Why Couples Seeking Counseling Can Benefit From Individual Therapy First

I see many couples in therapy who are just being exposed to counseling for the first time. While I fully support couples counseling for anyone, including those new to therapy, I find that it’s most helpful if each partner has experienced some individual therapy before entering into couples therapy. There are several reasons for this.

Familiarity With Counseling Can Help Build Trust In Couples Therapy

If the therapy situation is new for one or both partners, and the couple begins therapy with a lack of trust in some form in each other, then it is that much more difficult to establish an emotionally safe environment which is required to do the work. The situation is quite a bit more intense for both partners.

For example, most couples enter therapy with the expressed desire to work on “communication.” However, usually, one or both partners feel inadequate, misunderstood, invalidated, unappreciated or unsupported. These feelings are quite painful to explore for the first time even if alone with a therapist, let alone with a partner who is triggering these difficult emotions.

Each Partner Can Benefit From Reflecting On Past Experiences & Relationships

Everyone brings their own personal histories to bear on their interpersonal relationships. Parents, siblings, peers, teachers and coaches all lay the groundwork for how individuals function later in life. While some messages that individuals receive are explicit, most of them are implicitly learned through experiences.

For example, a well-intentioned, but anxious, mother tries to reassure her son, who feels excluded by his friends and shameful, by telling him how great he is. Although seemingly innocuous, this behavior could inadvertently send the message that the child’s negative feelings are not acceptable, which could lead the child to bottle up his emotions. As an adult, this man puts pressure on himself to suppress any kind of negativity. This can result in depression, which, in a relationship means that not only can he not communicate his own experience, but this individual has difficulty attending to his partner’s feelings. His situation ultimately mirrors the experience that he had when he was a child, one of being lonely and misunderstood.

Another example is in a chaotic household with multiple children, a child learns that she has to be vocal and pointed in order to get her needs met. She carries this emotional understanding into her romantic relationship only to find that the more vocal and angry she is, the more her partner withdraws from her, as a result of his or her own childhood experiences. She becomes exhausted and frustrated that her partner seems to be ignoring her even when she is so vocal about communicating her needs.

Messages learned through past experiences and relationships are stored as core beliefs and emotional and relational patterns, which are activated in intimate relationships. It can be helpful to uncover and understand in a relatively safe environment how one has been impacted by his or her childhood in terms of their relationships before entering a space with a distressed partner.

Laying The Groundwork for Couples Therapy Through Individual Counseling

If a partner understands what role that he or she has in the relationship dysfunction, the focus can be more heavily on how each partner’s way of being in the relationship contributes to the dysfunction or disconnection. Although the work may still not be easy, once the therapeutic groundwork is laid for each individual, partners can learn what each other needs to feel secure in the relationship and what behaviors make each other feel shamed, misunderstood, mistrusted, rejected, abandoned, etc. All of these feelings are reflective of how each partner may have felt at some point in their families of origin.

For some couples, the situation at home is so untenable that they feel couples counseling is urgent. In these cases, if you have the resources, I suggest that these couples pursue individual therapy alongside couples therapy. In our practice, we collaborate to offer couples counseling with one therapist and individual counseling to each partner with other therapists. The individual therapy can be used for additional processing of the couples therapy and to help each partner explore how their current relationship fits in to their overall relational patterns.

Feel free to reach out if you’d like more information about our couples therapy services.

Take Good Care,

Dan Goldstein, PhD