Finding your way back to each other - how couples therapy can help
- Adele@Grow2Be
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
In the busy busyness of life and relationships, it can be easy to lose intimate moments like the one this captures.
As time progresses, we may forget that early physical closeness and sense of connection to each other. I often sit with couples who care deeply, but feel distant as the relationship grows. Not because they don’t love each other, but because they have become caught in patterns that leave them both feeling unheard or misunderstood.
The same conflicts happen again and again. One partner is trying to get through, the other pulling back, and then it switches. Over time, it can begin to feel like you as a couple are on opposite sides.
When I sit as a therapist with couples, I am observing what is happening between you:
What is being said, and how it is being received.
What is happening just before things escalate or shut down.
What each of you is trying to express, but finding hard to say when things have felt difficult between you.
Very often, I see there is something more vulnerable happening beyond the words and behaviours:
A wish to feel close.
To feel understood.
To feel that you matter to each other.
The above actions are not always easy to show to each other, especially when things have felt difficult for a while. Instead, it can come out in other ways. Frustration and criticism, avoidance or distance, or feeling alone even when you are together.
In couples therapy, I help you begin to make sense of this together. We look at the patterns you are both caught in, and how it plays out between you. I will often help couples see where one is reaching out and the other is stepping back, and how quickly things can move away from what you are really trying to say.
As this begins to make sense, something can start to shift.
You may find yourselves hearing each other differently, or being able to say things that have felt hard to put into words. There can be moments where the connection between you feels a little easier, a little less strained.
At first, these shifts are often small. A different kind of conversation, a softer response, feeling able to reach for each other rather than pull back or away from each other.
In many ways, this is the work. Communication, connection, and intimacy, both emotional and physical.
Over time, this can begin to build.
Not just being in the same space, but feeling close again. More at ease with each other. More able to lean in, rather than hold back.
That connection is not just emotional. It often shows up physically too, in how you are with each other, how comfortable it feels to be close, to reach out, to be held again. In a way that feels right for you both.
As a therapist, it can be powerful to see laughter and warmth return to the relationship, and to explore that in the therapy space.
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