Couples Therapy: Your Stuff, My Stuff, Our System
Rethinking Relationship Through Psychoanalysis and Family Systems
I’m trained—and continue to train—in psychoanalysis. That is where my intellectual and emotional curiosity lies. Yet, I’ve come to see that psychoanalysis alone is not a sufficient framework for working with couples. In my experience, effective couples therapy requires a deep engagement with Systems Theory, drawing from thinkers like Bowen, Minuchin, and others. I believe that truly transformational work with couples becomes possible only when depth psychology (whether psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, humanistic, or philosophical) is integrated with systems thinking.
What is the goal of couples therapy?
At its core, couples therapy helps partners recognize the dysfunctional system they’ve co-created—and work together to make that system more functional.
When a couple begins treatment, the initial goal is similar to that of psychoanalysis: to speak freely. Both partners are encouraged to say anything and everything, with one caveat—communication must not become attacking. Managing that caveat is my responsibility. The reason for such openness is simple: most couples come in feeling stuck, anxious, or frustrated. Often, the individuals in the couple do not fully understand what is happening within themselves, let alone with their partner. They often believe the issue is “just poor communication” and assume they simply need better tools or strategies. But in my experience, that’s a premature solution.
In fact, I don’t believe couples should try to change anything at the outset—not yet. Change emerges naturally when both partners begin to feel heard and understood. The work begins by helping each person express their inner world—unfiltered, uncensored, and without trying to manage the other’s emotional response. Because the moment one partner begins editing themselves to protect or control the other’s reaction, the relational field becomes clouded. Misunderstandings grow. Emotional tension builds. And soon, a seemingly minor event—like the trash not being taken out—becomes a flashpoint. But of course, it’s never about the trash. It’s about the accumulation of resentment, emotional distance, and the confusion that arises when people stop feeling seen, heard, or understood.
Common Resistances at the Start
Every couple I’ve worked with (and I include myself in this, in relationship) carries some version of the fantasy that if the other person would just change—become a little more reasonable, a little more emotionally available, a little more like me—then everything would be fine. But that’s not how relationships work. That’s just a fantasy. It always takes
two. There’s always a dynamic, a dance, unfolding between partners—one that both are co-creating and sustaining, consciously or not.
Disclaimer:
This kind of work is incredibly difficult if one or both partners are highly reactive and haven’t yet developed the capacity for introspection or impulse control. What often happens is that when one partner is finally being understood—when their experience is being validated—the other partner feels erased, as if their own perspective is being overwritten. They may be full of envy. In that moment, it can feel like a fight for survival, and the impulse is to fight back.
Let me share two common examples that often appear early in the process—and how they keep couples stuck:
1. “I always express my feelings. My partner just doesn’t know how. I don’t even know why I’m here—they’re the one who needs help.”
This perspective often feels self-evident to the person saying it. But it reflects a misunderstanding of what it actually means to “talk” in couples therapy. Talking isn’t the same as offloading or venting—what I sometimes call “verbal vomiting.” When someone speaks from raw frustration or unprocessed anxiety, the listener often shuts down, becomes defensive, or withdraws—not because they don’t care, but because they’re overwhelmed.
Real communication involves emotional honesty, self-awareness, and curiosity. It requires slowing down enough to identify what you’re feeling and why. It’s about naming your inner experience—not trying to force your partner to fix it. When done well, this kind of communication invites connection, rather than pushing the other away.
2. “I don’t understand why my partner makes such a big deal out of everything. These are first-world problems. We have a roof over our heads. I feel fine. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it—it’s not that deep.”
This mindset tends to minimize emotional experience—even when it’s well-intentioned. While practical gestures (“just tell me what to do”) may seem helpful, they often bypass the emotional core of the relationship. The partner expressing distress may feel invalidated or unseen, which deepens the disconnection.
This reaction often comes from a disconnection from one’s own emotional landscape. When emotions feel unfamiliar or overwhelming, it’s easier to ask for instructions than to engage vulnerably. But our feelings are ancient. The brainstem and limbic system—our emotional centers—have been evolving for hundreds of millions of years. They drive us. Our rational brain, by contrast, is a recent development, and it often scrambles to make
sense of what the rest of us already feels. When we can’t name our emotions or understand what we want, we feel stuck, frozen, angry, or trapped.
The Relational Dance
These two positions—over-expressing and minimizing— form a pattern known in Family Systems and Emotionally Focused Therapy as the pursue/withdraw cycle. Sue Johnson describes it as a way couples attempt to manage anxiety by passing it back and forth—through blaming, chasing, or avoiding.
The more one partner withdraws to manage their overwhelm or fear of escalation, the more the other pursues for reassurance. And the more one pursues, the more the other withdraws. It’s not a matter of who started it—it’s a system, a dance, co-created by both.
This pattern doesn’t resolve emotional conflict. It breeds more anxiety, fear, and resentment—until eventually, both partners are exhausted. Sometimes they reconcile momentarily out of sheer fatigue, but the core issue remains. The pattern will repeat.
The real work of couples therapy is to help each partner understand their role in this dance and to support them in developing new ways of relating—ways of expressing, receiving, and responding that feel safe and sustainable for both. Over time, a new system can emerge—one that honors both people at the same time.
Bowen’s Tools: Differentiation and Triangulation
This is where Bowen’s contributions are so essential. Two of his most enduring concepts—differentiation and triangulation—offer powerful insights into how partners get stuck and how they can grow.
Differentiation sounds technical, but it points to something deeply human: the ability to stay connected to yourself while staying connected to others.
When you’re well-differentiated, you can have your own thoughts, feelings, and values—even when someone close to you disagrees or is upset. You don’t collapse into their emotions, and you don’t shut down to protect yourself either. You can stay grounded and present, without getting swept away or needing to control the other person.
In couples therapy, this means helping each person express their inner experience without needing the other to change in order to feel okay. It means learning to tolerate emotional intensity—conflict, disappointment, difference—without panicking, withdrawing, or attacking. It’s the foundation of intimacy, because it allows two people to be fully themselves, together.
Most of us struggle with this at times. When things get heated, we might lose ourselves trying to please, fix, blame, or punish. But when we build more differentiation, we can have hard conversations without losing our clarity or our compassion.
And when differentiation is low, we often see triangulation.
Triangulation happens when the tension between two people becomes intolerable—so they draw in a third to relieve the pressure. This third party might be a child, a friend, a therapist, or even an idea (like “we just need to get married” or “it’s because of their trauma”). The triangle reduces anxiety in the short term, but it keeps the real work from happening in the primary relationship.
In couples therapy, I often watch for these triangles—how each partner may be unconsciously enlisting others to manage what they struggle to confront directly. Part of the work is to gently collapse the triangle so the partners can face each other again.
A Controlled Fire
This is only possible when both partners show up to therapy exactly as they are. They speak honestly. They laugh, argue, withdraw, pursue, rage, grieve. Every feeling common to intimate human connection shows up in the room—from love to hate and back again. The treatment space becomes a kind of controlled fire—a place where these intense emotional experiences can be witnessed, contained, and understood.
Often, the first shifts happen in the room itself. Slowly, communication changes. Understanding deepens. And eventually, these new ways of relating begin to take root outside the therapy room.
What About Sex?
Many couples say, “We have great communication, but we’ve lost the spark.” The truth is, emotional safety and vulnerability are essential for sustaining sexual intimacy in long-term relationships. (In contrast, short-term relationships often run on lust, novelty, and fantasy—sheltered from the mundane realities of daily life.)
When emotional safety breaks down—when partners stop expressing themselves fully, when they begin managing each other’s feelings or avoiding conflict—desire tends to wither. These behaviors might be adaptive in parent-child dynamics, but between romantic partners, they dampen erotic energy.
Unresolved resentment and poor communication create tension that makes physical intimacy difficult or unappealing. Emotional connection is vital—but good sex also requires intensity, risk, and surrender. Erotic aliveness depends on a certain emotional friction: the interplay between care and aggression, playfulness and danger. When couples can hold both safety and emotional intensity, desire is more likely to thrive.
Esther Perel, one of the most prominent voices in contemporary couples therapy, puts it this way: “Women want in the sheets what they protest in the streets.” This provocative line gestures toward a deeper psychoanalytic truth: that erotic fantasy often transforms
what feels intolerable (and often undesirable) in everyday life into something pleasurable and charged between partners.
Psychoanalysis has long understood sex as a theater of the unconscious—a place where forbidden feelings can be explored through play. A person who feels powerless in daily life may seek domination in bed as a way of reclaiming control through reversal. For some, the shame itself becomes part of the excitement, precisely because it allows them to feel something otherwise inaccessible.
And yet, not all sex must be transgressive to be meaningful. Sometimes, sex is simply a way to return to one another—to soften the edges of conflict, to feel close again, to be reminded that love still lives in the body. Sex can be tender, playful, routine, even quiet—and still profoundly connective. The erotic doesn’t always have to shock or provoke; sometimes it just asks us to be present, attuned, and willing
Conclusion:
In the end, this work isn’t about giving couples better communication tools. It’s about helping them see the system they’re caught in—and the parts of themselves they’ve outsourced to each other. It’s about disrupting the illusion that one person must change while the other stays intact. There is no clean separation between “your stuff” and “mine.” There is only the dynamic—recursive, alive, shaped by both.
Depth work with couples doesn’t mean choosing between emotional safety and raw honesty. It means refusing the false binary. It means staying in contact long enough to tolerate complexity—grief alongside desire, love alongside hate. It means learning to speak without collapsing, and to listen without retreating into defense or control.
The relational system is the patient. Not just the two individuals, but the emotional logic that binds them—the loops, ruptures, and unconscious bargains. To work at that level is to invite not only repair, but reconfiguration.
There is nothing small about this. It demands presence. Discipline. Courage. But if both people are willing to stop blaming and start participating—really participating—then the system changes. And when the system changes, everything changes.
