From my many years as a couples therapist, I have learned one of the most difficult phases of the work is when a couple has committed to repairing your marriage, but before the repair has begun.

It’s an important time: you and your partner have decided to go to couples therapy, so you’ve researched local counselors and booked an appointment. But your first session hasn’t happened yet and you’re still feeling distressed, disconnected, or dissatisfied.

Some models of relationship counseling have specific tasks for this stage, such as the online relationship assessment for the Prepare/Enrich program. Therapists may also have their own preferred assessment measures, such as the classic Dyadic Adjustment Scale or the newer Gottman Relationship Checkup.

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But these assessments are meant to inform your therapist about where to start treatment, about the issues and dynamics contributing to conflict or distress. They don’t help you and your partner get through the days or weeks until your first appointment with any more peace or patience.

So what should you be doing? Thinking about? Paying attention to? Here are three things I ask of couples seeing me for the first time, before therapy begins:

1. Prevent Further Damage

To prevent further damage, do your best to stop unhealthy patterns of interaction that are causing distress in the relationship. There has been enough conflict already. In other words, it’s important to bring your best self to every exchange so you don’t heap problems on top of problems. You’ve committed to therapy to make positive changes, and they can start right now.

For example, if you’re used to yelling at each other, preventing further damage means keeping your volume low and your tone pleasant. If you’ve been sleeping in separate rooms, preventing further damage means respecting the boundaries each of you have set to avoid distress.

If you find yourself back in a familiar dance of hurt feelings, miscommunication, or bad habits, remember to prevent further damage. Notice what is happening, halt the unhealthy spiral, and choose a different response.

2. Prioritize Self-Care

To prioritize self-care is to choose behaviors that nourish your body and spirit. The road to relationship health through therapy may be long and difficult, so it’s important to prepare yourself mentally and physically. Prioritizing self-care means taking good care of yourself.

If you find yourself back in a familiar dance of hurt feelings, miscommunication, or bad habits, remember to prevent further damage.

Here are seven ways to be intentional about self-care:

1. Eat fresh, healthy foods.
2. Drink plenty of water.
3. Rest when you are tired.
4. Prioritize sufficient, uninterrupted sleep.
5. Exercise and stretch your body.
6. Seek joy through the arts (music, comedy, theater/movies, art).
7. Soak up love from supportive relationships (children, friends, family).

You may realize it’s been a while since you were intentional about caring for yourself. Don’t worry—self-care can start right now.

3. Practice Introspection

No matter which theory of couples therapy your therapist is trained in—Emotionally Focused Therapy, Imago, and the Gottman Method may be the most well-known for their evidence-based practice—one of the primary ways your therapist will intervene in your distress is to help you and your partner think and feel differently about what is happening. These skills of perspective taking don’t come naturally to all of us, but there are ways to practice before therapy begins.

One way to practice introspection is to think about your experience from a new perspective. I’ve written previously about the power of therapy to shift your point of view, and the metaphor can help before therapy even begins. Ask yourself: What are the ways I understand or explain what is happening in my relationship? Are there alternative ways to understand it, even if I don’t agree with them? How does my partner explain what is happening? Are we looking at things from the balcony or the dance floor? What might I see if I look from the other perspective?

Another way to practice introspection is to become familiar with the idea of mindfulness. Yoga, guided imagery, apps like Headspace or Calm, or spending intentional time in nature are readily available ways to bring mindfulness into your life.

Ready to begin couples therapy? Contact a licensed counselor in your area.

When you decide to seek help from a therapist or counselor, chances are you’re struggling. Maybe you’re feeling lost in your life, or maybe you’re experiencing painful disconnection from others. Sometimes what brings people to therapy is a need for help brainstorming new solutions to old (or new!) problems.

One of the most important functions of good therapy is to help reveal new perspectives. A new perspective provides a new angle from which to view what is happening (or what has happened) and provides a new stance from which to make healthy choices for the future.

Sometimes, your therapist will help you find perspective by helping you step outside of the immediate details to see the bigger picture or context of the problem. You know the phrase about not losing sight of the forest for the trees? Therapists can help you look beyond the specifics of your situation to discover patterns or connections to a larger context.

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Other times, you therapist will help you find perspective by helping you dig deep inside yourself to uncover the emotions or fears underlying the problem. When you keep too much distance between your situation and how you think or feel about it, you lose important data from what renowned therapist Dr. Peter Levine calls your felt sense. Therapists can help you shift your awareness from the greater, external world to your intimate, internal landscape.

A metaphor I often use with people in therapy when describing the power of a new perspective is one about being in a dance hall:

Imagine you’ve just stepped into the dance hall. You can hear the music playing and see people moving around you. To your left is a flight of stairs up to a balcony that overlooks the dance floor, and to your right is a door that leads straight to the dance floor itself.

A new perspective provides a new angle from which to view what is happening (or what has happened), and provides a new stance from which to make healthy choices for the future.

The Perspective from the Balcony

From the height of the balcony, you can see the dance floor below. Your gaze takes in the whole scene and you can begin to notice patterns and differences among what you see is happening: a group of people are dancing in a circle, a line is forming at the bar, and there is a couple engaged in animated conversation in a corner of the room. You also notice what isn’t happening: although people are dancing close to one another, no bodies are touching and there isn’t a line for the bathrooms.

From the “balcony” perspective, you are able to notice patterns and learn from others. Over time, you’ll be able to notice and integrate all the different parts of your experience, how they interact and influence one another, and make decisions based on a broad look at your situation.

The Perspective from the Dance Floor

From your spot on the dance floor, your vision is limited to the space immediately around you—you can see only as far as the people dancing next to you. Your eyes close, you can feel the beat of the music pulse in your body, and you begin to notice the heat generated by your dancing. Your eyes open and you notice a new, attractive fellow dancer beside you.

From the “dance floor” perspective, you are able to access sensations, energy, and emotions. You have access to changing information moment to moment from all of your senses—from temperature, from color, from movement. Over time, this data will help you integrate your intuition with your surroundings and make decisions based on an intimate examination of your lived experience.

An important third part of this metaphor is the staircase that links the balcony to the dance floor, or being able to move freely and with intention back and forth between the bigger context of your problem and the underlying emotions. Sometimes, a short break from the action is helpful to gain knowledge and set goals. Other times, a short immersion into the depths of feeling is helpful to reconnect to your inner world. Finding balance in these perspectives can be one of the most powerful, positive outcomes of good therapy.

Steve and Rebecca have been together for seven years, married for four, and have one toddler. Since the birth of their child, arguments between Steve and Rebecca have escalated to the point Rebecca’s threats of “I can’t do this anymore!” are met with shrugs. But after their last fight, she left to stay at her parents’ house for the weekend. It was a wake-up call for Steve, who wants to try couples therapy to improve communication and repair their partnership. Rebecca is tired of arguing and is still seriously considering a long-term separation.

Does this fictitious (yet all too real) couple sound like you and your partner? Is one of you leaning out of the relationship, unsure whether it is healthy to stay, while the other is leaning into the relationship and ready to make healthy changes? If so, you’re not alone. It’s not uncommon for couples experiencing the intense flames of conflict or the slow smolder of disconnection to view the future from different angles.

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In times of relationship distress, counseling can be a valuable resource. The question is, what kind? In individual therapy, only one side of the story might be heard, making it difficult to identify a way forward that serves not just one partner but the relationship. Yet this situation also can present a real challenge to even the most experienced couples therapist, particularly in cases where one partner isn’t totally on board with the therapy process. Three popular and well-researched couples therapy models—emotion-focused therapy, imago therapy, and the Gottman Method—are each effective primarily with couples who want to actively work on their relationship and are wholly committed to each other.

Discernment counseling is a chance to slow the decline into disconnection and take a deep look at your options for your relationship.

To help address this complex situation facing couples whom he describes as “mixed-agenda,” Dr. William Doherty envisioned a new type of therapy for couples on the brink of divorce: discernment counseling. Discernment counseling is a chance to slow the decline into disconnection and take a deep look at your options for your relationship. A trained discernment counselor holds hope for both partners—no matter their positions—while a decision about the future of the relationship is reached, whether that decision is to divorce/break up or make one last effort at repair.

Discernment counseling is designed as a short-term counseling process that is focused on making a mutual decision on one of three paths forward. In other words, each of the paths represents a different form of “treatment,” and the discernment counseling sessions represent the conversations to decide which treatment is best for both partners. Here’s a closer look:

Path One: The Status Quo

Path one is to maintain the relationship as it has been. Many couples who enter discernment counseling rule out path one quickly—the status quo has become unsustainable, thus they are seeking help to make a decision that brings change. Sometimes, however, at the end of discernment counseling no clear commitment to leaving or staying has been reached. In these situations, couples can simply default to taking a break from the process and trying again for a decision at some point in the future.

Path Two: Separation or Divorce

Path two is to move toward ending the relationship. Although some path two decisions are not mutual, in that one partner chooses separation or divorce against the wishes of their partner, the goal of a path two decision would be for both partners to feel clear and confident about a decision to part ways. When couples choose separation or divorce, the discernment counselor makes them aware of additional resources, including individual therapists and divorce professionals who can facilitate a healing and fair separation process.

Path Three: Couples Therapy

Path three is to make a six-month commitment to couples therapy in an all-out effort to restore the relationship to health. Separation or divorce are taken off the table during the couples therapy process, and at the end of six months both partners are invited to make another decision about whether to stay or leave. Couples therapy, in turn, is more likely to succeed because both partners are committed to applying themselves fully to the hard work of change.

In the conversations that lead to a choice for the path forward, here’s what discernment counseling offers couples in distress:

• Deepened clarity and confidence about a decision for the future of the marriage or relationship
• Deepened understanding of what has happened to bring the couple to this point, and an understanding of the role each partner has played in problems to date
• A mutually agreed-upon plan of action, should the couple decide to repair the marriage in couples therapy
• Insights about each partner and the relationship that will carry forward into future relationships, should the couple end this one

If discernment counseling seems like a good fit for you and your partner, seek a trained discernment counselor in your area.

It’s far too common for newly married or new-parent couples to find themselves searching for more—more time together, more romance, more connection, more intimacy. Maybe, after the wedding is over and the thank-you notes are written, you’re thinking, “What are we supposed to do now?” Or maybe, when the baby is crying and the laundry is piling up, you’re thinking, “When will we feel like ourselves again?”

Research by Dr. Barry McCarthy, sex and relationship expert and author of Rekindling Desire, indicates that couples are more likely to become sexually inactive in the first two years of marriage than at any other period in their married life (McCarthy and McCarthy, 2014). His recommendation is for couples to reenergize their relationship intimacy by enhancing desire, pleasure, eroticism, and satisfaction.

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One place to start on the journey toward deeper intimacy is letter writing. Writing letters to each other is a good way to communicate your thoughts and feelings amid the demands of work and family. Remember the spark of excitement and desire when you received an old-fashioned, handwritten love letter? That’s the spirit of this activity. These are loving letters, full of your hopes, dreams, warmth, and tenderness. These letters inspire a deepening of intimacy because they help you communicate without distraction and with a genuine voice. The goal is for your words to bring you closer and help you feel more connected.

So here’s how it works: You and your partner commit to exchanging letters, ideally handwritten (but emailed will do), a few times a week. You can each answer one prompt below at a time, and you don’t have to follow the same order. It’s best to direct your answers to your partner, just as you would when writing a letter to anyone else.

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Your letters have the power to become the vision statement for your shared future together.

• What are ways you feel loved and accepted by your partner, even with an acknowledgement of failings and imperfections? Are there different ways you show your partner you love and accept them?
• Describe a fantasy, romantic or sexual, you’d like to experience with your partner. Where are you? What does it feel like? What happens first, then next, then after that? How does it end?
• What is a metaphor for your relationship so far? Explain the metaphor. How would you change that metaphor to illustrate the kind marriage you want to have in the future?
• How do you think you and your partner should deal with bad luck or disappointment? How will you show your partner you are on their team no matter what?
• Fill in the blanks and then explain: “If I were living my life the best version of myself as a partner that I could be, I would continue to ___, I would do ___ differently, and I hope you would feel more ___.”
• What do you appreciate most about your partner? What personality traits, strengths, and talents do you admire and value?
• What are your hopes, goals, and dreams for your marriage and family together?

At the end of a few weeks, compile your letters and go over them together. What do you notice about where your answers overlap or where they are unique? Reread them often and allow the words to calm you when you’re angry, soothe you when you’re sad, and fill you with hope when you’re worried. Your letters have the power to become the vision statement for your shared future together.

If these prompts, your answers, or your partner’s answers have stirred up deeper feelings of dissatisfaction, disconnection, or disappointment, you may want to seek individual counseling, couples therapy, or sex therapy. The help of an experienced therapist is an investment in yourself and your marriage.

Reference:

McCarthy, B., & McCarthy, E. (2014). Rekindling desire, 2^nd Ed. New York, NY: Routledge.