What happens in Couple Therapy or Relationship Counselling

Do you want to build and nourish a fulfilling and lasting relationship? Do you want to address old relationship wounds? Or are you in a new relationship and want to give it your best chance? How can couple therapy help?

When you have tried to make your relationship better and if it is not happening then what to do? What if there is too much anger and resentment already? What if your past history is impacting your present relationship?

Couple therapy or relationship counselling is one of the avenues that you can pursue. Lot of people ask me about couple therapy and are very confused about what really happens in Couple counselling / Couple therapy.

In general, as we grow up the well-intended parental messages for couples are to, keep your problems within the four walls. Sort out your issues between the two of you as a couple. Make adjustments. Nobody else can solve your problems, but the two of you and so on.

In principle though I agree with these approaches, it is also important to acknowledge that you didn’t get any training for how to be in a relationship. You might have been in relationships and you may have broken up or had a heartbreak etc, but there is very little understanding about how to build and nourish fulfilling lasting relationship. You are left to learn on your own and on the job, isn’t it.

Also when you have tried to make your relationship better and if it is not happening then what to do? What if there is too much anger and resentment already?

One of the reasons why people hesitate to reach out for help is that they don’t understand the process. Talking to a therapist is very different from talking to your friend or family.  Most of the times your family or friends might already be aligned to you and so might be biased. Or they may offer their own personal experiences and solutions that worked for them, which may or may not work for you.

So, what really happens in couple therapy / couple counselling? How can relationship counselling help? If you are considering couple therapy but unsure about it, you are at the right place. And there are many other differences too.

1. It is a safe space

It is a safe space for you to express yourself in the presence of the therapist as well as your partner. I tell my couple clients upfront that it is important that, the therapist offers you a safe space but that they also need to offer a safe space for each other to open up and talk about the difficult things about themselves each other and the relationship.

2. Neutrality and unbiased position

As a couple therapist I would stay neutral between the two parties and will be unbiased between the two of you. At the same time as a therapist, I would also not take the position of a judge between the two of you. 

Many couples comment to therapy expecting the therapies to tell them who is right and who is wrong and expecting you help to play the judge between the two of them. Or tell them how a couple should be or should not be. I do not take a prescriptive view as to how a couple should be. Each couple have a way of understanding and dealing with what is ok or what is not ok in their relationship. I would work with that. And if the couple wants certain things to be renegotiated, then I facilitate that.

3. What will you talk about?

You can talk about anything that is important for you. You may end up talking about how you perceive each other, what happened in the past, how do you react to each other families, your expectations, challenges in day to day functioning, finances, work load sharing, intimacy, unresolved issues and so on. It is not easy to talk and open up to a third person even if they are a professional and wont judge you and stay unbiased between the two of you. So if your partner takes courage to share something or bring up something in therapy then it is important enough to listen to it discuss about it and address it.

4. You may work on your relationship wounds.

I encourage couples to talk about how did they begin this relationship, how did they choose each other, and what happened in between and how they arrived at where they are in the Here and Now.

When there are unhealed wounds underneath in your relationship with either partner, they are bound to surface again and again, in some visible as well as invisible ways, in how you deal with your disagreements, conflicts, your emotional reactions to each other etc. Unless you heal the wounds in your relationship, you will tend to inflict more wounds on each other, damaging the relationship further.

5. You would learn new skills and took to engage with each other in healthy ways

Most of the clients have excellent communication skills. The challenge is not in terms of the communication or language skills but how effective is their communication. To convey what you want and to be received by the other, the way you intended and to be able to check and clarify any misunderstanding would be effective communication in a couple.

Relationship skills that you could gain could be about learning to handle and address conflicts in a healthy manner, communicate effectively by learning to hear and listen to your partner, to see each other’s point of view and most importantly learning to address each other’s reasonable needs and to be able to empathize with each other and offer support, physically, mentally and emotionally.

I am still just scratching the surface of couple therapy.  But I hope this gives you a sense of what couple therapy would look like.

Currently with the COVID-19 situation, all counselling and therapy services are offered online over video calls. Reach us at +91 9632146316 or write to us at counselor@innerdawn.in

About the Author:

Kala Balasubramanian is a certified Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist with a Masters in Counselling and Psychotherapy, Diplomas in Counselling and has further certifications specializing in couple/marriage/relationship counselling and family counselling. She is trained in different modalities like CBT, Gestalt, NLP, Family Systems Therapy, Transactional Analysis etc. As a trained therapist, she provides professional and confidential counselling services including Individual counselling and Couples counselling / Marriage counselling