Perhaps you are unable to get close to your partner and feel uncared for, alone or insecure as a result.

Your partner may misinterpret this insecurity as controlling, demanding, or overly dramatic. They might feel like they can never do enough for you and that they’re better off focusing on work or their own activities, so they pull further away. Once this pattern is in place, it’s a vicious cycle that repeats itself.

One or both of you may feel like you can’t get it right with your partner and long to be accepted.

You think that if you could just get your partner to accept, appreciate, and value you, you could relax and just be yourself. Fortunately, a couples therapy intensive can give each of you relief from the conflict and loneliness in your relationship and reestablish love, connection, and trust.

While approximately 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce in the United States (a statistic that excludes couples in committed partnerships who choose not to marry), none of us start off wanting this to be the outcome. Nevertheless, given how common it is, separation and divorce have become socially acceptable options.

Unlike in past generations, many of us put high expectations on achieving our happiness through our relationship with our partner. In Western cultures especially, we are often dependent on our partner for our well-being rather than on a larger, extended family. We also expect to be able to solve our relationship problems on our own. When we can’t, we fear judgment—both personally and as a couple—and perceive it as failure. 

Many of us are resistant to seeking outside help because we are afraid that the couples therapist will take sides rather than supporting each partner equally. Or we may be concerned the therapy itself will make things worse, not better, between us. But in reality, research studies have shown that Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy helps shift approximately 85% of couples from a place of distress to a place of non-distress in their relationship. 

Even if you and your significant other feel like you’re on the edge of breakup or divorce—or if you are post-divorce and want to find if there’s a way to heal and possibly begin again—, it is possible to achieve new perspectives and understanding about the painful patterns you’ve been stuck in. You can heal the emotional wounds in your relationship and move forward free of these burdens.  

That is not uncommon, and it is not a reason to wait. Ambivalence about staying is often what despair looks like after years of painful cycling.

The work is not about producing a particular outcome. It is about understanding what has actually been happening between you, which matters regardless of what you ultimately decide. If you share children, that understanding matters even more.

This rarely becomes the obstacle it sounds like. People who arrive skeptical—or who have never felt understood in a room like this—often find the experience very different from what they expected.

Resistance is usually intelligence: a reasonable protection against something that has not felt safe before. I can work with that.

Weekly therapy moves incrementally, which has its place. An intensive creates continuity. Each session builds directly on the last without a week in between for patterns to re-solidify.

Many couples find that what they have been circling for months becomes accessible in a different way when there is sustained time and focus. The intensive format accomplishes something different, not simply faster.

A couples intensive is unlikely to be helpful when there are significant active struggles with addiction, untreated trauma, psychosis, suicidal crisis, or risk of harm to others.

In those situations, please reach out directly. An individual intensive may be a more meaningful entry point before couples work becomes possible.