There was a time when entering couples therapy was seen as the death knell of a relationship – a last-ditch attempt to save a partnership beyond salvation.
“People are afraid that once you’ve gone to couples therapy, you’re on a negative track,” says Dr Matthew Siblo, a licensed professional counselor in Washington DC.
Now, couples therapy is more commonplace. One 2023 survey found that 37% of US couples who live together have been to couples therapy. In 2022, nearly 30% of UK therapists reported a rise in the number of inquiries for couples counseling.
It’s also more successful. “Success, how we define it, is the couple establishing a closer friendship, a closer sense of connection … and better conflict management,” says Dr Julie Gottman, a clinical psychologist and co-founder of the Gottman Institute. According to Gottman, the success rate of couples therapy used to be about 17%. Now, the Gottman Institute’s methods have about a 75% success rate.
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But what about when a relationship truly seems to be on its last legs? Will a couples therapist ever tell a pair to break up?
“I would not, personally,” says Siblo.
Siblo says he has never directly told a couple that he thinks they should break up, because he doesn’t think it would be appropriate or productive.
“I’m there to create a space of greater understanding,” he says. If that leads to people deciding to separate, Siblo can help them navigate that process. But telling a couple their relationship is not viable risks distracting them from the issues at hand; the focus becomes the therapist’s opinion rather than the pair’s relationship. Not only that, it could end up pushing the couple closer together by uniting them against a common enemy: the therapist.
“It would backfire,” Siblo says.
Telling clients what to do puts them in an “infantilized position”, says Gottman. If a couple is at a complete loss on how to move forward, Gottman might present them with several different options – including separation, in some cases – and talk them through each.
Gottman has intervened more directly in certain situations, she says, including cases involving domestic violence. There are two types of domestic violence, Gottman explains.
Roughly 80% is “situational”, meaning both people are involved and the violence is mild to moderate – for example, pushing, shoving or slapping. In these cases, Gottman says, “both people really want to change” and “they both might feel deeply ashamed and guilty”. Situational domestic violence is often the result of both partners getting emotionally “flooded” – going into fight-or-flight mode – during conflict. This dynamic can be successfully resolved with proper couples therapy, Gottman says.
But in the 20% of cases that are “characterological” – meaning there’s a clear victim and a perpetrator who takes no responsibility for the violence and inflicts major injuries – Gottman says intervention is appropriate.
“It’s crucial that the couple break up and the [victim], typically the wife, get somewhere safe,” she says.
In these instances, Gottman says she talks to the couple separately, and works with the victims on a safety plan to extricate themselves and any children from the relationships.
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Outside of these situations, experts say one should not walk into couples therapy and expect a therapist to tell them what to do.
“It’s not my job to provide advice or to tell clients how they should operate in their relationship,” says Dr Negin Motlagharani, an individual, couples and sex therapist in Chicago. “My job is to ask them the right questions that will help them make an informed decision on their own.”
Motlagharani says that when she works with couples, she asks them to reflect on their values, goals and history, and how these things align with their current relationship.
Sometimes there is an incongruence between the relationship they want and the relationship they have. “That’s where the process of change starts happening,” Motlagharani says.
There are a lot of misconceptions about couples therapy, experts say. One of the biggest is that it will serve as a sort of courtroom in which one partner will be declared guilty, and the other innocent.
“Everybody comes to couples therapy assuming that their perspective is going to be vindicated by the therapist, and that the other person is going to see the error of their ways,” says Siblo.
The goal is not to decide who is right and wrong, but to provide partners a greater understanding of why they behave the way they do within a relationship.
“The goal is to empathize and disarm some of the defensiveness or critical ways of communicating, and engage in perspective taking,” says Motlagharani. People also need to understand that their partner is their own person with their own ideologies, beliefs and opinions. “It’s OK for you to disagree as long as there is compassion,” says Motlagharani.
All of this is no small task, and can take time. Siblo says clients often expect couples therapy to move more quickly than it actually does. “Nobody should expect anything in only 10 to 12 sessions,” he says.
Ultimately, therapists say that only a couple can decide if what they need to do is to separate.
“How can I be so arrogant as to think I know what’s best for somebody?” Gottman says.
