Is Couples Counseling Necessary?
- Yvette E. McDonald, LCSW-QS, CMNCS
- Jun 19, 2018
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 25
Updated: October 25, 2025
You’re not sure when it happened, but suddenly you don’t recognize the person sleeping next to you or maybe you can’t remember the last time they did. The distance feels heavy, the silence confusing. You catch yourself wondering, “Is this just how marriage becomes?”
If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Every marriage goes through seasons of disconnection. What matters most is how you respond when you feel the drift.
Is Couples Counseling Right for Us?
Most couples envision marriage as a partnership rooted in friendship, honesty, and lasting love but reality rarely unfolds that neatly. Many partners never learned the skills to maintain connection through stress, change, and unmet expectations.
I understand this deeply, both personally and professionally. When my first marriage ended, I experienced the disorienting pain of watching something sacred crumble. But through that loss came clarity, compassion, and a passion to help other couples rebuild before they reach that breaking point.
Couples counseling isn’t about deciding whether to stay or leave — it’s about creating space to heal, grow, and rediscover what’s possible together.
What Couples Can Expect at Nourivida Wellness
At Nourivida Wellness, my approach to couples counseling integrates:
The Gottman Method for emotional connection, trust, and communication
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and emotional regulation strategies for high-conflict couples
Neuroscience-based relationship education to build insight into stress, reactivity, and attachment
Faith integration for couples who wish to include a spiritual component in their work
Together, We Will Work To:
Understand your emotional patterns and communication breakdowns
Learn tools to manage conflict effectively
Rebuild friendship and intimacy
Deepen emotional and physical connection
Explore love languages and apology languages
Establish healthy marital boundaries and routines
Identify and shift unhealthy patterns
Create rituals of connection
Strengthen trust, admiration, and shared meaning
Communicate needs openly and safely
Resolve lingering hurt and build a new foundation of respect
For couples who prefer a Christian counseling lens, we can incorporate prayer, Scripture, and spiritual disciplines in a way that honors your faith and strengthens your marriage.
What About Blended Families?
Remarriage brings its own set of joys and challenges. If you’re in a blended family, we’ll address:
Step-parenting and shared parenting challenges
Boundaries and expectations around “ours, yours, and mine”
Building trust with stepchildren
Navigating co-parenting relationships with ex-partners
Managing loyalty conflicts and communication breakdowns
Our goal is to help your new family thrive with clarity, unity, and emotional balance.
Why Seek Counseling Early
Many couples wait until the relationship feels beyond repair before reaching out for help. By then, therapy often becomes “divorce counseling” rather than marriage counseling.
Seeking support early is not a sign of failure — it’s a sign of wisdom.
Learning healthy communication, emotional regulation, and repair skills early on prevents small cracks from becoming canyons.
What If My Partner Doesn’t Want to Go?
This is one of the most common questions I hear. It’s easy to feel hopeless when one person is open to counseling and the other resists. But here’s the truth — it only takes one person’s willingness to begin creating change.
If your partner isn’t ready yet:
Start with individual sessions to gain clarity, tools, and language to invite your partner differently.
Avoid ultimatums; instead, express how counseling aligns with your desire to make the relationship stronger, not to “fix” them.
Share that therapy isn’t about blame, it’s about understanding. Sometimes just reframing the goal helps reduce defensiveness.
Consider inviting them to one trial session to meet me together. Many reluctant partners find the process less intimidating than expected once they experience it firsthand.
Even if only one person starts, the ripple effects can transform the dynamic.
What Couples Therapy Is and Isn’t
It’s not about proving who’s right or wrong.
It’s not an endurance test where one partner gets “ganged up on.”
And it’s definitely not a last resort.
Couples counseling is:
A guided process that helps both partners understand before trying to be understood.
A structured way to lower emotional reactivity and increase empathy.
A chance to learn new communication and repair tools you’ll use for life.
Many couples leave counseling saying they wish they’d started sooner, not because it was easy, but because it gave them a language for connection they never had before.
When to Choose Individual vs. Couples Therapy
Sometimes, relationship issues are deeply connected to one partner’s unhealed trauma, stress, attachment or emotional regulation challenges. If communication always derails into anger, avoidance, or shutdown, it may help to begin with individual therapy to regulate emotions before diving into couples work.
If your relationship is generally safe but emotionally disconnected or stuck in unhealthy patterns, couples therapy is the right step.
If there is active abuse, untreated addiction, or safety concerns, couples counseling should pause until those issues are stabilized in individual therapy.
This clarification helps couples feel guided, not pressured, in choosing what’s most appropriate for their current season.
Early Warning Signs It’s Time to Reach Out
Frequent unresolved arguments
Growing emotional distance or loss of intimacy
Difficulty communicating without criticism or defensiveness
Disagreement over parenting or finances
Repetitive cycles of anger, blame, or avoidance
Pornography, infidelity, or secrecy
Addictions or compulsive behaviors
Depression or resentment
Feeling more like roommates than partners
If these patterns sound familiar, don’t wait until resentment becomes the third person in your marriage. Healing starts when both partners decide to turn toward each other — even if that first step feels small.
The Bottom Line
Your marriage doesn’t have to end to begin again.
Counseling provides a safe space to unpack the hurts, realign your values, and rediscover what drew you together in the first place.
As I often tell couples, it takes two to build and two to heal. When both partners show up with openness and curiosity, change is not only possible — it’s powerful.
Whether you’re exploring couples counseling out of curiosity, pain, or hope, remember: reaching out doesn’t mean your marriage is broken. It means you care enough to learn new ways of loving, understanding, and growing together.
Yvette is a psychotherapist, Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW-QS), and Certified Mental Health and Nutrition Clinical Specialist (CMNCS). At Nourivida Wellness, she helps individuals and couples heal from emotional disconnection, stress, and trauma through a holistic, neuroscience-based approach that integrates psychology, nutrition, and relational science. Yvette is passionate about helping couples build emotionally secure, connected, and lasting partnerships rooted in empathy and growth.
