S3 E6: Why Wait Until It's Broken? The Case for Couples Therapy Before a Crisis

Before It Breaks S3 Ep 6 MASTER MIX VIDEO: Welcome back to Before It Breaks with Gabriella Pomari. I'm someone who has spent years sitting with people at the point where relationships have become difficult, disconnected, and sometimes already broken. And this podcast is about what happens before that point. The conversations we avoid, the patterns we repeat, the resentment we minimise, the things we assume will sort themselves out, and the moments where if we had perhaps understood each other a little better, Or had the right tools a little earlier, something might have looked different. And so today I want to talk about something that feels completely central to that idea. Therapy. Not therapy once somebody's had an affair, and not therapy once somebody's packed a bag. And not therapy when the relationship has reached the point where somebody's saying, I don't know if I can do this anymore. I want to talk about what happens if we go much earlier. What if we learnt the tools before the crisis? What if we understood our conflict patterns before we'd repeated them for 10 years? What if couples therapy was something we could use to maintain a good relationship rather than something we only reached for when we were terrified of losing our relationship? And there's something I've been thinking about a lot lately, and it came up recently in the conversation I had with Zoe Marshall earlier this season. Which is the idea that we seem to accept maintenance almost everywhere in our lives, except our relationships. You know, we service our cars where they're running, we go to the dentist before our teeth are falling out. We've got health checks all the time, even when we feel reasonably well. You know, we speak to accountants, financial advisors before we're a bankrupt. We hire coaches when we want to get better at work or sport or leadership. And none of those things automatically mean something's terribly wrong. In fact, quite often we see them as evidence that somebody is responsible and proactive and invested in protecting something that matters to them. Yet the minute someone says we're seeing a couples therapist, there can still be this immediate assumption that the relationship must be in trouble. There's almost a little pause before the inevitable question, is everything okay? And I understand where that comes from, because for a very long time we've treated couples therapy almost like the emergency department of a relationship. It's where people go after the affair, after resentment, after years of arguments or the explosive fide, or after one person has announced that they're not sure they want to be there anymore. And often by the time a couple finally sits down in front of somebody, one of them has been asking for help for years and one's already emotionally withdrawn. And both have built entire cases about why the other person is responsible for how unhappy they are. And the therapist is being asked to somehow undo years of behavior in a few sessions. It's not really maintenance at that point. It's really more like relationship resuscitation. And so that's the part I want to question today. Why do we wait so long? Why do we seem to need a sufficiently serious problem before we give ourselves permission to learn how to be better at the relationship that we're already in? And the strange thing is that we spend an enormous amount of time preparing for the milestones around relationships and comparatively little time preparing for the relationship itself. You know, we'll spend a year organizing a wedding, choosing flowers, arranging seating plans, comparing venues, and thinking about what song should play while people eat dinner. But we may never sit down and talk properly about what happens when one of us is unhappy. You know, we're having a baby, we prepare a nursery before the baby arrives, we buy the pram, we read about sleep, we research car seats, we talk about names and schools and childcare. But how many couples sit down beforehand and talk about what about, you know, sleep deprivation? What's that gonna do to the way we speak to each other? What will happen if one person starts carrying more of the mental load? How will they protect themselves and how will they protect the version of the couple when suddenly almost every conversation is about another human being? I think most of us enter into serious relationships with almost no formal preparation. You know, we've all got degrees and careers and businesses and teams reporting to us. We've got kids relying on us. We've got complicated financial lives and extraordinarily sophisticated professional skills. But put us in a room with the person we love and ask us to say, hey, when you did that, I felt frightened and that didn't matter to you. And suddenly most of us become terrible communicators. We defend, we withdraw, we get louder, we shut down, we become sarcastic. We start talking about something that happened five years ago because apparently it's been waiting patiently in storage for exactly this argument. But we say fine when everybody in the room knows perfectly well that nothing is fine. And most of the time we're not deliberately trying to damage the relationship. We're using whatever tools we happen to absorb, you know, growing up. One person grew up in a family where conflict was loud and immediate and everybody said what they thought. But the other grew up in a house where no one argued at all, which may have looked peaceful from the outside, but actually meant difficult things were never discussed. You know, one person learns that if somebody walks away during an argument, they're abandoning you. So they follow them and they keep talking because closeness feels like safety. But the other person experiences that same pursuit as overwhelming. So they retreat further because distance is the only way they know how to regulate themselves. And then they eventually end up married to each other and each completely convinced that the other person is the one making the argument impossible. I think this is why the conversation about therapy needs to be bigger than just, you know, when is your relationship bad enough to need it? Therapy, counseling, coaching, whatever form of support's appropriate for you can also be about learning the skills that love itself. doesn't automatically give us. Because you can love somebody so deeply and still be really bad at repair. You can love someone and be defensive every time they tell you they're hurt. You can love somebody and avoid uncomfortable conversations until resentment starts filling the spaces where the connection used to be. You can love someone and unintentionally make them feel incredibly lonely. Love matters enormously, obviously, but love and skill are not the same thing. And I think sometimes we put far too much pressure on love to somehow compensate for all the things that nobody ever taught us. Take the beginning of a serious relationship. People sometimes say, why would we need counseling? We've only been together for a year. But that can be exactly when it's useful to understand the assumptions you're both carrying. How much independence you need, what fidelity means beyond sex, what contact with exes or colleagues feels appropriate. How you think about money or phones or friends or career, kids, family. Those differences are much easier to explore before they appear in the middle of some enormous argument. People can date for years without really knowing the answers to some of those questions, because romance allows us to postpone them. And then you move in together, you get engaged, and then you discover that the other person's unspoken version of a relationship is so completely different to yours. Nobody necessarily lied. You just both assumed your version was normal. Now moving in together is another one of those moments. I mean, I think people underestimate how much information is revealed when you start sharing a home. Dating allows for curation. Somebody turns up for dinner, showered, dressed charming, they smell good. You don't necessarily know where their clothes were lying half an hour earlier, how often they clean a bathroom, whether they think a wet towel can live permanently on a chair. Or whether they regard an overflowing bin as something that will eventually empty itself? Those things sound ridiculous until you realize that domestic arguments are very rarely just about the object being argued about. The dishwasher, I can tell you this, is never the dishwasher. It becomes, why am I the only person who notices what needs to be done? Why do I have to ask? Why do you criticize the way I do everything? Why does it feel like nothing I do is good enough? Why do I feel more like your mom or your manager than your partner? And that's where learning to hear the argument underneath the argument becomes so important. Couples can spend years debating who loaded the dishwasher incorrectly when the actual conflict is about appreciation, mental load, control, respect, feeling taken for granted. And a good therapist is often helping people translate. They're not necessarily telling you who should have emptied the dishwasher. They're helping one person understand that their partner's not actually crying about a plate. They're crying because they feel like the entire household lives inside their head and nobody else sees it. And then of course there's parenthood, which I think is one of the biggest relationship transitions we still massively underestimate. You can have an incredibly strong relationship, and then you have a baby, and you genuinely wonder for a period of time, where did the relationship go? It's not because the love disappeared, it's because almost every resource you once had is suddenly under pressure. Sleep, time, money, sex, privacy, spontaneity, identity, work, your body, your friendships, your ability to finish a cup of coffee while it's not hot can change all at once. And then we act surprise when two people who are exhausted and trying not to learn how to parent don't communicate with the same patients they had when they were spending Sunday mornings having a long brunch. I actually think that the transition into parenthood is one of the most logical times for couples to check in with someone, even if there's not yet a serious problem. Not because having a baby damages relationships, but because massive changes, they deserve support. We're not very good at thinking about therapy this way. We think it's for dysfunction, you know, when sometimes it's actually just for transition. Moving together. That's a transition. Marriage is a transition. Parenthood's a big transition. A major career change, that's a transition. Relocation, blending families, their traditions. Illness, grief, children leaving home, retirement, menopause, changes in sexual desire. All of these things alter the architecture of your relationship. And sometimes nothing's wrong, except that the rules you created ten years ago no longer fit the life that you're living now. And perhaps one person used to work nine to five and now they run a business. And perhaps you had one kid and now there are three. Perhaps sex once happened spontaneously because you had evenings and weekends to yourselves. And now spontaneity means nobody has vomited in the bed. A relationship can need renegotiation without being broken. And the other question I hear a lot is why people are frightened of therapy in the first place. And I think one reason is that people are frightened of what might be uncovered. There's a belief that if we start looking too closely at the relationship. We might discover something that we can't unknow. What if the therapist asks whether we're happy and my partner says no? What if something comes out that I can't put back in the box? What if we walk into that room as a couple and then we walk out realizing there is a problem that we've been avoiding? But the difficult truth is that therapy doesn't create the thing that's already there. It may give it some language and sometimes that feels frightening. But silence doesn't make resentment disappear. Avoiding a conversation doesn't preserve the relationship. Sometimes it just preserves the problem. I think sex is a good example. Couples can avoid the subject for years while privately building, you know, different stories in their head. One person thinks, they're not attracted to me anymore, the other thinks I'm exhausted and I'm resentful and I can't access desire. But neither will say it to each other. So both just live inside an explanation that's probably not even true. And then I think there's also the fear of blame. You know, a lot of people imagine couples therapy is a very expensive courtroom where eventually the therapist will announce who was right in the fight. They picture themselves presenting the evidence. You know, here are the screenshots, here are the examples, here's why my partner is impossible. And surely this professional will finally confirm what I've been trying to tell them for five years. But good couples work is usually much more interested in the cycle between you than in declaring who the winner of the argument was. Imagine a very common dynamic where one partner feels disconnected and then starts criticizing. And, you know, they may say, you know, you never talk to me anymore, or you're always at work. You don't care about us. And the other person hears those words as, not I miss you, but you're failing. And so they start becoming really defensive. They withdraw. And the first person sees that withdrawal and thinks, see, you don't really care. So then they pursue harder, they become more emotional, they become more critical. And the other person feels even more attacked and then they retreat even further. And I think that if you asked each of them separately what's happening, they'd probably identify the other person as the problem. You know, one says, I have to chase him for any kind of emotional connection, and the other says, nothing I do is ever good enough for her. So I just shut down. So I think that therapy can actually help them see that neither person is necessarily the enemy. It's the pattern that's the enemy. And that shift can be enormous because suddenly instead of saying, hey, there you go again, you can sometimes get to, hey, stop, we're doing that thing again. And it sounds tiny, but the emotional difference is huge. You're no longer standing on opposite sides of building cases. You're standing together looking at the cycle that keeps swallowing both of you. And I want to touch on men and women, particularly in heterosexual relationships, you know, without falling into the lazy version where women want to talk and men don't. There are women who avoid emotion completely and men who have done years of therapy. But sometimes one partner says, I think we should talk to somebody, meaning, I care about us and I'm frightened we're losing something. But the other one's hearing, you're failing, and I'm taking you to a professional so you can be corrected. And I think a lot of men have also been taught directly or subtly that needing help means they fail to solve something themselves. So when somebody asks, you know, what did you feel? The genuine answer might be, I don't know. Now that doesn't mean there's no emotional world underneath. Sometimes the emotional world is enormous and the vocabulary, it's actually really tiny. You know, anger can actually cover humiliation. Withdrawal can just be fear. Defensiveness can be shame. Work can become the place where someone feels confident and competent, and home feels like the place where they're always getting it wrong. And understanding what sits underneath a behavior doesn't excuse destructive behavior, but I think it gives us a better chance of changing the pattern. We can say you're avoidant instead of when you walk away, I feel abandoned. And we can say you're a narcissist when what we actually mean is I just feel unheard. Now, knowing psychological language doesn't automatically mean we're using it accurately. And one of the most unhelpful ways to enter couples' therapy is when one person is there to learn and the other is there to have some diagnosis confirmed. So if you're the person trying to convince a reluctant partner to come to therapy, I think the way you frame it matters enormously. You need therapy because you can't communicate. It's probably not gonna be an irresistible invitation. I don't want us to wait until we're really unhappy. I feel like we keep getting caught in the same conversations. And I would love somebody to help us both understand what happens there. It's really different language. And the word I would emphasize here is both. Couples therapy should not be the place where I take you to get fixed. It's the place we go to understand what's actually happening between us as a couple. Now, another tool I think couples desperately need is. Is learning how to take space without making space feel like abandonment. And this is such a common argument. You know, one person becomes emotionally flooded and says, I can't talk about this anymore. And then they walk away. And the other person's nervous system goes into complete panic because walking away feels like rejection. So they follow them through the house and they're trying to, you know, continue the conversation. And now the person who needed the space feels like they're being pursued and then they withdraw even further. And then that makes the pursuer more anxious. And suddenly everybody is fighting in the hallway about something that began 20 minutes ago in the kitchen. And the difference can be as simple as saying, hey, I'm too activated to have this conversation properly right now. I just need half an hour. But I'm not leaving this unresolved. I'll come back at 8 30 and we can continue. And there's something profoundly different about space that has a return point. You're not saying I'm abandoning you. You're saying I just want to regulate myself enough. To come back and to do this better. And then there is what I think may be one of the simplest and most useful tools of all, which is just having a relationship check-in before anybody has a complaint. We tend to talk seriously about the relationship when something's already wrong. Imagine if once a month or every couple of months, you deliberately asked each other a few questions while neither of you was angry. Hey, you know, what's felt good between us lately? Where have you felt disconnected from me? Is there anything you're carrying, maybe that I haven't noticed? Is there something you need more of or less of from me at the moment? Is there anything we're avoiding because it feels easier not to talk about? Now, personally, I love the idea of asking these questions because they're not asking what's wrong with us. They're asking, How are we? And those are really different conversations. And that brings me to today's first dear Gabriella, because I think that This listener's question captures exactly why people struggle with the idea of preventative relationship work. So this listener writes in, Dear Gabriella, my husband and I have been together for eleven years. We've been married for seven. We have two young kids, and honestly, compared with a lot of couples we know, things are pretty good. We don't have crazy fights, no one's cheated as far as I know. We laugh together. He's a wonderful dad, and I genuinely love him. But I've grown this feeling that we've stopped talking about anything. We have sex, but honestly, less often. And sometimes even that feels like something we know we should do rather than something we actually are excited about. And so I suggested couples therapy recently. A few of my friends are doing it. And he looked genuinely shocked. And he said, Why? What's wrong with us? So now I feel guilty because there isn't actually one big thing I can point to. But I have this feeling that the we leave it another five years, there actually might be. Am I creating a problem by suggesting therapy when our relationship might actually just be okay? So to this listener, I really don't think that you're creating a problem. I think you're noticing drift. And drift is very different from crisis. Drift is quiet, which is why it's easy to ignore. It's what happens when two people become extremely good at running a life together and slowly stop noticing that the relationship itself is becoming thinner. You know, you're still functioning, you're still kind to each other, you're still a family. And there's no dramatic event that gives you permission to say, we need to start paying attention to this. But something inside of you is noticing that most of your conversations are now about administration rather than each other. And these are the type of DMs I get all honestly on the daily. I would tell him, I love you. I think we're good. I think you're a really good dad. I'm just not secretly planning to leave, so don't stress about that. But I don't want us to become so focused on running our life that we stop having a relationship inside of it. And I would rather learn how to protect that now than wait until one of us is really unhappy in a few years' time. And I think there's something very powerful about going to therapy while you still have goodwill, while you both still laugh, while you're both still emotionally invested enough to be curious rather than defensive about, you know, every question. You're not walking into the room asking somebody to save a marriage that's been starved of attention for a decade. You're actually just saying we have something valuable. Help us understand how to keep tending to it while life is incredibly full. Now, I do want to be clear that better communication, it's not magic. You can communicate beautifully with someone who fundamentally wants a different life. Or you can explain your needs to someone who repeatedly chooses not to meet them. And therapy is not a guarantee that the conclusion will be to stay together. Honestly, sometimes therapy is just about repair, but it's also sometimes understanding or working out whether you want the same future. You know, where there's dishonesty or coercive behavior or repeated betrayal or addiction or incompatible values, the work may be clarification and not actually reconciliation. And so in today's don't do what I did, this one comes from a man who wrote to me about his marriage. And look, I've changed some of the details. But what he said to me was this. He said that for years his wife asked him to go to counseling, and he genuinely thought she was just being dramatic. Again, they didn't have big fights. Come on, we hear this all the time. They still had sex, they still went on holidays. And whenever she suggested counseling, he just heard it as evidence that she was unhappy with him. So he just resisted. He told himself if things were really bad, he would know. And then slowly she stopped asking to go to counseling. And because she stopped raising the issues, he thought things had improved. But six months later, she told him she wanted to separate. And he said the thing I've heard everyone say, but in very different versions, but we haven't been funny. Things have been good. And her response was, that's because I just stopped believing that anything would change. And so they did. They went to therapy after that. And suddenly he was prepared to go every week. He was reading books, he was organizing date nights, he was changing his schedule, he was asking questions he'd never asked before. But what he said to me was the most painful part was realizing that he was now offering everything that he's been asking for a while whilst she was still emotionally invested, but he'd waited until the possibility of losing her had created an urgency that her unhappiness had not. I actually think that's an incredibly confronting an idea. Why does losing someone sometimes create that urgency that their loneliness doesn't? Why do we wait until the relationship itself is threatened before the same concern suddenly becomes serious enough to address? And I'm not saying that if your partner stops complaining tomorrow, you should panic and assume they've emotionally left. Silence means lots of things. But I do think that we need to challenge the idea that the opposite of fighting Is just automatically peace. Sometimes and usually the absence of conflict means people have learned how to repair, but sometimes it means their safety. And sometimes it means that one person has stopped believing that there's any point trying. Anger, uncomfortable as it can be, may still contain hope. Somebody is still trying to get through to you. But indifference is often much quieter. And so my second dear Gabriella. Comes from somebody at a much earlier stage of the relationship, I was quite surprised. And I think this is a perfect example of why we shouldn't automatically wait until marriage to start thinking about therapy. So she writes, I have been with my boyfriend for three years, and we're talking seriously now about getting engaged. I love him. And there's no big problem between us, but we handle conflict completely differently. I want to talk things through straight away, he shuts down. If I push him, he gets angry and he says I'm not giving him space. But if I leave him alone, I become incredibly anxious because I feel like he's pulling away from me. My parents had a terrible marriage and they screamed at each other constantly. His family seems to deal with difficult things by barely talking about them at all. So I suggested that we do a few sessions of couples therapy before we get engaged. And he thinks it's ridiculous because we're only in our early 30s. And he says therapy is for married couples with actual problems. Am I making too much of this? So, no, I don't think you are making too much of it. You've already identified something really important about how you operate under stress. You seem to create safety through connection. When something feels uncertain, you want to talk and you want to reconnect. He may create safety through distance. So when a conversation becomes intense, he needs to step away and regulate. And neither strategy is inherently bad. But together they can create an exhausting cycle. You feel him pulling away, so you move closer. He experiences that as pressure, so he moves further away. His distance makes you more anxious, and your pursuit makes him more overwhelmed. And very quickly, each of you becomes evidence for the other person's fear. And that is exactly the sort of pattern I would rather understand before getting married. Let me tell you, marriage will not make it disappear. And you're gonna meet much harder things than whatever you're arguing about now. So I think I would say to him, I'm not suggesting therapy because I think there's something wrong with us. I'm suggesting it because I can already see one area where we both struggle to understand each other, and I'd rather learn what's happening now than spend the next 10 years having the same fight in different forms. And that brings me to really what I want to leave you with from this episode. Because I don't want you to finish listening and think the message is simply everyone should go to couples therapy. Because I don't think that. I think the bigger message here is that relationships need deliberate attention before there's a crisis. And therapy is one possible tool for creating that attention. So what I want to leave you with today are five things that you really need to remember. The first Is that you do not need a crisis to become curious about your relationship? Ask questions while things are good. How are we doing? What has felt good lately? What are you missing? Is there anything about our life now that no longer works? Paying attention doesn't mean you think your relationship is failing. It can actually mean that you really value it. Now the second is to learn your pattern, not just the subject of your arguments. You know, money, in-laws, work, or a forgotten message. That may look like different fights, but underneath them it could just be the same wound. I don't feel prioritized. I feel controlled. I feel like whatever I do is wrong. I feel alone. So identify the cycle and you have a much better chance of changing it. Now the third is to build a repair plan before you need one. Talk about how you want to fight when you're fighting. Can either of you call a break? When will you return to the conversation? What should never be weaponized? What does an apology look like? Knowing this doesn't necessarily prevent conflict, but it can stop conflict becoming unnecessarily destructive. Now the fourth is to treat transitions as reason to check in, not proof something's wrong. You know, babies, promotions, grief, illness, menopause, caring responsibilities, and children leaving home, they're all big changes for people. And sometimes the healthier sentence is The way we used to do this no longer works for the life we have now. So what do we need to change? And the fifth is to seek help while there is still goodwill. If you keep having the same fight, if sex has disappeared, and neither of you can talk about why, if parenthood has left you feeling like colleagues or business partners, or if one of you repeatedly says they feel lonely, you don't need to wait another five years to justify asking for help. There's often something really sad about how often we become extraordinarily motivated to save our relationships only when we're suddenly scared to lose them. Suddenly there's time for therapy, work can be rearranged, the date night can happen. and the phone all of a sudden can be put down. And yep, sometimes that works. People do come back from very difficult places. But sometimes the other person's just thinking, I needed this version of you two years ago when I still had enough hope to ask. We also need to let go of that romantic idea that if we pick the right person, all of this would be intuitive. Love does not magically teach us how to communicate or repair or divide domestic labor or navigate money or protect intimacy or support ambition or manage family, or know when the other person just needs reassurance rather than space. There is an extraordinary list of skills to expect two people to possess simply because they fell in love. Sometimes the most loving thing you can say isn't we should not need help. It's this matters enough to me that I want to learn how to do it better. Now listen, none of that guarantees a relationship lasts forever. Therapy is not some kind of insurance policy against separation. And staying together is not the only measure of whether the work, you know, was valuable. Sometimes it does help people repair, sometimes it helps them understand what they want. Sometimes it tells them they want different lives and they separate with more clarity and, you know, less cruelty, particularly when there are kids involved. But what I would really love for us to stop doing is waiting until catastrophe gives us permission to pay attention. Maybe couples therapy doesn't always need to be the emergency room of a relationship. Maybe sometimes it can actually be, I don't know, the annual checkup. Somewhere you go while there is still laughter and affection and friendship and enough goodwill to be curious. The sentence that takes you there doesn't need to be something is terribly wrong with us. It's just nothing's broken. I really think this relationship is worth looking after. And if you send this episode to somebody you love, don't send it with the caption C, I told you we needed therapy. Instead, ask, what's felt good between you lately? Whether there's anything they're carrying that you haven't noticed, or whether there's a conversation that you both keep postponing because nothing feels bad enough yet to force you to have it. Because sometimes the conversations that change a relationship, they're not the dramatic ones when somebody's standing at the door ready to leave. Sometimes they're the quieter ones we choose to have years earlier, while both people are still sitting at the same table. This is before it breaks. And I think the point is right there in the name. Not every relationship can or should be saved. But if something matters to us, perhaps we should stop waiting until it's breaking before we learn how to look after it.