Doing the Reps: Why Consistency Matters in Couples Therapy
Lasting change in couples therapy doesn’t come from quick fixes. It comes from consistency, courage, and showing up week after week to do the real work of building a secure bond.
Something that’s often misunderstood about therapy is that, in my honest opinion, there are no shortcuts or quick fixes when it comes to lasting change.
Like individual therapy, couples therapy takes time, hard work, and commitment.
Often, by the time a couple seeks support, negative cycles have been escalating for a number of years. In attachment-based couples therapy, we are working with two separate attachment systems that have been forming since early childhood. Couples may also be holding relational trauma — sometimes known, sometimes not — and this work takes time, courage, patience, and trust.
Why Weekly Couples Therapy Matters
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There are 168 hours in a week. Assuming a couple attends therapy weekly — which I believe is essential, particularly at the beginning of the process — this one hour really needs to count.
This precious hour is an opportunity to try doing things differently. More healthily. More lovingly. It must hold hope, while also supporting couples to lean in with courage, without overwhelming either partner.
This therapeutic hour is a chance to notice the cycle as it unfolds and to be supported, skilfully, to respond differently in the moment.
Lasting Change in Couples Therapy is Cumulative
The process is cumulative.
At the beginning, this work can feel challenging. It certainly asks for courage and commitment from both partners. And yet, over time — with practice and repetition — a new way of being together begins to emerge. Within the safety of an increasingly secure bond, attachment injuries can be held and healed.
If you’d like to explore weekly couples therapy, you can read more about working with me here.
Therapy targets the moment things escalate in couples
How couples therapy works in moments of conflict and escalation, and why slowing down and turning towards each other strengthens emotional safety and connection.
Working with couples is complex.
Life is busy, and people understandably arrive in the couples therapy space carrying whatever they are carrying from that week. The residue of work, family life, stress, disappointment, exhaustion.
And yet, we often have just sixty minutes to achieve something different relationally.
It is my job to stay focused on the long-term goal: a growing secure connection, emotional safety, and mutual sense of trust in the relationship as a source of support.
Emotionally focused couples therapy is not about avoiding storms, far from it. Life will bring them. What matters is recognising that when things become tough, as they so often do, it is the relationship — built slowly over time — and a willingness to turn towards our partner in moments of vulnerability, that can carry us through safely to the other side.
How couples therapy helps during moments of conflict
This is where therapy begins.
We slooooow things right down.
We get deeply, deeply curious.
We begin to understand that a cycle is happening.
I support couples to risk doing something very different in the moment. Rather than being caught in an escalating cycle, how might it be to risk turning towards, in vulnerability, the person we treasure most?
We interrupt the cycle by leaning in rather than out.
This is where the healing happens.
This is where the bond is strengthened.
A moment of potential disconnection is transformed into a moment of connection.
If this resonates with your experience, you can read more about working together here.