A deeper understanding of the self is powerful, and the individual may find that these self-realizations can benefit relationships as well. Exploring individual relationship history, and often familial history, will greatly benefit an individual trying to show up differently in their relationship.

How could your partner possibly understand your emotions or how to care for them, if you don’t have a firm grasp on them yourself? Or for example with infidelity issues, each partner needs space to deal with how this situation is impacting them, and sometimes doing this together won’t feel emotionally safe at first.

There is a hard limit to the use of individual therapy when working on changing a relationship. Individual therapy cannot be a space for exploring the other partner, or giving that person goals or interventions. That’s not fair to the person who hasn’t consented to this therapy, and especially unethical for a therapist to try and change someone they have never met! Thus, all work in individual therapy has to be centered on the person in therapy, and their perspective on matters.

The best change for a couple comes from working together on goals and experimenting on solution attempts collaboratively. Working together can still mean change in behavior for one partner while the other partner works to be supportive of this change. For a common problem like trust issues, where it seems the problem was only one partner’s “fault,” the best chance for the couple to heal together is through being vulnerable with one another in couples therapy.

Communication is the cornerstone of couples therapy work. It is essential to examine how the combination of each partner’s communication style creates the current dynamic. There will not be just one bad communicator and one good one. The work will be to find a style of communication that is effective and valued by each partner.

I hold individual meetings with each partner when beginning couples therapy in order to provide a safe space to fill me in on perspectives about issues. Individuals may not reveal issues they have or how they are feeling if their partner is sitting right next to them. But this is often the only time I meet individually with the members of a couple, as all the rest of the work needs the vulnerability of working together.

Sometimes the main issue a couple faces is the addition of a co-parenting relationship to their romantic relationship. The combination of couples therapy and family therapy will often bring sustained change more quickly. If the main issues in the relationship center on family functioning, family therapy may be more beneficial when there is considerable effort put towards the couples work as well.

Often a couple will find the experience of working together on co-parenting tasks helps to illuminate issues in the couple’s functioning. Each partner is drawing upon their experience in the couple, but also their own upbringing when working as a parent. Some of the same basics in problem solving, managing emotionality, and of course communication, will be a bit different in a co-parenting context because of those differences in the partners’ childhoods.

There are other reasons couples may wish to engage in wider family therapy as well, such as structuring and exploring blended family and step-family dynamics, or caring for aging parents. Again, having all the members of a family present can be highly rewarding, connecting, and effective for change.