Learn About Couples Counseling

September 2, 2025

Couples counseling, also known as relationship therapy or marriage counseling, is a type of psychotherapy that helps couples resolve conflicts, improve communication, and strengthen their emotional connection. It can be useful for partners at any stage of a relationship — whether you’re dating, engaged, married, or even considering separation.

What Happens in Couples Counseling?

  1. Initial Assessment
    • The therapist will typically begin by learning about both partners, their history, and the relationship dynamics.
    • They may meet you both together, and sometimes individually.
  2. Identifying Issues
    • Common issues include communication problems, trust issues, intimacy concerns, financial disagreements, parenting conflicts, or life transitions.
  3. Setting Goals
    • Couples work with the therapist to define what they want to achieve (e.g., rebuilding trust, improving intimacy, learning to argue constructively).
  4. Therapeutic Techniques
    • Gottman Method: Based on decades of research, this method helps improve communication and manage conflict.
    • Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT): Focuses on emotional bonding.
    • Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT): Focuses on changing negative thinking patterns and behaviors.
  5. Homework & Practice
    • Therapists often give exercises to practice between sessions (e.g., communication drills, date nights, journaling feelings).

When Should You Consider Couples Counseling?

  • Frequent arguments or ongoing conflict
  • Emotional distance or lack of intimacy
  • Infidelity or breaches of trust
  • Difficulty making joint decisions
  • Navigating big life changes (e.g., moving, kids, retirement)
  • Feeling “stuck” in the relationship

Finding a Good Couples Therapist

Look for someone who:

  • Specializes in couples or marriage therapy
  • Has experience with your specific issues (e.g., trauma, LGBTQ+ relationships, infidelity)
  • Is licensed (LCSW, LMFT, LPC, or psychologist)
  • Makes both partners feel safe and heard

In addition to couples therapy, often a couples therapist will recommend that each partner have their own individual therapist to work on their own personal issues. We all have things we can work on or improve. Often our own past personal experiences can contribute to problems in a relationship. Maybe a former lover cheated on you in the past, and the trauma of that, prevents you from fully trusting your current partner. Perhaps you were vulnerable with a person in the past and they later used it against you, so now you feel guarded with your emotions with everyone. Maybe you were abandoned as a child, and now you fear your current partner will leave you, so you try to control everything they do. All of these past experiences can affect how you relate to your partner. Some people have insight into what they need to work on, whereas others don’t.

Are you one of those people who think “I don’t need counseling, it’s my partner that needs the help!” More often than not, the person who says “I don’t need counseling” is the person who really needs counseling because they lack insight into their own issues. Often our loved ones can see what we can’t see. So if you think you don’t need counseling or maybe you are willing to do individual therapy but you don’t know what to work on in therapy, I challenge you to do this next exercise. Ask a friend or trusted loved one “If you and I were in a therapy office together and the therapist asked you what you think I need to work on the most what would you say?” Listen to your loved one’s answer without being defensive. Your loved one may say something like “Your anger” or “learning to say no to others” or “setting boundaries with others” or “learning to take time for yourself” or “you are too critical” or “you’re too hard on yourself.”  Often our loved ones can see things we don’t see, and we must objectively evaluate if perhaps there is some truth to our loved one’s answer. Their answer could be a great starting point in your own individual therapy to explore with your therapist to see if it is an issue that you need (or even want) to work on.