Navigating the Challenges of Couple Therapy: Insights from the Therapist’s Chair

Working with couples is a profoundly rewarding experience, yet it brings a distinct set of challenges that differ from individual therapy. While individual sessions focus on one person’s inner world, couple work invites two stories, two emotional landscapes, and often two different ways of making sense of the same experience.

Creating Safety in Crisis: Couple Therapy Insights

One of the greatest challenges is balancing the therapeutic alliance. In individual work, rapport is built with a single client. In couple therapy, the therapist must remain attuned to both partners without appearing to take sides.

This requires

• Maintaining a delicate balance of empathy and neutrality

• Honouring each person’s pain and perspective, even when they sharply contrast.

• Holding both realities with equal care is fundamental to building trust.

Behind every complaint is a deep personal longing.”

John Gottman

Couples often arrive in therapy disconnected: communication has broken down, trust has eroded, or emotional intimacy feels lost. Some come in crisis, with one foot already out the door. Others bring a loneliness that permeates their relationship. In these moments, the therapist steps into a dynamic charged with emotion, blame, and vulnerability.

Careful pacing and structured approaches are crucial to creating a sense of safety, especially when old wounds are triggered in real time.

The therapist becomes both anchor and guide, helping the couple tolerate discomfort long enough to explore it meaningfully.

Navigating Competing Attachment Needs

Another layer of complexity lies in competing attachment needs. One partner may seek closeness and reassurance, while the other feels overwhelmed and craves distance. These mismatches often create a push–pull dynamic where both partners feel unseen and misunderstood. When attachment fears are activated, reactions often become defensiveness, criticism, withdrawal, or shutdown.

In couple therapy, the therapist’s role is to slow the process, offer insight into the patterns the couple is caught in, and support more aware and responsive ways of relating.

In doing so, therapy opens the door to less reactive, more intentional forms of relating.

In intimate relationships, we are always looking for someone

to help us finish the unfinished business of our childhood.”

Esther Perel

Addressing Unresolved Trauma

Couple therapy often mirrors unresolved personal history. One partner’s distress may echo childhood experiences, feelings of unworthiness, abandonment, and dismissal.

Intimate relationships easily reawaken these emotional injuries, particularly when partners unknowingly step on each other’s sensitive spots. The therapist’s task becomes multidimensional: supporting individual healing while also facilitating relational repair.

It involves holding the past, the present, and the potential for something different, all at once. Therapy becomes a space where individual wounds can be acknowledged without eclipsing the shared work of reconnecting.

At the same time, therapists act as translators of emotional subtext. Helping partners give language to those needs without blame, and guiding the other to hear without defensiveness, is slow, vulnerable work. Yet it is where some of the most profound shifts occur.

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone,

and finding that that’s ok.

Alain de Botton

Managing Power Dynamics

Power dynamics often sit beneath a couple’s struggles. These may relate to gender roles, parenting, cultural expectations, or control over money and decisions.

When power is uneven, one partner may feel unheard or silenced, which quickly affects emotional safety. In therapy, these patterns need to be labelled with care.

The aim is not to assign blame, but to create space for responsibility and understanding. When experiences of unfairness are part of the relationship, they must be acknowledged openly rather than minimised.

Progress in couples therapy is rarely linear. Conflict may resurface, and emotions can intensify. While this can feel like a setback, it often signals important work unfolding. When couples stay engaged through discomfort, they begin to build emotional resilience and trust.

Co-Creating a New Relationship

Despite its challenges, couple therapy can be deeply transformative. A safe, non-judgmental space allows both partners to feel seen, not only in their pain, but also in their fears, hopes, and vulnerabilities.

The goal is not to return to how the relationship once was, or to create a perfect version of it. Instead, therapy supports couples to build something new, a relationship that reflects who they are now.

Change happens gradually. When partners learn to turn toward each other with curiosity and care, new ways of relating become possible, one conversation at a time.

We are hurt in relationship, and we are healed in relationship.

Harville Hendrix

Final Thoughts

At its best, couple therapy is not about fixing people or solving every issue. It is about restoring connection, fostering empathy, and cultivating a shared emotional language. It is an invitation to rewrite the relational script together, with honesty, curiosity, and care.

A helpline, a support group, your GP or a counsellor can offer support.

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