Not Making Enough Progress Doesn’t Mean Your Relationship Cannot Be Repaired
Perhaps you’ve spent months—or longer—in couples counseling. You’ve talked about communication, identified your negative cycle, learned about your triggers, and developed a better understanding of how each of you contributes to the problems between you.
And yet at home, you’re still arguing. Still withdrawing. Still resentful. Still lonely. Perhaps one of you is now saying, “We’ve already tried counseling. Nothing works.”
That can be profoundly discouraging. But before concluding that your relationship is hopeless, it may be worth asking a different question: Did therapy fail, or did the two of you need a different amount of time and a different way of doing the work?
Sometimes the Problem Is Simply Time
Weekly couples counseling can be extremely valuable. But a seriously distressed relationship may contain years of unresolved hurt, disappointment, anger, mistrust and unsuccessful attempts to reconnect, and 50 minutes can disappear remarkably quickly.
You arrive and begin discussing what happened since your last appointment. An argument from the previous weekend needs attention. Eventually you get underneath the incident and something important begins to emerge. Emotions deepen—and the session is over. Another week passes, life intervenes, another conflict occurs, and the next session may begin with the newest crisis.
Some couples do very well with that format. Others never seem to have enough uninterrupted time to get beneath the latest incident and work deeply enough with the pattern underneath it.
Insight Is Not the Same as Change
Some couples who come to me already understand their problems remarkably well. They know who pursues, who withdraws, where the defensiveness comes from and what their therapist has asked them to do differently.
They understand the relationship—and they still cannot change it.
Knowing what healthy communication looks like is one thing. Being able to use it while you feel rejected, frightened, furious or deeply resentful is another.
What Concentrated Time Can Make Possible
A private relationship intensive gives us several consecutive days rather than a series of brief appointments separated by a week. We can stay with an important issue, slow an argument down while it is actually happening, identify what triggers each of you, work through unresolved injuries, and practice responding differently while I am there to help when the two of you become stuck.
The objective isn’t simply to understand your destructive cycle. It is to begin changing what happens when that cycle gets triggered.
An Intensive Isn’t Better Than Weekly Therapy—It’s Different
It is a different format for a different situation. For many couples, weekly counseling is exactly what they need. But when a relationship is deteriorating quickly, one person is talking about leaving, or you’ve spent months understanding your problems without being able to change them, substantially more uninterrupted therapeutic time may be useful.
Is Another Weekly Hour Enough?
The question is not whether weekly counseling is good or bad. The question is whether another weekly hour is enough for what is happening between you now.
If you’re asking that question, I would be happy to talk with you about whether an intensive might be appropriate.
Neil Rosenthal
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist
46 years of clinical experience
Author of a bestselling relationship book
More than 1,000 relationship articles published in newspapers around the world
Complimentary consultation: (720) 331-5564