Couples Therapy

Our closest relationships can bring enormous meaning to our lives.

They can also stir up some of our deepest vulnerabilities.

Couples often come to therapy because something between them has changed. Conversations that once felt easy now turn into arguments. Affection and intimacy have diminished. One partner reaches for connection while the other pulls away. Or perhaps the relationship isn’t filled with conflict at all — two people have simply become increasingly disconnected from one another.

Sometimes couples know exactly what happened.

Other times they find themselves asking a more difficult question:

How did we get here?

Couples therapy creates a space to slow down these patterns, understand what is happening between you, and begin discovering whether you can relate to one another differently.

When Couples Get Stuck

Most couples don’t intentionally create the relationship patterns that eventually cause them pain. They develop over time.

The content of an argument may change, but the emotional pattern underneath it can remain remarkably familiar. The disagreement about money somehow ends up feeling like the argument you had about the kids last week. Or the conversation about sex ends in the same silence that followed an argument about something completely different.

Before long, both people are reacting not only to what is happening in the moment, but to what they have come to expect from one another.

Here we go again.

Couples therapy can help us step outside of these cycles long enough to understand them.

Rather than asking only Who is right?, we become interested in another question:

What keeps happening between us?

What We Bring Into Our Relationships 

None of us enters an intimate relationship as a blank slate. We bring a history with us. Our earliest experiences of closeness, conflict, dependency, vulnerability and emotional safety can help shape what we expect from intimate relationships later in life.

For one person, conflict may feel threatening and create an urgent need to resolve things immediately. For another, the same conflict may feel overwhelming and lead to withdrawal. One partner’s attempt to create closeness can therefore unintentionally activate the other partner’s need for distance.

And both can end up feeling misunderstood.

This doesn’t mean that every relationship problem can be traced back to childhood. But understanding our attachment histories and emotional vulnerabilities can help explain why certain interactions with our partner affect us so powerfully.

Couples therapy involves understanding both the relationship occurring between two people and the two individual histories entering that relationship.

What Couples Therapy Can Help With

I work with couples struggling with a range of relationship difficulties, including:

• recurring arguments that never seem to get resolved;
• emotional disconnection and loneliness within the relationship;
• communication difficulties;
• defensiveness, criticism or emotional withdrawal;
• differences surrounding closeness, independence or emotional needs;
• sexual and intimacy difficulties;
• unresolved anger and resentment;
• major life transitions and relationship stress;
• difficulty rebuilding emotional safety and trust;
• longstanding patterns that leave one or both partners feeling unseen or misunderstood.

I also specialize in working with couples recovering from affairs and other forms of intimate betrayal.

Because infidelity often creates a particularly complicated relationship crisis involving betrayal trauma, trust, disclosure, remorse and accountability, I address this work in greater depth on my Infidelity Counseling & Affair Recovery page.

Understanding the Relationship You’ve Created Together

Couples often come to therapy believing they have a communication problem. And sometimes they do. But what looks like a communication problem is often something more complicated.

In my work with couples, I pay particular attention to what may be happening underneath the words themselves.

Most of us have particular ways of protecting ourselves when we feel hurt, rejected, criticized, controlled, unimportant or emotionally unsafe. A part of you may become angry. Another part may want to withdraw. You may become defensive, pursue your partner for reassurance, shut down, or try even harder to make yourself heard.

These reactions aren’t necessarily conscious choices. Often they reflect ways of protecting ourselves that developed long before our current relationship. The problem is that what protects one partner can inadvertently wound the other.

A partner who withdraws because conflict leaves them feeling overwhelmed may experience their withdrawal as an attempt to keep things from getting worse. A part of them may be trying to protect them from feeling inadequate, criticized or emotionally flooded.

The other partner may experience that same withdrawal very differently. The silence might feel like indifference or abandonment. As a result, they become frightened or angry and push harder to reconnect.

The withdrawing partner experiences this pursuit as further criticism and retreats even more. Before long, each person’s reaction becomes evidence for the other’s fear.

See, you don’t care.

See, nothing I do is ever enough.

Neither person necessarily intends to create this cycle. In fact, both may desperately want something very different.

This is one of the things I pay close attention to in couples therapy — not simply What are you fighting about?, but:

What keeps happening between you when conflict begins?

And then we become curious about something else:

What happens inside each of you when that pattern gets activated?

A part of you may become angry in order to protect something more vulnerable. Withdrawal may protect against shame or the fear of disappointing your partner. The part that urgently pursues connection may be protecting against a deeper fear of being left alone or becoming emotionally unimportant.

When we slow these moments down, reactions that once seemed irrational—or simply infuriating—can begin to make more sense.

In therapy, we begin to understand both sides of this process: the cycle occurring between you and the emotional reactions occurring within each of you.

This doesn’t mean that every relationship problem is equally created by both partners. Sometimes one person has behaved in ways that require clear individual accountability. Infidelity, deception, abuse and other serious violations shouldn’t be explained away as a “couples dynamic.”

But in many distressed relationships, something more reciprocal is occurring. Two people who may genuinely love one another have become caught in a pattern in which each person’s attempt to protect themselves inadvertently activates the very thing their partner is trying to protect against.

Couples therapy gives us an opportunity to make that pattern more visible.

As this happens, each partner can begin to recognize not only what the other person is doing, but what is happening inside themselves just before their familiar reaction takes over.

There is an important difference between knowing afterward, I shouldn’t have said that or I shouldn’t have shut down, and becoming able to recognize the part of yourself that is taking over while it is happening.

That awareness creates possibilities that weren’t available when the pattern was operating automatically.

The goal isn’t simply to teach you a better way to argue.

It’s to help you understand one another—and yourselves—well enough that the old argument doesn’t have to keep happening in quite the same way.

Can Couples Therapy Help Us?

There isn’t a single answer to this question. Some couples begin therapy because they are committed to staying together and want their relationship to become stronger. Others arrive uncertain about whether their relationship can—or should—continue.

You don’t necessarily need to have that answer before beginning.

Couples therapy can provide a place to understand what has happened between you, whether meaningful change is possible, and what each of you would need for the relationship to become emotionally healthier.

The goal isn’t simply to keep two people together. The goal is to help you understand your relationship more clearly and determine whether a different way of being together is possible.

Beginning Couples Therapy

Reaching out for couples therapy doesn’t mean your relationship has failed. Often it means that the ways you’ve been trying to solve the problem on your own are no longer working.

Sometimes the first step is simply creating enough space to stop repeating the same conversation and begin having a different one.

Richard Nicastro, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist with three decades of experience working with individuals and couples. His work is informed by psychodynamic and attachment theory, trauma theory, and parts-oriented approaches to psychotherapy. Dr. Nicastro is licensed in Connecticut and Texas and provides teletherapy to clients in participating PSYPACT states.

Interested in working with Dr. Nicastro?

To inquire about couples therapy or schedule an initial consultation, email Rich@RichardNicastro.com.