The Trouble with Couples Therapy

How did it happen that couples therapy got such a bad reputation? Some other forms of therapy are more effective. Some are less effective. 

And yet, for all of the debates about what does or does not work as therapy, we read, far too often, that couples therapy has very few redeeming features. 

So, couples therapy has gotten a bad reputation. Its reputation will hardly be salvaged by this recent New York Magazine article by Scaachi Koul.

Koul decided to try couples therapy after she had put in endless hours of individual therapy.

She had undergone therapy in order to repair her marriage.

Or so one would naively think. Read this opening paragraph from Koul’s article:

When I ended my decade-long relationship with my ex, my therapist clapped her hands over her head and screamed out, exalted: “YES!” For almost four years, whenever we talked about him, she looked at me like I was talking about how much I loved drinking expired strawberry milk. “Sorry,” she said, quickly collecting herself after the “good” news. “I know I shouldn’t root for this. But I hated him.” I was grateful for her disclosure; it had been a while since anyone had been honest with me about the state of my relationship, myself included.

Highly professional and highly objective, don’t you think? It may have been the case that the therapist was trying to make her client feel good.

Naturally, there are some situations where we would be happy to see a woman decamp from a bad relationship. One likes to think that these are the exception, not the rule.

Presumably, Koul thinks that this intervention, this absurd jaculation counts as good because it is honest. No wonder she had trouble functioning within a marriage.

If this is Koul’s version of good therapy, she has made herself into an unreliable judge of what does or does not work in therapy.

And yet, the therapist does not just despise the husband in question. She has not even bothered to disguise her feelings behind a mask of professional objectivity.

Someone will explain to me why this therapist needed all of those years of professional training to come up with such a malicious remark.

Then again, we do want to know whether Koul was suffering from extreme distress, brought about by extreme duress, not to mention abuse at the hands of her husband.

With any luck her further accounts will show us why the therapist arrived at this conclusion. She must have had a very good reason.

Unfortunately, Koul’s presentation does not show abuse and harassment.  

I introduced my husband to my therapist only through his best stories: how he made me laugh instead of cry at the airport as we were leaving our lives behind, how he brewed my tea with three crushed cardamom pods the way I like, how much I appreciated feeling like I was on a team instead of an unmoored transient. But even when our marriage was good, I could forecast how it might become unbearable. When the pandemic settled in New York just over a year after our move, I had no confidence that we’d be strong enough to survive this particular dystopia.

Up to now, we have not seen anything that might provoke hatred.

Koul offers us a picture of her work with her serial individual therapists:

I talked to them about my sexual assault, my disordered eating, my mother, my anger — you know, the woman-in-her-30s starter pack. Steadily, our conversations turned to being almost entirely about my relationship: Our work schedules were always at odds; I hated how tidy he wanted to keep the apartment; worst of all, he wanted to go hiking all the time and I just wanted him to tell me he liked me. I could tell he didn’t. I started to forget what it felt like when he did.

Evidently, the unhappy couple was incapable of organizing their lives as a couple. They did not divide household labor, as Emile Durkheim recommended, and could not negotiate different interests. It is not the most difficult task in the world, so one does not quite understand why they could not navigate it.

So, the unhappy couple decided to try couples therapy.

And so for years, from the time we were just dating all the way to the brittle end of our marriage, we sat in front of an array of interchangeable therapists who were all named Teresa.

Some of them seemed to believe the narrative we gave them about our relationship — that we were cosmically destined to be with each other and therefore just had to figure out this current rough patch — while others seemed totally unable to help us get out of the quicksand of our arguments.

If they were all named Teresa, that means, to me at least, that we cannot blame this on the patriarchy.

What did these licensed professional therapists have to say? Glad you asked:

Teresa No. 1 thought everything was my ex-husband’s fault, but Teresa No. 4 thought it was all mine. Teresa No. 2, after listening to me talk for 51 minutes about how I felt hopeless, shrugged her shoulders at me. “I don’t know what to say,” she replied. I did. I wanted her to say that we should end our relationship with the remaining scraps of dignity we had. She never did, and we instead just moved on to the next Teresa we found. When I cried to Teresa No. 3 that I felt like a failure as a wife, she cried with me, her heavy tears rivaling my own. That night, my ex suggested we should stop seeing her. “I don’t think she’s equipped to receive your feelings,” he said. It took us months to find someone else who seemed to understand us both, another problem attributed to my Big Feelings. Teresa No. 5 told us we needed more sessions more frequently. “There’s a lot of work to do here,” she said, and I wanted to pull her hair. Should there be this much work between two people who ostensibly love each other? Even the ones who seemed to know we were doomed still opened their calendars at the end of each session and urged us to come back, to try again.

It gets worse. Therapy teaches them therapy-speak, to little avail. It does not teach them to get along. It shows them how to find fault with each other.

But instead of helping us see each other more clearly, therapy gave us new words to use to criticize each other. Every constructive lesson became a knife. I learned about trauma responses, and so everything he did elicited a trauma response in me. He was my father! I was his mother! When he learned about gaslighting, everything I did became gaslighting. When we argued about a time he called me stupid, therapy gave him a new explanation for why he said it (repeatedly): “We talked about this. I lashed out because I felt disconnected from you. We need more date nights.”

Considering how much they were paying for these exercises, they concluded reasonably that they were being sold tools that could be used to gain deeper understanding of themselves and each other. So they applied them to their relationships.

By all indications, they went through the gamut of psycho interpretations, to no avail. That is, they tried on various narratives, to no benefit.

We do not know whether Koul did not want to be married or did not want to be married to the man she married. We certainly have no real sense that he was a bad man, worthy of hatred.

Consider this scene.

I twirled in front of him in a new pair of gold sequin pants before my company’s Christmas party. “How do I look?” I asked, to which he replied, “You didn’t take out the trash.” We were such disappointments to each other.

Perhaps he wanted to marry a woman who would become a homemaker. Perhaps she did not want to engage in such frivolities.

So, Koul concludes this:

Only in hindsight can I see what I wanted the therapist to tell me. I wanted permission. I wanted to be told I could stop trying. I wanted her to tell me I had done everything I could — that we had indeed put in the work and shouldn’t feel ashamed for throwing in the towel. After all, we tried. It’s not “failing” if you give your relationship everything you have. I don’t regret any of our time with the Teresas; I needed to try just a few more times to make it work, and I needed someone to be a witness to my misery. Teresas No. 1 through No. 6 never told me to leave, but little by little they helped me give myself permission all the same.

Strangely, we are talking about a ten-year relationship. Something must have made it work, more or less, for that length of time. At the least, we should conclude that Koul did not want to be a wife whereas her husband wanted to have a wife.

One hastens to mention a point that Koul seems happy to repeat, namely that her family comes from India. She does not mention that in India marriages are semi-arranged, that couples report a high level of satisfaction and that divorce is unheard of. These couples do not avail themselves of therapy.

As for what it means to have a semi-arranged marriage, it means that your parents choose a half dozen or so suitable matches, and you get to meet them all in public or chaperoned settings, and then  decide how far you want to go.

What might we conclude? At the least, Koul has shown that she has overcome her ancestral culture and has become thoroughly Westernized.

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