Couples therapy: Does frequency of visits matter?
What is the most frequent error in pursuing couples therapy? I believe it is the tendency to spread out sessions. This may be to save money, or to spread out the impact on busy schedules, or because the therapist has limited availability. In any case, it is my experience that this usually greatly damages the effectiveness of the work and therefore endangers your relationship.
If I had to choose between meeting with a couple for ten sessions, in short intervals or 30 sessions, spread further out, I would almost always recommend the ten sessions at least weekly. This is very important, so please pay attention.
Relationship therapy is not about just being nicer to each other. Neither is it about having a counselor/mediator walk you through each possible fight in order to find better solutions. Either of these will be ineffective. Things also don’t generally improve through one of the partners thinking deeply about the relationship and coming to some eureka moment.
Relationship work should instead facilitate the two of you changing your brains. Sound huge? It is, and yet it is fairly simple and straightforward. You need to override primitive ways of defending yourselves in order to allow your best thinking to occur. Face it, aren’t you usually able to treat total strangers with greater kindness than you show to those closest to you? That isn’t because you don’t care. It’s because they are too close and too important to you and arouse more anxiety in you than any stranger ever could.
Therapy is about changing patterns and breaking through old destructive rituals, rituals in which you fight in ways that you absolutely know will never get you what you want or need. This repair occurs through carefully structuring a new set of responses to one another and then practicing them over and over. It means building trust through this practice so that as you see your own skills grow, you see your partner trying to respond differently as well.
In this process, spreading out the sessions, allows more time for errors and sliding back into old behaviors. In this pattern, even small errors will feel like defeats or betrayals. After a longer gap, partners will often say, “look, things were going much better and then he did the same thing he always does and I just felt like giving up.” You might think of this very much like physical therapy. If, after an injury, you don’t follow up with the prescribed physical therapy sessions or only go every now and then, your muscles will not improve in the way they would have, had you gone regularly.
In past blogs, I have provided information about choosing a marriage/relationship therapist. I have suggested finding someone who has been trained in marital work, sees this as a primary skill and interest and someone with whom you feel a good working bond. Next, ask the therapist about their approach and how it fits with your relationship and your goals. Finally ask how often they want to and can meet with you. Intensive therapy leads to rapid results and is much more cost-effective than long drawn out treatments.
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