Author: Dr. Meghan Pasha

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

The drive to find someone to whom we can turn to for comfort is wired into our genes and our bodies. We enter into romantic relationships to feel close, to feel connected, and to feel loved. Ideally, these connections provide us a sense of safe haven to feel comfort and emotional support, as well as a secure base from which we can go out into the world and explore. So, what about when our relationship does not provide these things? What if our relationship has changed? What if we feel stuck?

Knowing if or when to seek support for your romantic relationship can be challenging. Here are some common signs couples could benefit from couples therapy.

1. Unhealthy Cycles: “Here we are… again.”

We come into contact with one another with a blueprint, along with our experiences in the world, that shape how we understand closeness and how we navigate conflict. Together, and over time, these blueprints create patterns or cycles. Sometimes these cycles are healthy and strengthen romantic bonds. Other times these cycles become an unhealthy dance that pushes each other way. Partner 1 gives that look, partner 2 responds in that way, partner 1 reacts, and partner 2 walks away. You and your partner have come to know this dance well. It can be about big or small matters, and ultimately, it leaves you feeling stuck each time.

“The key to restoring connection is, first, interrupting and dismantling these destructive sequences and then actively constructing a more emotionally open and receptive way of interacting, one in which partners feel safe confiding their hidden fears and longings.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

Feeling stuck is one of the most common reasons couples seek therapy and is often described as “communication problems.” While these cycles certainly do create communication problems, the process of couples therapy can provide a much deeper solution, one that will be long-lasting. Couples therapy works to understand each partner’s blueprint for a relationship, identify the unhealthy patterns or cycles that have emerged, and create new patterns of communicating that bring forth closeness and connection.

2. Feeling lonely, together.

When difficult patterns take hold in a romantic relationship, those feelings of emotional safety and feeling known can begin to erode. The relationship that allowed us to be seen, heard, and understood, can begin to feel like a lonely place.

“Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other: Can I count on you, depend on you? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me when I need, when I call? Do I matter to you? Am I valued and accepted by you? Do you need me, rely on me? The anger, the criticism, the demands, are really cries to their lovers, calls to stir their hearts, to draw their mates back in emotionally and reestablish a sense of safe connection.”
– Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

In couples therapy, a trained clinician can help in building safety and gently inviting you both back to one another. The space will allow each partner to tune in, give clear messages of what we need, and truly feel heard and understood by the other.

3. Trust in need of repair: “How do I forgive?”

Affairs or betrayals are incredibly painful catalysts to reach out for support. So often couples are unsure of what lies on the path ahead. Infidelity, whether emotional or physical, ruptures the most intensely held trust in a relationship. When this trust is broken it creates deep insecurity, fear, and uncertainty regarding the relationship that is most important to them.

“For all of us, the person we love most in the world, the one who can send us soaring joyfully into space, is also the person who can send us crashing back to earth. All it takes is a slight turning away of the head or a flip, careless remark. There is no closeness without this sensitivity…. When we don’t feel safe and connected, these moments are like a spark in a tinder forest. They set fire to the whole relationship.”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Your Guide to the Most Successful Approach to Building Loving Relationships

Couples therapy offers a space for partners to gently wash out these painful wounds and explore paths towards healing. Throughout the process, partners can form deeper understandings of the dynamics in their relationship, explore ways to cope, and ultimately repair and strengthen their connection.

For more information or to see if couples therapy may be right for you and your significant other, reach out today. Our clinicians will work side by side with you and your partner to reconnect and find healing.