Navigating Relationship Difficulties: When Individual Therapy Can Help
It is so common to have relationship difficulties – whether that be in dating, marriage, or friendships. You might be struggling with communication and feeling misunderstood or unheard. Maybe you are not seeing eye to eye about something that really matters to you, like your faith or how to raise the kids or how often you visit your in-laws. You might be feeling emotionally disconnected and unsure how to get back to how things were. Or maybe something bigger, like a lie or an affair, has changed everything. Of course, when relationship difficulties arise, couples counseling is a great place to find new skills to navigate the conflict and to find healing. But there is a misconception that therapy must always involve both partners. Sometimes, it is just as powerful to be in individual therapy for resolving relationship difficulties.
how your own patterns affect your relationships
As a therapist who works with individuals, I have seen how individual therapy allows you freedom in exploring your own patterns in relationships. Self-awareness is foundational to making change. Here, we get the chance to identify patterns that have played out in your current relationship, and maybe in past ones too. It might be a sense of emotional avoidance, people-pleasing, defensiveness, or how your communication is not quite working. In individual therapy, it may feel a little easier to be honest with yourself about how you are contributing to the relationship difficulties, as you’re not simultaneously trying to “win” the argument or be understood by your partner in that moment.
It is also a chance to look at your past and earlier experiences in relationships. I take the time to get to know my clients’ relationship history as we talk about current relationships. This is different for everyone of course, but it is often evident that we play out roles in our relationships now based on the early experiences our lives.
Attachment theory explains how emotional bonds are central to human connection. Such bonds are formed early in childhood, and we are shaped by our early relationships and connections. Dr. Sue Johnson explains, “our past history with loved ones shapes our present relationships. In moments of disconnection when we cannot safely engage with our lover, we naturally turn to the way of coping that we adopted as a child, the way of coping that allowed us to hold on to our parent, at least in some minimal way.”
When we can identify how it is that we responded to distress in childhood, we also get a peek into how we are managing relationships today. This can lead us to understanding a core wound, which needs attention. And if we process the unresolved pain on an individual level, it will help restore the relationship pain too.
processing past relationship trauma to improve current connections
As you can see, the unresolved trauma of childhood, or even past romantic relationships, is carried with us into the next, and the next relationship. Sue Johnson shares, “almost all of us have at least one additional exquisite sensitivity – a raw spot in our emotional skin – that is tender to touch, easily rubbed, and deeply painful. When this raw spot gets abraded, it can bleed all over our relationship. We lose our emotional balance.”
Finding the “raw spot” may involve taking the time to identify and understand what happened in your past. This is where individual therapy really offers the chance to focus on yourself, so that you can show up in a healthier way in your relationship. It allows you to heal the “raw spot” so that when it is touched upon, you don’t have the same reactive response. Such healing breaks the cycle that may be causing relationship difficulties in the first place. We learn to find new ways of responding to pain, instead of returning to the patterns of our childhood.
I want to note too, that individual therapy creates a safe space for unpacking and healing from past relationship trauma. You may not feel comfortable or have the desire to unpack your past in couples therapy, with your partner. So, individual therapy offers a more private space to process, giving you the time to sit with the heavy feelings on your own, and decide when and how to share them with your partner, if you so choose.
For more information about attachment from Dr. Sue Johnson, I recommend her books wholeheartedly. Hold Me Tight is a great resource to help strengthen your relationships, and Love Sense provides an insightful and scientific approach to love, relationships, and attachment.
learning communication skills that transform interactions
Individual therapy does not offer only emotional processing though. As an effect of identifying relational patterns and past pain, you have the opportunity to learn new skills to replace the old ones. I often see some common communication pitfalls in my work with individuals, such as blaming, defensiveness, or shutting down. Individual therapy can help you develop emotional regulation skills, so that when big emotions come your way, they do not put you into flight, fight, or freeze mode. Instead, you can learn how to self-soothe, de-escalate, and regulate emotions on your own, before reacting or shutting down.
Other skills that may be of import are practicing assertiveness, active listening, clarifying meaning, expressing your needs, and expressing emotions in a healthy way. Couples counseling may have a leg up, in that you are able to practice these skills in the room with your partner. But individual therapy allows you to practice them in a more calm state, where you may not be as emotionally activated as you try out a new skill. In my sessions with individuals, I often use role-play to test communication skills and then debrief by exploring how it might actually feel in the moment, and what to realistically expect with your partner.
Improving communication and emotion regulation skills can have quite a ripple effect. I think of relationships as a set of gears that all work and run together. If just one gear changes direction or speed, the rest of them follow. So, it may take only one person to initiate healthy changes in your communication for you to see improvements in your relationship.
when individual therapy might be more beneficial than couples therapy
There are a few reasons why you may be choosing individual therapy instead of couples therapy. It may be your only option if your partner is unwilling to attend therapy or is-in some way- forcing you to go to therapy on your own. Individual therapy may be more beneficial for you than waiting on them to finally agree to couples counseling. Individual therapy may be a perfect place to explore what it means to you that your partner is unwilling to attend. You are in a safe space to process how you feel in the relationship and consider your experience of the relationship difficulties.
Or you may be considering individual therapy because you know you have some personal trauma, mental health issues, or personal identity struggles that are impacting the relationship. Individual therapy can offer you a space to sort through the relational trauma of your past, in a more in-depth way than couples therapy would offer. You also may wish to explore identity concerns, like religious or sexual identity. Individual therapy gives you the chance to focus on you for a bit.
This is not to say that these concerns should necessarily be kept separate from your relationship, but there are benefits of working on your own growth before or alongside couples therapy. It gives you a chance to explore how you truly feel and process deep-rooted issues, with the focus being on you. You might come to find out that the healing you found in individual therapy helped alleviate the relationship difficulties altogether, or you might discuss with your therapist if starting couples therapy in conjunction with individual therapy would be beneficial.
setting realistic expectations for relationship improvement
Change does take time, and progress is often non-linear. Individual therapy is a commitment to building insight, implementing new skills, and working through the heavy things. It is not going to be instantaneous change, but the goal is to create sustainable and lasting change. Some realistic expectations and goals you may have for individual therapy may include: increased insight into your patterns, understanding of how past relationships affect current ones, developing emotional regulation and communication skills, building acceptance, and finding clarity.
On the note of building acceptance, remember that your partner may not change just because you do. Even if this is the case, this allows you to have new insight into the relationship and offers space for you to process the shifted dynamics. Sometimes, this looks like accepting what will not change and grieving for the relationship that you wish you had. Success is not always about fixing the relationship, as we can’t guarantee a change. However, there can still be healing in accepting the reality and gaining clarity into what you want and need.
Individual therapy still has power to promote relational healing, and sometimes that healing starts with yourself. Personal growth is an investment in all your relationships, whether there are current issues or not. I encourage you to reflect on how individual therapy might benefit your relationships today and consider speaking to a therapist if you recognize yourself in any relationship difficulties.