what makes couples therapy work (part 2)

We left off with Jane and Josh. Let’s pick up there.

The problem

Both of them feel uncared for, and neither can say so in a way the other can hear.

For Josh, feeling cared for has run through sex, admiration, and shared excitement. Those have thinned out, stopped, or in some form were never there to begin with. What fills the gap is coping: drinking, pornography, sports, more hours at work. He also feels nagged by Jane’s anxious pursuit and rejected by her lack of desire. The two feed each other. The less available he is, the harder she pursues, and the harder she pursues, the more criticized he feels. Under all of it sits the feeling he cannot tolerate, which is being small, or less than.

For Jane, feeling cared for has run through being noticed and appreciated, through an even split of the domestic load, and through intimacy in the wider sense of emotional contact rather than sex alone. Those have thinned out too. Her coping: drinking, sexually charged reading, true crime podcasts, hobbies, and turning her attention toward the kids. She feels betrayed by Josh’s coping and by his absence. Under it sits anger she keeps pressed down, and the belief that she is unlovable.

So they fight about the dishes, the kids’ schedules, and the tone of a text. Those fights are the surface. Neither one can find relief or empathy from the other for what is actually happening, so the small things get charged with the weight of the big ones.

What drew them together

Josh and Jane met in college. They were drawn to each other’s looks, personalities, and shared interests, and they also felt a fit. Where Josh was strong, Jane felt short. Where Jane was strong, Josh felt short. Each experienced the other as supplying something missing.

That fit helped and hurt. It helped by generating good feeling, a sense of being completed by another person. It hurt because it let them skip the work of identifying, naming, owning, and speaking their own vulnerable needs. When a partner covers the gap, neither person has to learn where the gap is or how to close it alone.

Then life changed. Work demands, money pressure, and household logistics all went up. The old unconscious arrangement could not be sustained, and when it slipped, each of them ran into attachment pain from much earlier in life. So they coped. But coping is not adapting. It was the solution each of them worked out as a baby and a child, running again in an adult body.

Their attachment history

Both Josh and Jane had what they would call a loving childhood. Not an unhappy one. Both still carried insecure attachment, which is more common than people expect. Across normative samples, roughly a third of infants classify as insecure, so plenty of people with decent childhoods are working with it.

Attachment security gets built out of the earliest exchanges with caregivers, in the first year or two, before there is language to hold any of it. So these insecurities were never stored as thoughts. They showed up as feelings that arrived in social moments. When Josh and Jane got together, they helped each other feel secure without having to try. When that arrangement fell apart under the weight of life, the old insecurities came back into focus.

What therapy has to do

The work is to catch attachment needs as they happen in the room. Dan Siegel’s four S’s are useful shorthand: people need to feel seen, safe, and soothed, and out of those comes feeling secure. Siegel wrote that for parents and children. It carries over to adults because the need does not expire. It just gets harder to admit.

In session, that runs as a five-step sequence, repeated:

1. Help the person notice a vulnerable emotion while it is occurring.

2. Help them feel it.

3. Help them regulate it.

4. Help them speak it.

5. The partner it lands on receives it and responds.

Written out, that sounds…tidy. In the room it is anything but.

What it actually looks like

Josh was talking about something and Jane cut in to correct him.

We stopped the conversation there because the interruption was pointing at something underneath it. We got curious with Jane about what she was experiencing. We asked her to track her senses: what her eyes were doing, what she was hearing, what she felt inside her body. She noticed her vision had narrowed to a point, her chest was tight, and her shoulders and jaw were clenched.

We had her step out of that for a moment by finding three things in the room her eyes were drawn to. Then we went back inside and had her stay with the sensation in her chest until it shifted. It did. She took a spontaneous deep breath and the tension dropped. We waited until it was gone before moving on.

Then we asked what emotion was there. Anger.

We invited her to speak the anger to her husband. I worked to keep it bite-sized so he could take it in, and had him monitor his own sensations while she spoke. When he started moving toward emotional flooding (distracting thoughts, intensifying sensations in the gut, chest, throat, and face), we paused her and turned to helping him regulate. As he settled, he recognized how frightened he becomes when she is upset, which was not something he had ever said out loud. We stayed with that until he could say it to her.

That is one sequence out of many. It took most of a session.

When it goes the other direction

Another session went differently. Josh got quiet. Quieter than usual. His face closed and he looked disengaged. When I stopped the conversation to ask what he was experiencing, he had few words and seemed cold and distant.

Josh was in freeze. Freeze carries very high activation and shows up on the outside as the least activated thing in the room, which is why it gets read as stonewalling or not caring. What he needed was help getting his physiology moving again.

I asked him to notice three things in the room. Then three things inside. Then three more in the room. He took a deeper breath. I asked him to wiggle his toes and start some gentle movement, rocking a little side to side.

Emotion started to show. He seemed less distant and more upset. I asked whether he had a sense of what he was feeling. Shame.

I asked where the shame was living in his body. His shoulders wanted to cave, his knees wanted to pull in, and there were knots in his stomach. I asked him, if it was not overwhelming, to put his attention on the sensations in his stomach, to observe them without trying to change them, and to stay there until something shifted.

After a few minutes he looked up, more socially engaged, and said the shame had subsided. What replaced it was helplessness and sadness, close to despair.

Odd as it sounds, I took that as a good sign. He was moving out of freeze and back into what he had been feeling just before he went into it. Helpless sadness of that kind is classic attachment pain. Psychoanalysts call it anaclitic depression.

I turned to Jane and asked what it was like to watch and feel this. Her eyes were wet. She said she felt open, and strangely closer to him.

Slow is fast

Work like this is slow because the core is only reachable at that pace. Defenses get in the way without anyone deciding they should. When we do get there, we find out what was never finished and never said. When those experiences can be completed with a partner who responds well enough, something shifts in how the brain holds the original material.

Bruce Ecker’s work applying memory reconsolidation research to psychotherapy argues that the old learning does not get suppressed or outgrown. Under the right conditions it gets unlocked and revised. That is the difference between managing a pattern and being done with it, and it is why this kind of change tends to hold rather than wear off. It is also what makes future assumptions and behavior more secure.

Eventually Jane and Josh could run a whole repair sequence in session without much from me. Then the repairs started happening at home, between sessions. Topics that used to create too much friction could be handled without a therapist in the room.

They needed a little over a year of weekly work. It included hundreds of ruptures and repairs, most of them small, plus a stretch of individual therapy for each of them. Those repairs rebuilt the relationship. A smaller number of tipping moments revised the memories and expectations underneath it. They recovered the marriage and built a bond stronger than the one they started with, and the whole family got the benefit of it.

Your story

Jane and Josh are invented. Both vignettes are composites, built out of many couples I have worked with, with the identifying details changed.

The pattern is not invented. If you read the fight about the dishes and recognized your own kitchen, or read Josh going quiet and knew that face, you are not looking at something rare or broken. You are looking at two people whose oldest ways of feeling cared for stopped working at the same time.

That is workable. It takes longer than most people want it to, and it asks both people to feel things they have spent years not feeling. Not every couple who starts this work stays together. Many do, and come out with something sturdier than what they walked in with.

If you want to find out whether this kind of work fits your situation, reach out to us at aaron@analogcounseling.com.

Sources

Blatt, S. J. (2004). Experiences of Depression: Theoretical, Clinical, and Research Perspectives. American Psychological Association.

Spitz, R. A. (1946). Anaclitic depression. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 2, 313–342.

van IJzendoorn, M. H., & Kroonenberg, P. M. (1988). Cross-cultural patterns of attachment: A meta-analysis of the Strange Situation. Child Development, 59(1), 147–156.

Lyons-Ruth, K., et al. (1998). Implicit relational knowing: Its role in development and psychoanalytic treatment. Infant Mental Health Journal, 19(3), 282–289.

Ecker, B. (2015). Memory reconsolidation understood and misunderstood. International Journal of Neuropsychotherapy, 3(1), 2–46.

Ecker, B., Ticic, R., & Hulley, L. (2012). Unlocking the Emotional Brain. Routledge.

Lane, R. D., Ryan, L., Nadel, L., & Greenberg, L. (2015). Memory reconsolidation, emotional arousal, and the process of change in psychotherapy. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38, e1.

Siegel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2020). The Power of Showing Up. Ballantine.

Tronick, E. Z., & Gianino, A. (1986). Interactive mismatch and repair: Challenges to the coping infant. Zero to Three, 6(3), 1–6.

What Makes Couples Therapy Work? (Part 1)

To answer that question, we need to understand what makes couples fall apart.

One of the first things I tell people when we start working together is that therapy can leave you feeling worse before you feel better. If you have thoughts, feelings, or memories you've put out of your awareness so you could cope and keep living your life, and then you start the work of bringing those back into awareness, that process is going to disturb you. You put those things away in the first place because they were disturbing and you didn't know how to deal with them any other way. Couples work has a way of surfacing things you don't want to know but, at some level, already do.

Couples work is fundamentally about attachment

To understand attachment, we have to talk about the first two years of life. This window is critical for social and emotional development. The experience we have with our caretakers, how they understand us, interact with us, support us, and see us, gets recorded in our brains long before we have words to describe it.

Our brains can't evaluate every relational moment for safety in real time. That would be too slow and too costly. So instead, the brain builds a model from a set of data, and those first two years are the data. From that model, the brain generates predictions: when I feel this way, or find myself in this kind of situation, it will go well, or it will go poorly, or it will hurt. Based on those predictions, we develop strategies for staying safe socially and emotionally.

• If our data suggests things will generally go well enough, we tend to move through relationships as ourselves: feeling our feelings, expressing our needs, and taking in the needs of others without becoming overwhelmed. (Researchers like Mary Main called this a secure attachment style)

• If we predict things might go well but can't be sure when that will change, we tend to become anxious and try to control our social environment through pleasing, appeasing, criticism, vigilance, or codependency. (This is called an anxious/preoccupied attachment style)

• If we predict things simply won't go well, we stop engaging vulnerably. We don't show our own emotional needs, and we struggle to feel the emotional needs of others, even if we get skilled at solving their practical problems. (This is called an avoidant/dismissive attachment style)

• If we experienced trauma at the hands of caregivers, we predict a more painful pattern: things may go well until they don't, and then we get hurt. This often shows up as "come here, get away" behavior, since the brain has learned that the same source of love is also a source of pain and works to manage that impossible bind. (This is called a disorganized or fearful/avoidant attachment style)

That disorganized attachment style lines up with what attachment researchers Mary Main and Erik Hesse called "fright without solution": when a caregiver is both the source of comfort and the source of fear, the child's instinct to approach and the instinct to flee both fail at once, and no consistent strategy can resolve it.

When the data we're carrying is marked by pain, it tends to leave us insecure, about ourselves, about others, about the world in general. And because this data comes from before we could talk, it isn't stored as words or conscious thoughts. It's stored as feeling and as procedural, body-level knowledge of how relationships go. Attachment researcher Beatrice Beebe's work backs this up directly. Her lab's frame by frame analysis of four-month-old infants interacting with their mothers could predict, with real accuracy, which infants would be classified as insecurely or disorganized-attached at twelve months, based entirely on split-second patterns of gaze, facial expression, vocal rhythm, and touch, long before any child could put a sentence together. That's a strong argument for treating attachment convictions as automatic and unconscious rather than something people reasoned their way into.

What this has to do with couples

When we fall in love and couple up as adults, we bring those same unconscious predictions into the relationship, the ones we first built with our caregivers. We also tend to be drawn to partners who feel emotionally familiar. In my experience, people who grew up with attachment insecurities are often drawn to partners who carry some flavor of what they've known, but who also signal the hope of being a better version of it.

Then comes the honeymoon period. In those first months, we're flooded with enough feel-good hormones and emotion that we underweight red flags. That flooding is part of what allows us to attach in the first place, which means our real attachment patterns don't fully show themselves until after we've already committed. By then, we've usually invested enough that it's harder to take in the red flags that do start to appear.

Over time, couples shape their relationship into something that complements each partner's patterns. One partner may feel insecure in response to a moment that isn't actually threatening. The other partner, reacting to that insecurity, may soothe them the same way they once soothed a parent, or pull away emotionally the way they learned to with a caregiver early on. All of it runs automatically and unconsciously, each partner's pattern completing the other's.

These complementary patterns can be sustainable without being satisfying. They tend to hold together until something demanding happens: having children, a move, a job change, a loss, a tragedy. That's usually when the fragility of the relationship starts to show. As we get older, we often gain more ways to avoid seeing that fragility, and our own unhappiness along with it. We may have more money to spend, more focus we can put into our kids or our work, or we may look for something outside the marriage, an affair, over involvement at church, anything that keeps us from looking directly at what isn't working. It's not uncommon for a couple to spend years inside a relationship built around the unconscious insecurities both people brought into it as children.

Jane and Josh

Jane grew up in a middle-class home. Her parents loved her and did their best, but Jane always felt a subtle pressure to be a good girl: to look a certain way, get certain grades, be a certain way socially and religiously. That pressure conditioned her to stay out of touch with her own desires in certain parts of her life, a pattern that traced back to caretakers who didn't want to be disturbed or bothered outside of what they could handle.

Josh grew up in a lower-middle-class home. His parents loved him and did their best too, but Josh carried a subtle, constant sense that he was on his own, that if life was going to go well, he was the one who'd have to make it happen.

When Jane and Josh met in college, both there on partial scholarship, they were drawn to each other physically and in every other way, but they also felt understood. Josh felt Jane gave him a kind of emotional attention he'd never really had. He didn't have to put his needs into words; she figured them out for him. Jane felt that Josh was stable, undemanding, and genuinely interested in her. They got married.

What started as Jane offering emotional support that felt good slowly turned into her wanting more from Josh emotionally than he knew how to give. That made him feel small. And while Josh's stability and low emotional demand felt secure to Jane at first, she eventually started to feel lonely without more vulnerability from him. Kids didn't help. The division of labor somehow fell mostly on Jane, and Josh grew more distant as he felt the weight of financial pressure. Sex became less frequent, which hit Josh hard, since that had always been a primary way he felt emotionally connected. By the time they were around 35, they knew, consciously, that they were unhappy. What they didn't know was why, or how to fix it.

Part two will look at what couples therapy actually focuses on and how it works.

Notes and references

A few sources that back up the claims above, in case you want to go deeper or cite them yourself:

• Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. New York: Basic Books. Foundational work on internal working models, the mental templates built from early caregiving experience.

• Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Source of the original secure, anxious, and avoidant attachment classifications from the Strange Situation.

• Main, M., & Hesse, E. (1990). "Parents' unresolved traumatic experiences are related to infant disorganized attachment status." In M. Greenberg, D. Cicchetti, & E. M. Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the Preschool Years. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Source of the "fright without solution" concept behind the come-here-get-away pattern.

• Beebe, B., Jaffe, J., Markese, S., Buck, K., Chen, H., Cohen, P., Bahrick, L., Andrews, H., & Feldstein, S. (2010). "The origins of 12-month attachment: A microanalysis of 4-month mother-infant interaction." Attachment & Human Development, 12(1-2), 3-141. The study showing that split-second, nonverbal patterns of interaction at four months predict attachment classification at one year.

• Beebe, B., & Lachmann, F. (2014). The Origins of Attachment: Infant Research and Adult Treatment. New York: Routledge. Connects the infant research directly to adult treatment, including couples and individual work with adults carrying insecure or disorganized patterns.

• Jaffe, J., Beebe, B., Feldstein, S., Crown, C., & Jasnow, M. (2001). "Rhythms of dialogue in infancy." Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 66(2), Serial No. 264. The earlier vocal-coordination research that set up the 2010 study above.

Why Couples Get Stuck (And How Therapy Helps You Move Again)

Many couples come to counseling because they feel stuck in the same arguments, shut-downs, or misunderstandings. Most don’t know why it keeps happening, especially when both partners say they love each other and want things to improve. It can feel confusing and discouraging.

Couples counseling can help, not by assigning blame, but by helping you understand the patterns underneath the conflict.

Patterns Are Like Loops

Most couples don’t just have “fights.” They have loops—the same dance repeated with new content. One partner reaches out, the other pulls away. One pushes for clarity, the other protects by shutting down. One gets louder, one gets quiet. The topic changes, but the loop stays the same.

These loops form because each partner is trying to protect something important—usually a longing or a vulnerability they stopped showing a long time ago.

It’s Not Just Communication. It’s What Communication Is Protecting

Communication skills matter, but skills alone often don’t solve the deeper issue. Many couples already know how to communicate—they just don’t know how to stay connected when they feel misunderstood, criticized, or afraid.

That requires understanding what’s happening inside the relationship space between partners. Therapists call this the intersubjective field, but practically it means:

“What is it like to be me with you, and what is it like to be you with me, especially when we are stressed?”

That space between partners is where relationships actually get repaired.

Improvisation: The Opposite of Keeping Score

When conflict loops form, couples often start keeping score: who apologized last, who’s trying more, who should change first. Scorekeeping feels organized, but it makes relationships rigid.

In couples counseling, we help partners learn something closer to improvisation. Instead of sticking to defensive scripts (“here we go again,” “I already know how this ends”), partners learn how to stay responsive and curious in the moment.

Improvisation creates openings. Openings create repair. Repair builds real trust.

Why This Approach Works

This style of couples therapy focuses on:

• recognizing your shared pattern
• understanding how each of you protects yourselves
• identifying the longings underneath conflict
• creating space for new emotional experiences
• practicing repair in real time

When couples experience successful repair—not perfection, but repair—their nervous systems begin to trust each other again. Arguments become less about survival and more about connection.

You Don’t Have to Stay Stuck

If you and your partner feel trapped in a loop, it doesn’t mean your relationship is broken. It means the two of you are due for a new way of relating—one that allows both partners to feel seen, understood, and safe enough to show what they actually feel.

At Analog Counseling in Overland Park, we help couples across the Kansas City metro learn how to repair, reconnect, and build new relational patterns. In-person and telehealth options are available.

FAQ: Couples Counseling

Why do couples get stuck in the same arguments?
Most couples repeat patterns because each partner is protecting a deeper longing or vulnerability. Therapy helps reveal and repair the loop.

Is couples counseling just communication skills?
Communication skills help, but lasting change comes from understanding the emotional patterns underneath conflict—not just the words.

How long does couples counseling take?
Most couples attend between a couple of months to a year or two of weekly sessions depending on goals, pace, and level of conflict.

Is it too late for counseling if we’re considering separation?
Not necessarily. Many couples wait until things feel urgent before seeking help, and repair is still possible.

Do you offer in-person or telehealth sessions?
Yes. We serve the Kansas City metro through in-person sessions in Overland Park and secure telehealth for Missouri and Kansas residents.