How to Prepare for Couples Therapy Sessions
You’re ready for couples therapy. Whether you’re early in your relationship or you’ve been a couple for years, getting clear about your goals is a good first step. How else can you prepare? We have a few tips.
No matter how far into your relationship you are, couples therapy can help you improve communication and increase intimacy with your partner. You also gain insights into your own problems and learn to take responsibility for your feelings rather than project them onto your partner.
With care and hard work, you and your significant other can learn to navigate your challenges and find better ways of being with each other. However, it helps to prepare yourself both in terms of knowing what you want and by setting realistic expectations.
At Happy Apple in New York City, Maggie Vaughan, MFT, PhD, and our team provide evidence-based couples counseling techniques, such as emotionally focused therapy (EFT) and the Gottman method. Couples counseling requires hard work in your sessions — and homework, too.
How should you and your partner prepare for couples counseling? Here are a few tips.
Expect a difficult journey
Your marriage, right now, feels hard. While you look to couples counseling for relief, it doesn’t feel easy, either. Especially at first.
You may have a fantasy that the counselor will immediately be able to pinpoint and resolve the issues that bring you to therapy. Or that they’ll side with you and make your partner “see the light.”
It’s important to understand that couples counseling requires deep, sometimes unsettling work both as a couple and as individuals.
You may have to discover and face unconscious beliefs you have that have been sabotaging your attempts at intimacy. You or your partner may unearth — or finally discuss together — past traumas that affect the way you relate to each other (and to yourselves).
Keep in mind that your therapist isn’t a potential ally. They’re an objective third party who creates a safe space for both you and your partner to express your feelings. They also teach you positive ways to express those feelings that remove blame from the other person.
Spend time with the intake paperwork
Before your first session, you and your partner must fill out paperwork that lets us know about your medical history but also about your goals for therapy. Filling out the paperwork also gives you a chance for self-reflection. It may help you identify:
Your goal — to stay together or to split peacefully?
Your feelings about your partner
Your degree of happiness or dissatisfaction
Problems you have together
The state of your sex life
The act of filling out the paperwork also prepares you for counseling itself. During your sessions, your therapist asks you questions that help you reflect on your feelings and needs. This can feel uncomfortable at first, but it gets easier with practice.
Set boundaries for friends and family
You may choose to keep your couples therapy a secret from your friends and family. Perhaps you believe that what happens between a couple should stay between a couple.
Or you may already have used your friends and family as sounding boards for your relationship woes. Even the best intentioned friend or loved one, however, has a bias toward you and your point of view. In counseling, there’s no bias.
You may wish to let your loved ones know that you’re the one who ultimately decides whether to stay or leave your relationship. Ask them to respect your privacy as you and your mate go through the therapy process.
Focus on yourself
Even though you’re in therapy to save your relationship or make it better, your focus also needs to be on yourself. How do you really feel? What do you want? How can you learn to express these needs in a productive way that doesn’t end up shutting down communication with your partner?
No matter what the outcome of couples therapy ultimately is — a stronger relationship or the decision to go your separate ways — counseling improves your understanding of yourself. By taking ownership of your feelings instead of blaming someone else, you’re better equipped to navigate every relationship in your life.
Are you ready to do the hard work it takes to deepen communication and intimacy with your partner? Contact Happy Apple today for couples therapy in person at our Columbus Circle office or via virtual counseling through our HIPAA-secure private portal.
