Something I hear fairly often from couples, especially early in therapy, is, “I don’t want to come here just to fight.” Sometimes only one partner says it, but I can usually tell they’re both wondering the same thing. If the relationship has been marked by criticism, defensiveness, or conversations that never seem to end well, it makes sense that setting aside an hour to talk about something difficult would feel intimidating. Why would anyone voluntarily sign up for that?
The truth is, I don’t think that’s what couples therapy is for. When a conversation at home falls apart, it’s tempting to assume the topic is the problem. Maybe it’s money. Maybe it’s parenting. Maybe it’s sex, in-laws, where to live, or who keeps leaving things on the kitchen counter. But after years of sitting with couples, I’ve become much more interested in how people are having the conversation than what they’re talking about. The topic changes from couple to couple. The process usually doesn’t.
I’ll often ask someone, “Can you tell me what you heard your partner say?”
It’s such a simple question, but the answers are fascinating. Instead of telling me what they heard, they’ll tell me why their partner is wrong. Or they’ll explain what they meant. Or they’ll defend themselves against something that hasn’t actually been said yet. It isn’t because they’re trying to be difficult. It’s because listening becomes incredibly hard the moment what we’re hearing seems to say something about us.
Imagine your partner says, “I wish we spent more time together.” You might immediately start thinking about all the things you already do together, how exhausted you’ve been lately, or the fact that they were the one scrolling on their phone all evening. None of those things may be wrong. But they also aren’t what your partner was trying to tell you. Somewhere between what they said and what you heard, “I miss you” became “You’re not doing enough.” And now you’re defending yourself against a criticism your partner may not even have been making.
This is one of the harder things I ask couples to practice: letting another person’s experience be real without immediately deciding whether it is accurate. You don’t have to agree with your partner’s interpretation of an interaction in order to become curious about why they experienced it that way. You don’t have to see the situation the same way to understand what it felt like from where they were standing. Understanding someone else’s experience is not the same thing as admitting they’re right and you’re wrong.
But there’s another part of listening that can be even harder: asking yourself whether any part of what you’re hearing belongs to you. Maybe you don’t agree with your partner’s entire version of what happened. Maybe their interpretation feels unfair or misses something important about your intentions. You can still ask, Is there something here for me to own? Is there something I do when I feel criticized, dismissed, pressured, or misunderstood that makes it harder for us to find each other? Taking responsibility for your part doesn’t mean taking responsibility for the whole interaction. It means being willing to look at yourself even while you’re hoping your partner will do the same.
That distinction matters because so many couples get stuck trying to establish whose version of the relationship is correct. One person says, “I was just making a request.” The other says, “It felt like you were telling me what to do.” One says, “I was trying to explain myself.” The other says, “You weren’t listening.” They can spend the next hour arguing over which description is more accurate, or they can become curious about how the exact same interaction managed to feel so different to two people who were both there.
I don’t think most people struggle to express themselves. Most of us can explain our own position pretty well, especially when we feel misunderstood. What’s much harder is staying present long enough to understand the person sitting across from us when their experience doesn’t match our intentions or our understanding of ourselves. Those are two very different skills.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t mind when couples bring a difficult conversation into the therapy room. In fact, sometimes I encourage it. If there’s a conversation you’ve been avoiding because every attempt ends the same way, that gives us something real to work with. Not because I want to watch the argument unfold, but because we can slow it down before it becomes the argument it has always been.
Learning to have difficult conversations reminds me a little of taking music lessons. No one expects to sit down at a piano for the first time and play a complicated piece without stopping. You slow difficult passages down. You repeat a few measures. You notice where your hands want to rush ahead. You practice until something that once felt awkward begins to feel more natural. The goal isn’t to perform perfectly during the lesson. The lesson is where you build the skill you’ll eventually use somewhere else.
I think couples therapy works much the same way. Sometimes I’ll stop someone after a single sentence. Not because they said the wrong thing, but because there was an opportunity hidden inside it. I might ask them to try saying it a little differently. I might ask their partner to tell me what they heard before responding. Sometimes I’ll ask someone to resist explaining their intentions for another minute and instead get curious about the impact. None of those moments are particularly dramatic, but over time they begin to change the way couples experience each other.
I’ve noticed that when people feel heard, they often become much better listeners themselves. They stop working so hard to prove their point because they no longer feel as though they’re fighting to establish the legitimacy of their own experience. And sometimes something surprising happens: once neither person has to win the argument about what happened, there is finally room to talk about what happened.
That’s why I don’t see couples therapy as a place to settle arguments. I see it as a place to practice conversations. My hope isn’t that couples leave my office agreeing about everything or having solved every disagreement they’ll ever have. It’s that they become better able to stay curious when they don’t agree, to hear something uncomfortable without immediately defending against it, and to understand that two people can walk away from the same conversation having had genuinely different experiences of it.
Because the conversations that matter most usually don’t fall apart because nobody knows how to talk. They fall apart because once we feel misunderstood, criticized, controlled, dismissed, or blamed, listening becomes much harder. Learning how to keep listening anyway, while also being willing to ask what part of the problem might belong to us, is where a very different kind of conversation can begin.
