Usually one of you has been wondering for a while.
Not because anything has broken, exactly. Things are mostly fine. But there’s a conversation you’ve stopped having, or a subject that reliably goes sideways, or a distance that wasn’t there a few years ago and neither of you can point to when it started. And somewhere in that is the question of whether this counts: whether you’re allowed to get help for relationship problems that haven’t become a crisis.
In my clinical experience, that question keeps more couples struggling than any actual problem does. I’d like to offer a different way to answer it.
What most people get wrong about couples therapy
The common idea is that couples therapy is a last resort. It’s for affairs, constant fighting, someone with a foot out the door. By that standard, most couples never qualify until the situation has gotten calcified and much harder to work with.
The research here is fairly consistent, and a little sobering: couples tend to wait years between noticing a problem and doing anything about it. By then the pattern has had a long time to settle, and there’s usually a layer of hurt on top of the original issue that has to be addressed before anyone can reach the actual issue itself.
None of that means waiting was foolish. Most people wait because they hope it will resolve on its own, which is reasonable, and because asking for help feels like admitting that something is wrong, which is hard to say out loud about a relationship you care about.
But “is it bad enough?” is the wrong question. A better one is: has anything stopped flowing?
Signs something has stopped flowing
Is there a subject the two of you route around? Does a particular argument arrive in the same shape every time, with the same ending? Have you started editing what you say, not out of cruelty but out of fatigue, because you already know how it goes? Is there something you’ve decided to stop bringing up?
Those aren’t emergencies. They’re the early shape of distance, and many times, resentment. They respond well to attention while they’re still small.
Some couples come in with something specific: a decision they can’t get through, a betrayal, a transition that has put more weight on the relationship than it used to. Others come because things are basically good and they’d like them to stay that way. Both are good reasons to be in the room.
What each of you is carrying for the both of you
The psychoanalyst Henry Dicks spent years studying marriages at the Tavistock Clinic in London, and he noticed something that still shapes how I think about couples. Partners don’t choose each other at random. Very often, each person unconsciously finds in the other someone who can carry a part of themselves they can’t easily hold on their own.
The person who was never allowed to be angry marries someone who gets angry for both of them. The one who learned to need nothing marries someone who seems to need everything. At first it feels like balance; the other person has what you’re missing. Over time it can harden into a quiet agreement Dicks called collusion: each partner keeps playing their role, and each resents the other for playing theirs.
That’s why the same fight keeps coming back no matter what it’s about. The subject is rarely the point. The fight is two people struggling with parts of themselves they’ve handed to each other.
Slowing it down
Much of the work is taking the thing that keeps happening and slowing it down.
Usually we’ll start with one recent example, often something small from the past week, and move through it slowly enough to see what happened inside each of you at every turn. At full speed that’s invisible. Slowed down, there’s almost always a moment early on where something shifted before anything difficult had actually been said.
From there we get curious about where each of your responses came from and what they were originally for. Not to assign fault. Knowing that your partner’s shutdown is an old protection can change what’s possible in the next conversation.
A few things to know before you start
It doesn’t require you both to be equally enthusiastic. Plenty of good work starts with one partner who wanted this and one who agreed to come. Those varied feelings are good to talk about early, and they aren’t a reason to stay home.
It doesn’t require you to know what’s wrong. Most couples arrive with the surface version and find the real subject along the way.
It isn’t a referee service. I’m not there to decide who’s right, which is sometimes disappointing in the first session and usually a relief by the third.
One exception: if there’s fear in the relationship, or violence, or you find yourself working around your own safety, couples work isn’t the right first step. Individual support is, and I’m glad to help you find it.
One small practice
Sometime this week, on your own, ask yourself:
What’s the one conversation we’ve both stopped trying to have?
You don’t need to bring it up yet. Just notice whether an answer comes quickly. If it does, I invite you to bring that conversation into the room.
You don’t need a crisis
The question was never whether things are bad enough. It’s whether you’d like them to feel different.
Wanting the relationship to feel closer, easier or more honest is reason enough to come in, and the earlier you start, the less there is to untangle. If you’re not married yet, the same ground can be covered before there’s history attached to it, which is most of what premarital counseling is for. I offer couples therapy in person in Fullerton and Newport Beach, and by telehealth anywhere in California.
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