Sometimes individual therapy makes relationships worse.
After years of sitting with couples, I think that’s true more often than therapists are comfortable admitting.
Not always, obviously. Some people genuinely need therapy to survive a relationship or leave one. Some relationships are abusive, destructive, dead. I’m not talking about those relationships.
I’m talking about the much larger middle ground of couples who are hurt, disconnected, exhausted, resentful, lonely, sexually shut down, and slowly building stories about one another over years.
And then one person goes into individual therapy.
Now here’s the problem.
The therapist only ever hears one side of the story.
And human beings are unbelievably unreliable narrators once attachment and pain enter the picture. We all are.
We present ourselves in ways that make sense to us. We highlight certain things. Leave out others. Minimise our own behaviour. Emphasise the moments where we felt abandoned, criticised, unloved.
Again, that’s not manipulation necessarily. It’s just human nature.
But the therapist is trained to empathise and validate. That’s part of the training.
So over time, therapy can accidentally become this kind of echo chamber where the client becomes more and more convinced that they are the healthy one in the relationship and their partner is the problem.
I see this all the time now.
“My therapist says my husband is a narcissist.”
“My therapist thinks my wife is toxic.”
“My therapist says I’ve outgrown the relationship.”
And sometimes I’m thinking:
Your therapist doesn’t have a clue.
Not because they’re stupid or malicious. But because they’ve never actually sat with the two of you together.
They know your experience of the relationship. That matters. But that is not the same thing as understanding the relationship itself.
Relationships are relational systems. The dynamic only really starts to make sense when you sit with both people together and actually watch the dance happen in real time.
Honestly, a surprising amount of my work as a couples therapist is cleaning up the poisoned view of each other that people sometimes arrive with after years of individual therapy.
Not because their therapist intended harm.
But because once somebody has spent two or three years explaining the relationship entirely through the lens of their partner’s deficits, they arrive carrying a very rigid story:
I’m healthy.
I’m growing.
I’m trying.
My partner is the problem.
And that story is often deadly for intimacy.
Terry Real talks about the difference between developing as an individual and relational development. And I honestly think that modern therapy culture leans far too heavily towards the individual now.
My needs.
My boundaries.
My growth.
My truth.
But relationships ask something completely different:
How do we stay relational when disappointed?
That’s the real work.
Because people are trying to do 30 or 40 years together. Of course it gets difficult.
There are years where people feel lonely with each other. Sex disappears. Resentment builds. Children arrive. People stop listening properly. Both people start protecting themselves instead of reaching toward each other.
That doesn’t automatically mean the relationship is toxic.
It doesn’t automatically mean somebody is a narcissist.
It doesn’t automatically mean you’ve “outgrown” each other.
Sometimes it just means two people have lost the ability to really reach each other underneath all the hurt.
Honestly, I think therapists are sometimes too scared to challenge clients relationally.
Gently. Respectfully. Relationally.
But more.
Instead of simply validating the story about the partner, I think therapists should be asking:
Okay. And what’s your part in the dance?
How do you contribute?
How do you protect yourself?
What happens to you when you feel hurt?
How do you become difficult to reach?
Because otherwise therapy can slowly become a place where somebody goes once a week to build a prosecution case against their partner.
And relationships quietly die there.
Not because anybody intended harm.
But because nobody was helping the client become more relational.
Therapy should not just help people feel validated.
It should also help people become more reachable.
More accountable.
More honest about the effect they have on others.
Because eventually everybody in a long-term relationship runs into the same uncomfortable question:
What’s it actually like to be in a relationship with me?
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