic. I know exactly what you’re talking about with people leaving a relationship, just to find themselves in a similar situation. It’s something I’ve feared for myself, and so I’ve spent the last several years learning to tend to my own needs, validate myself, focus on the things that bring me joy, appreciate the good around me. But, for us, this ended up making things worse. I think the dynamics of our relationship are just far too tangled and our dynamics have become incredibly toxic. Outside of the relationship, I can find peace of mind, happiness, joy. But together, it’s just constant conflict. I mean, am I missing something?! Does it take more than a few years?! How’d you do it?! I really love the life we built together, but I don’t like who we’ve become together. It’s just wild…
I’m so glad you’ve grown so much and have peace and joy regardless of what your spouse does! Only each person knows if/when enough time has passed to see whether anything will take root. For me, it took a few years. Our growth was so slow, we almost missed the new shoots coming up.
I avoid couples who wear the longevity of their marriage on their sleeve. There should be NO prize for staying married. I am divorced, and I stayed married way too long. It's normal for people to change and grow. It's nice to grow at the same rate and in the same direction, but it's not a given. There should be no shame for moving on when it's necessary.
100% this.
I’d make a terrible couples counselor if the goal was simply for people to stay married. I think divorce can be a healthy thing. To my mind, the first question isn’t whether or not people should stay married or to separate, it’s to explore the meaning of their relationship and understand themselves more thoroughly. Then, they can make a more informed decision of how they would like to move forward.
Yes! It would be good if we all avoid praising people who wear any of their "accomplishments" on their sleeve -- whether it is a long marriage, the number of children/grandchildren they have, or their career accomplishments. The best, most honorable people I have known in my life don't show any of it "on their sleeve" - they are not publicly lauded and applauded (so many pretend to humbly accept praise, but in fact they set up the situation in which they are "surprised" by public praise!), but instead quietly keep doing what is right. May God send us more of these, please.
I was badly hurt by couples therapy, and I’d like to find a way to share it. Thank you for what you’ve written.
I'd be happy to share your perspective anonymously if you'd like to reach out directly.
Also, Cindy, asking rhetorically, how is it that you affirming or complimenting his essence is going to make a dent in his behavior when the patriarchy is raining down on him with validation of his behaviors?! You can’t compete! Just a bit of affirmation for ya! 💗
I had a useless couples therapist who couldn’t spot coercive control, took his side in everything, and gave me “intimacy exercises” instead of an escape plan! She just helped him torture me further. For a year.
Oh my god that phrase “intimacy exercises instead of an escape plan” could have been the title of this piece! I’m so sorry that happened but sadly I think it is all too common when therapists aren’t trained to identify these forms of abuse.
The problem with couples therapy lies in incentives. You're paying for every session with them. The longer you must go to couples therapy, the more money the therapist makes. It's a perverse system. I'm not saying couples therapy can't be helpful or won't help one's relationship, but you have to go in with one simple fact in mind: they want you to keep attending.
I went to couples therapy with my then-husband after I had discovered his affair, when I was undergoing treatment for cancer. My ex (himself a therapist) was refusing to end the affair but was also resisting divorce; effectively he wanted me to accept the affair and his continuing abusive behaviour. He reported dreams or fantasies where he drove us off a bridge, or struck a knife into the kitchen table, and also exposed me to actual health risks during my chemo. He also competed with my life-threatening illness by saying he felt suicidal (because I wanted him to make a choice). But the couples therapist treated all this as if the risks were equal and she couldn’t call him out because that would be taking sides. I felt he was using the therapy room to continue his attacks on me. Some years later, after divorce, I wrote to her to challenge her neutrality. I said, if you had seen physical abuse you wouldn’t have stayed neutral, so why allow psychological abuse in the room? She responded to acknowledge my letter but didn’t answer the challenge.
This is exactly what I need to read right now as my husband and I start couples counseling next week. Thank you for sharing!
I have also been harmed by therapists in the past- I had a therapist see me and a former partner while he was in active addiction- which is WILD and soooo unethical. Looking back I'm furious at how much money I spent when I clearly needed to leave that relationship ASAP. She was also my personal therapist which is even grosser.
Also the thrall of monogamy culture and lack of sexual education for many many therapists and confronting their own biases really impacts marriage family counseling. I had a therapist shame me and my oldest child's son when were attempting open relating... while I'm glad I am no longer in that relationship, I do see how harmful her insistence on us stopping our other relationships instead of actually MEETING US where we were at reinforced some awful beliefs about sexuality and intimate life. Not to mention other individual counselors who have shamed me.
Thankfully now I have a wonderful personal therapist, and this couples counselor we meet with next week after in initial intake seems well versed and skilled. He understood right away what I meant when I mentioned the gender care gap and gendered norms in cis-het marriages. so wish us luck!
My couples therapy was pretty bad, and expensive, and didn't save the marriage. After the first meeting, the therapist pulled me aside to tell me that the marriage was abusive—that I was being abused. But instead of having the sense to get out then, I stuck it out for two more years trying to become somebody my ex would be nice to.
I think our therapist was trying to get me to realize that the situation was hopeless, but my conditioning to never give up was too strong. I don't know if the problem was that the lesson wasn't clear, or that I was just too dull to grasp it.
Was our therapy a success or a failure? I'm still not sure.
Well, I am glad that therapist did that but I also know that sometimes we cannot see the abuse until we see it with our own eyes. And yes, the conditioning to make it work is SO strong no matter your background. You put in the work, you stick it out, you try another therapist. This is what I wish we could address more. That forever love is not the goal if it doesn't feel like love.
That's great the counselor privately told you their concerns! Did the therapist offer your trauma-related/abuse-related resources like an abuse counselor? That might have been a next step. It has got to become more normal for all counselors to first STOP and assess (really, truly, deeply) assess whether there is any chance that abuse is happening. Almost like, counselors should send the couple individaully to an abuse evaluator or something. Ofcourse, malignant abusers will know how to play off this...
No, no referral to outside resources. At least I was never in any physical peril.
Thanks for the shoutout! Tracy and I just finished our edit on a couples therapy episode too, it’s dropping next week! Must be something in the water…
Ooooh, can't wait to listen! I do think that for the first time people are unpacking something that we have just assumed is a positive for the ways it can do damage.
I am finding a particularly harmful couple's therapy guru (particularly in Christian and Catholic ciricles) is called The Gottman Institute. They are nationally (possibly internationally) known and lauded. They claim that they rule out abuse first, but how do they rule it out? Their therapist missed the boat on tons of stories I have heard. Also, how often do they rule out the abuse? There should be a "check" done at least once a month during therapy to be sure no red flags of abuse are there. Horrifyingly, Gottman Institute also claims that only a small percentage of the couples they "help" are dealing with "characterological" (as opposed to "situational" anger) abusive person. I think they are dead wrong on the magnitude of the problem. I think many, many couples are dealing with a characterologically abusive person (ie permanently abusive rather than situation to situation). All of their researched seems skewed due to this. I really think they are dangerous if they so easily dismiss abusive persons. Besides - look at their website - the Gottman couple's own photo is EVERYWHERE on it -- totally look like it's about them, not about helping others. Wish the Christian world would wake up to them.
I am also pretty suspicious of the Gottmans who inevitably appear in so many articles on couples therapy. I hate their four horsemen and also did you know that it is his THIRD marriage?
Do you know any article questioning the Gottmans? I would love for my church to know.
This is all I have found so far. https://tribecatherapy.com/blog/couples-need-more-than-tools-a-couples-therapists-beef-with-the-gottman-method#:~:text=The%20Gottman%20Method%20skips%20the,action%20is%20to%20break%20up.
I am a woman who was married to a woman and yet this all rings true. My individual therapist reported our couples therapist after she reached out tried to triangulate the individual therapist and attempt to enlist her in abusing me. It was horrible. She berated me, yelled at me, accused me all the while under the thumb of my narcissistic ex. She told me my partner was owed sex. That if I want in the mood we should open our relationship (inside the first month of seeing her) and after months we were still working on the question she asked the first day about what’s wrong with the relationship that only my ex answered. I never got to.
I appreciate everything that you're saying.
In my opinion, as someone who trains relationship therapists and founded a relationship therapy training organization in Boston, one of the biggest challenges within the field of relationship therapy is that too many therapists start by working with individuals and transition into working with couples later in their careers. The skillsets for individual and relational therapy are completely different.
Managing what partner A needs, partner B needs, the differences between the two (and the potential unresolvability of the differences), and the effectiveness of the interaction cycle between two people is a ton of work. And that's just with two people. :)
I had a supervisor who told me that you begin to get decent at relationship therapy about 15 years into your career. As someone who just started his 17th year doing relationship therapy, I think he's absolutely correct.
No accountability system will completely eradicate bad services. However, until we get a more effective review and accountability process for therapists, in which relationship therapy is nationally recognized as a separate license within the field of psychotherapy, and therapists have to undergo even more rigorous training (i.e. continuous supervision) to be able to legally (not just ethically) practice it, we'll have a higher percentage of therapists who provide poor relational health services.
I super agree! I needed a lot of specialized training to work with couples – without it, there was just no way I could bring my individual skills to couples.
The Intimacy from the Inside Out (IFIO) method, which is Internal Family Systems applied to couples — is a great modality, as long as people are doing their own individual work as well.
I just learned about IFIO and I'm so excited about its possibility!
Cindy! Here’s an IFIO-based IFS session you may enjoy!
http://www.athousandpaths.com/video
I’m a couple’s therapist and agree with your post.
For the most part couple’s therapy works well with general relationship issues.
Where there is abuse, it often doesn’t work and can be damaging. This is apparent if the abuser blames the partner continuously, and won’t take personal responsibility for their reactions.
The problem is that it can take a while before it becomes apparent, and, as you say, many people don’t realise their partner is abusive. It needs the therapist to call it out and refer the abused person to individual therapy.
The therapist needs to be vigilant to the abusive person coercing the therapist in to the system. It’s very challenging work.
I'm a therapist (I only work with individuals, not couples). What I've seen again and again in my 15 year career is that therapists can only go as far with their clients as they themselves have progressed, so unfortunately you run into a lot of couples therapists who reinforce sexist, abusive, patriarchal ideas because they are not liberated from those ideas themselves. The best couples therapists are not trying to preserve the relationship. They're trying to help the clients figure out whether the relationship should continue. I am very selective about which couples therapists I refer my individual clients to for this reason. A good couples therapist who has done their own work can be a valuable ally for women who are trying to get their husband to understand that the unequal division of household labor is breaking their marriage and not a trifling matter. Good ones will also call out abuse when they see it. Therapists know that they risk losing the clients if they say something one half of the couple doesn't want to hear, so sadly too many play it safe and avoid ruffling feathers. In my work with individuals, I don't tiptoe around calling out abuse when clients describe it. I've heard too many stories over the years from women who stayed too long in relationships and couldn't understand why previous therapists didn't label abuse as what it is. So I tell women directly, "What you are describing is rape," or, "What you are describing is abusive." Sadly I have to have these conversations far too often. Sometimes clients drop out of therapy because it's easier to fire a therapist than to end a marriage, but more often, women are grateful to me for not reinforcing their partners' (and our culture's) gaslighting.
Thank you for sharing your perspective.
This is so congruent with my experience - my ex and I happened to be seeing the same therapist separately (he recommended her to me) when we started dated. When the blowups started, we saw her as a couples therapist (should have gotten an independent opinion instead). For years, I was told to look at abuse as a scared little boy expressing himself. That set up a dynamic for the whole relationship. I think she didn’t believe me when I described abusive behavior like screaming at me; I think she assumed I was exaggerating. When we were in the process of breaking up, we went back to her. I hadn’t yet put the pieces together and came off to her as a quitter.
A year after our divorce, he approached me and apologized. He owned all of it. We got our original friendship back. He is happily married to a better fit, became a stay-at-home homeschooling (for more rigorous academics, no less) dad to an amazing daughter (nobody who knew him before would ever have believed that).
Our therapist had totally mind-fucked me about the gaslighting. It would
be hard for me to ever try therapy again.
Oof. I am so sorry to hear that you had this experience. The majority of therapists agree that it is unethical and poses a conflict to see two members of the same family at the same time, and definitely unethical to do individual and couples work at the same time. Sadly there are a lot of bad therapists in the world, but there are also some good ones, if you can find them.
More of this, please. Thank you for sharing 💕💕