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I want to describe a scene that a lot of women in this community are going to recognize immediately. You're in couples counseling. You go there because you finally convinced him to go, or because things got bad enough that going felt like the only option left that you hadn't tried. And sitting in that office, something surprising starts to happen. He's doing well. Better than you expected, actually. He's talking about his childhood. He's using words like I feel and I realize. He's nodding when the therapist says something about accountability. He's making eye contact with you in a way he hasn't in months. He seems genuinely like he's getting it. And the therapist is encouraged. You can see it. They're leaning forward slightly, they're reflecting things back, they're seeing progress. And you are sitting across the room watching all of this happen. And instead of feeling hopeful, you feel something you can't quite name. Something closer to dread. A quiet, specific unease that you immediately start trying to talk yourself out of. Because what kind of person sits in couples counseling watching her husband finally open up and feels dread? Maybe you, because you know something the therapist doesn't. You know what happens when you get home. If that scene landed somewhere real for you, today's episode is for you. And I want to start by saying you were not imagining it, you were not being unfair, and what you were sensing in that room had a name. And we're gonna talk about it today. Welcome back to Pattern Breakers Collective. I'm Lisa. Before we go anywhere, three things that I need to say clearly at the start of this episode. First, throughout today's conversation, as usual, I'll use he when referring to the partner causing harm and she for the person experiencing it. That reflects my own lived experience and the majority of women that I work with. But I recognize that abuse is not exclusive to one gender. Men can be survivors, women can be abusive. These dynamics exist in same-sex relationships. If your story looks different from what I describe, everything I'm saying today still applies to you. Second, couples counseling helps a lot of people. I truly believe in therapy. You all know that, what I do for a living. I refer people to therapy regularly outside of coaching. There are struggling marriages that have been genuinely transformed by couples' work, and I would never want this episode to become a reason someone who could benefit from that work doesn't seek it. That's not my goal today. And third, what I'm going to describe today is not my opinion. The concern about couples counseling in the context of domestic violence and coercive control is well established in clinical and advocacy literature. It is not a controversial position among people who specialize in this work. It is, however, largely unknown outside of that world. And I think that's a problem. Because the people making decisions about couples counseling, the family members who recommend it, the friends who suggest it, the judges who sometimes order it, and the women themselves who suggest it as a last resort often don't have this information. And they deserve to. So today, I want to talk about what couples counseling is actually designed to do, why it works beautifully in some relationship contexts, and why it fails in others, and why, in relationships with coercive control or emotional abuse, it can actively make things more dangerous. Not just ineffective, but actually dangerous. And then I want to spend some time on what actually does help, including the distinction between therapy and coaching, because I think that's something women in this community specifically need to understand. Let's get into it. One of the most common things women in struggling relationships hear from friends, from family members, from their own internal voice at two in the morning. And on the surface, it makes complete sense. Couples counseling feels like the responsible choice, the mature choice, the choice that says, I haven't given up, I'm willing to do the work, I am taking this seriously. It also carries a deeply embedded cultural message that almost any relationship problem can be solved if people are just willing to communicate better. That with the right facilitator in the right room, with both people present and ostensibly willing, the gap between two people can be bridged. That communication is the fundamental unit of a healthy relationship, and therefore better communication is the fundamental solution to an unhealthy one. And I understand why that belief is so powerful. Because in many contexts, it's true. Communication really is the foundation, and couples counseling really does help people build better communication patterns, understand each other's attachment styles, learn how to repair after conflict, and create something more honest and more connected than what they had before. But here's where the logic breaks down. That entire model, the model couples counseling is built on, assumes something very specific about the relationship it's being applied to. It assumes that both people are operating in good faith, that both people genuinely want the relationship to be healthier for everyone in it, that the problem is a skills deficit or a communication pattern or an unresolved wound, not a fundamental power imbalance where one person's primary goal is to maintain control over the other. When that assumption is correct, couples counseling can be transformative. When that assumption is wrong, when you're not dealing with a communication problem, but with a control problem, you're not just using the wrong tool. You're potentially handing someone a more sophisticated version of the thing that they've been using to harm you. Couples counseling was designed for two people with a communication problem. It was not designed for one person trying to stay safe and the other person trying to maintain control. Applying the first model to the second situation doesn't just fail to help, it changes the dynamics in ways that can make the situation measurably more dangerous. So let me spend a few minutes on what couples counseling actually is, because I think it helps clarify why the context matters so much. Couples counseling, whether it's the Gottman method, emotionally focused therapy, Imago relationship therapy, or any number of other evidence-based approaches, was developed for relationships where both partners are fundamentally emotionally safe to be with, where the problem isn't safety but connection, where both people genuinely want their relationship to work and are willing to be vulnerable and honest in the service of that goal. The model assumes a relatively level playing field. Not that both people are equally skilled communicators or that both people have equally managed their personal history or that both people bring identical emotional regulation to the table. Those differences are part of what couple's work addresses, but it assumes that neither person is using the relationship to exercise power over the other, that neither person is going to weaponize what gets said in the room, that both people's experiences of the relationship are equally valid and worth exploring. In that context, a skilled couples therapist does genuinely important work. They help partners understand each other's attachment needs. They teach repair sequences, how to come back after conflict in a way that actually heals rather than just pauses the wound. They help people recognize the pattern underneath the argument, not well, we fight about money, but when we fight about money, I feel dismissed and you feel criticized, and both of us are actually scared. That's the real work. It changes real marriages. But the moment you introduce significant power imbalance, the moment one person is afraid of the other or is managing the other's moods as a survival strategy, or is walking on eggshells before, during, and after every conversation, the model stops working. Because now you have one person trying to be authentic and vulnerable in a room with their abuser. And that is not a couples counseling problem. That's a safety problem. And safety problems require safety responses. So let me walk through five very specific mechanisms, five ways this goes wrong, because I think that when women hear these described, they often recognize their own experience. And recognition in this matters. So number one, it gives him your disclosures. Think about what happens in a couples counseling session. The therapist creates a space for honesty. You're encouraged to share what hurts, what you're afraid of, where you feel most alone, what happened in your childhood that makes this particularly painful, what you need that you're not getting. The therapist uses this information to help both of you understand each other better. That's what the model is designed to do. But in a relationship with an emotionally abusive partner, the information you share in that room doesn't stay there. It travels home with him and it gets filed. Your triggers, your deepest fears, the specific thing that you said about your mother that explains why abandonment hits you so particularly hard. The moment you cried and said that you just want to feel like you matter to him, all of that becomes available in the next argument. Not necessarily consciously, sometimes it's completely instinctive, but he knows now exactly where to press to produce the maximum amount of pain with the minimum amount of effort. You handed in the map. Number two, it validates his version of reality. Couples counseling operates on the premise that both people's perspectives are valid, that both people have a truth worth exploring, that the relationship exists at the intersection of two subjective experiences, and the therapist's job is to help both people feel heard. That is a beautiful model for two people who are both operating in good faith. But in an abusive dynamic, one of those perspectives may be a systematically constructed distortion of reality. The gaslighting, the minimizing, the blame shifting. These aren't just communication patterns. They're the product of a sustained campaign to make her doubt her own perception. And when a therapist treats that distortion as one equally valid viewpoint alongside her experience, it can inadvertently reinforce exactly what the abuse has been doing. The message she hears, even if the therapist never says it, is that her reality is debatable, that his version is also worth considering, which is the central lie that abuse depends on. Number three, it teaches him better camouflage. This one I want to be careful about because it can sound conspiratorial and I don't think it's usually conscious, but the outcome is consistent enough that it needs to be named. A person who goes to couples counseling, even with limited, genuine investment, learns things. They learn the language of emotional intelligence. They learn what accountability sounds like when performed. They learn what a therapist responds positively to. They learn what a vulnerable disclosure looks like and what it produces. And they learn through direct observation of what makes the therapist lean forward versus sit back. Exactly what kind of emotional performance is most convincing. She will sometimes describe it this way. Well, he started using therapy words. He'd say, I hear that my actions make you feel unsafe. And it sounded exactly right. And then the same thing happened when we got home. The language changed, the behavior didn't. But now the language is sophisticated enough that even she sometimes second guesses herself because he sounds like someone who understands. And she's been trained to prioritize his words over her own experience. Number four, it resets her timeline. And this one breaks my heart every time I see it. She came into counseling close to a decision. She had done enough internal reckoning to know that something needed to change. Maybe she was close to leaving. Maybe she had finally found some clarity. And then three months of couples counseling produces some visible progress. He seems different in that room. The therapist is optimistic. Maybe a few things at home feel slightly different. Not transformed, but different enough. And hope arrives. Real hope. Because she wants things to be different. She has always wanted things to be different. And this feels like evidence that different is possible. Six months later, things have drifted back to exactly where they were, sometimes worse. And now she's not just back where she started, she's more exhausted, more demoralized, and further from the door that she was approaching. The counseling didn't just fail. It consumed the window in which she had momentum. And momentum in these situations is a precious and finite resource. And five, it can escalate danger. This is the most serious one, and I want to name it carefully. Research on intimate partner violence is consistent on one point. The period around when a woman's attempt to leave or create significant change is one of the most dangerous periods in the entire relationship. When a controlling partner senses that his control is genuinely at risk, that she might actually be done, the behavior can escalate significantly. We've all seen it in the news stories. Couples counseling can signal that she's considering leaving. The suggestion of counseling itself, especially if she's the one who initiated it, can register as a threat. Or the content of what she says in sessions can communicate how close to the edge she actually is. And that signal, picked up by someone whose primary operating concern is maintaining control, can produce an escalation that the counseling was never designed to account for. This is why domestic violence advocates and researchers are consistent in their guidance. Couples counseling is contraindicated when there's any history of physical violence and strongly inadvisable when coercive control is present even without the physical violence. This isn't because the therapist doesn't care. It's because the model itself doesn't account for this specific danger. What you were sensing in that room, the dread, the unease, the sense that something was wrong, even while things appeared to be going well, that was not paranoia. It was accurate perception. You were watching a performance and you knew because you lived with the performer that the curtain was going to come down the moment you got home. So I want to give you something concrete to work with. Because some women reading or listening to this are currently in couples counseling and wondering whether what I'm describing applies to their situation. So let me name some specific signs that the counseling may be making things worse rather than better. First up, you feel less able to speak freely over time, not more. The counseling was supposed to create a safe space for honesty, but you've started self-editing in sessions, calculating what's safe to say in front of him, anticipating how he'll respond when you get home, managing what you share so that the drive back isn't unbearable. That is not therapy working. That's the dynamic that was already at home, just moving into the therapy room. Next, he uses what you say in session and arguments at home, the specific language, the specific disclosures. You told the therapist that you feel abandoned. So is that what this is about? Said in a tone that makes it sound like a diagnostic observation, but functions like a weapon. If things that you've said in therapy are being weaponized outside of it, the therapy itself has become a source of the harm. Next, you leave sessions feeling worse about yourself, not clearer. Good therapy, any good therapy, should gradually increase your sense of agency and self-understanding. If you consistently leave couples' sessions feeling smaller, more confused, more doubtful of your own perceptions, or more responsible for his behavior than you did going in, that is important information. Next, the therapist has never asked you about your safety. A therapist working ethically with couples should screen for domestic violence. Not once as a checkbox, but genuinely, ideally in an individual session where you can speak without him present. If you have been in couples counseling for months and nobody has ever asked you privately whether you feel safe at home, that's a gap. Not necessarily because the therapist is negligent, sometimes it's just the lack of training in that specific area, but because it's information that should have been gathered. Next, he seems energized by therapy and you dread it. Pay attention to that asymmetry. In healthy couples work, both partners should probably feel some discomfort. Growth is uncomfortable. But both partners should also feel some genuine movement toward each other. If he comes out of sessions looking lighter while you come out looking more burdened, that disparity is worth examining. Who is the therapy serving in those sessions? And last, the therapist seems focused on keeping the relationship together rather than on your well-being. A good couple's therapist cares about the health of the relationship, but they should never prioritize the relationship over the safety of the people in it. If you have expressed something serious and the response has consistently been to redirect toward what the relationship needs rather than what you need, that's a concerning priority to notice. Because when couples counseling isn't the right fit, women are often pointed toward individual therapy. And that's often exactly right. But there's another option out there that many women don't fully understand, and I think the confusion about it can either lead them to dismiss it when it could genuinely help, or to pursue it when they actually need something more clinical. So let me be clear about the difference between therapy and coaching, because both can play a role in where someone ends up after leaving couples counseling or a harmful relationship. So, what therapy is. Therapy, including counseling, psychotherapy, and clinical mental health treatment, is a licensed, regulated profession. Therapists have gone through graduate level clinical training, supervised hours, and they have to pass licensing exams and are held to very specific ethical and legal standards by their licensing boards. They are legally authorized to diagnose mental health conditions, treat trauma, and work in the full clinical picture of someone's mental health history. This matters enormously in the context that we're discussing. Trauma from abuse, especially long-term emotional abuse and coercive control, is a clinical issue. Complex PTSD, anxiety, depression, the specific attachment disruptions that come from years of living in an unpredictable, threatening environment, those are not just patterns to adjust. They are injuries that require a specifically trained clinician who understands trauma, who knows how to work with a dysregulated nervous system, and who understands the particular dynamics of a coercive control well enough to avoid inadvertently reinforcing them. If you have experienced emotional abuse, I want to be direct, individual therapy with a trauma-informed clinician is the foundation. Not the only thing you may need, but the foundation. And very specifically, a therapist who understands coercive control. Because a therapist who doesn't understand these dynamics can, with the best of intentions, suggest approaches that are contraindicated in your situation. Just as couples counseling. And can cause harm when applied to the wrong context, individual therapy from someone unfamiliar with abuse dynamics can also miss what's important. Coaching, on the other hand, is an unregulated field. That's not a criticism. It's just a fact that matters for understanding what it is and what it isn't. A coach does not need a clinical license. They cannot diagnose mental health conditions. They are not bound by the same legal and ethical frameworks that licensed therapists operate within. The quality of coaching varies enormously from people with decades of relevant experience or rigorous training to people who just completed a weekend certification program to honestly people who just like to post videos online. What good coaching is designed to do is different from therapy, where therapy tends to work with the roots, healing what happened, processing trauma, understanding why the patterns formed. Coaching tends to work with the present and the forward. Where are you now? What do you want? What's getting in the way? What would it look like to build something different? Coaching is action-oriented, goal-oriented, and focused on building capacity going forward rather than processing what came before. And here is where the two complement each other. Because many women who come out of therapy, who have done the clinical work, who have processed the trauma, who have rebuilt some basic sense of their own reality, find themselves at a threshold. They understand what happened to them. They've healed significant wounds. And now they're standing in front of a future that they don't quite know how to build. The clinical level is largely done, but the practical identity level, what do I do with my life now? Work is just beginning. That's where coaching, specifically relationship coaching or life coaching with someone who deeply understands these dynamics, can be extraordinarily valuable. Not instead of therapy, not before therapy if the clinical work hasn't happened, but after or alongside it as the work shifts from healing toward building. I work on being completely transparent on here because I think it matters and because this community deserves honesty from me. I have both the education as a therapist and a relationship coach. I do both clinical work in the state of Hawaii and I do coaching work outside and separate of that. And my coaching practice, Pattern Breakers Collective, is specifically designed for women who are past the acute clinical phase and are doing the work of rebuilding their identity, their self-trust, their understanding of patterns, and their capacity for a healthy relationship. That is not a substitute for trauma therapy. I would never position it as that. But it is a specific, structured, community-supported environment for the next phase of the work, the phase where you stop surviving and start building. Therapy heals the wound. Coaching builds the life. Both are very real work. Both require the right provider. And the sequencing of it matters. Trying to build the life before the wound is treated is like trying to run on a broken leg. But staying in only wound treatment mode indefinitely without ever moving toward building is its own kind of being stuck. And that's why both are important. Now, okay, I've spent a lot of time on this episode what doesn't work. So let me spend some time on what does. Number one, individual therapy with a trauma-informed provider who understands coercive control. This is the foundation, not generic therapy, specific therapy. When you're looking for a therapist after leaving or while still navigating an abusive relationship, the questions that matter are: do you have experience working with domestic violence survivors? Do you understand coercive control? Not just physical violence, but the emotional and psychological patterns? Are you familiar with trauma bonding and what it does to a person's decision making? Are you trained in any specific modalities, EMDR, somatic approaches, trauma-focused CBT? You are allowed to ask these questions before committing to a therapist. You are allowed to interview them. You are allowed to say that this isn't quite the right fit and try someone else. Finding the right therapeutic relationship matters enormously in this work. And a therapist who is good at general couples work or anxiety treatment may not be the right fit for what you're navigating. Number two in my list of things at work, domestic violence advocacy, even if what you experience doesn't feel quote unquote bad enough. Domestic violence hotlines and local advocacy organizations exist for a much broader range of situations than most people realize. You do not have to have been physically harmed to call. You do not have to have a specific plan to call. Advocates can help you with safety planning, whether that means planning how to leave safely or planning how to stay as safely as possible while you figure out your next steps. They can help you understand your legal options. They can connect you to resources that you didn't know existed and they operate confidentially. You can find a domestic violence agency local to you or the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week at 1-800-799-7233. These resources are for you whether or not you're sure what you're experiencing qualifies. If something in your relationship doesn't feel safe, you qualify. Number three, we're going to talk about if couples counseling is being court-ordered or strongly pressured. So this is a situation that some women find themselves in, and I just really want to address this specifically. Sometimes couples counseling is ordered by a family court judge or strongly pressured by family members or presented as a condition of something important. If you are in this situation and you know or believe your relationship involves coercive control or abuse, please tell your individual therapist or a domestic violence advocate before the counseling begins. They can help you navigate this safely. There are also therapists who specialize in working within the court system and understand the specific risks involved. What you share in couples counseling is generally not confidential from your partner. He's in the room. Know that before you disclose anything. Protect accordingly. And last, let's talk about support specifically for this kind of relationship. Individual therapy is essential, but there's also something powerful about community, about being in a room, virtual or physical, with other women who understand what you've been through without you having to explain it from the beginning. Support groups for survivors of emotional abuse and coercive control exist in most areas and increasingly online. The experience of having your reality reflected back by different people who have lived something similar is genuinely different from even the best individual therapy. It provides a specific kind of validation that heals a very specific kind of wound, mostly in that isolation field. She went to couples counseling because she loved her marriage, or she loved the version of her marriage she had hoped it would become. She sat in that office and she opened herself up. She really opened herself up because she was willing to do whatever it took to make something work that she desperately wanted to work. She brought her most vulnerable self into that room. She took the risk of being honest in front of someone who has used her honesty against her before. She showed up and it didn't work. And maybe it made things worse. And maybe it gave her six more months of hope that delayed a decision she was already so close to making. And maybe she left the counseling process feeling like she had failed at one more thing. She didn't fail at it. The model wasn't designed for what she was in. She brought the right things honesty, willingness, courage, love into the wrong container. And that is not a character flaw. That is someone who tried everything she knew how to try. If you went to couples counseling hoping to save your marriage and it didn't work, I want to offer you something to consider. What you experienced in that room was real, even if the progress wasn't. The dread was real, the loneliness of watching him perform while knowing what came next was real. The grief of sitting across from the person you married and knowing in some deep place that the person the therapist was seeing and the person that you went home to were not quite the same. And that grief was real. And it deserves to be acknowledged as a specific and significant loss, not just the relationship. The hope, the specific named hope that couples counseling might be the thing that finally makes a difference. Losing that hope is real. And it belongs in your grief alongside everything else. You didn't fail at couples counseling. You applied the right intentions to the wrong tool. And knowing the difference now, knowing what the right tools actually are, that's not too late. It's the beginning of something that actually has a chance. So I want to close with the distinction that I opened with because I want to make sure that this episode lands correctly. Couples counseling is not bad. Therapy is not bad. Suggesting that a struggling relationship needs professional help is not bad. For the right relationship, one where both people are fundamentally emotionally safe to be with, where the problem is connection rather than control, where both people are genuinely invested in the health of the relationship and for everyone in it, couples work can be genuinely transformative. I've seen it, I believe in it. What I want you to take from today is something more specific. The presence of couples counseling does not mean that the work is being done. The fact that he went does not mean he's changing or that he changed. The fact that sessions felt productive does not mean that you were safe. And the fact that it didn't work does not mean that you didn't try hard enough. Your safety is not a communication problem. If what's happening in your relationship is about power and control, then the answer is not better communication skills. The answer is better safety planning, better individual support, better information about what you're actually in. And eventually, when you're ready and when it's safe to build, better tools for creating something entirely different. If this episode has made you realize that what you've been trying to address in couples counseling is actually a safety issue, please reach out to someone who specializes in exactly that. Again, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233. And it is available around the clock. These are people who understand the specific terrain that you're navigating. You don't have to figure this out alone. And if you're further along, if you've done the clinical work and you're in the phase of rebuilding rather than surviving, I want you to know this community and the Pattern Breakers Collective programs exist for exactly that phase. Not to replace therapy, to do the next thing alongside or after therapy with people who understand what you've been through and where you're trying to go. You can find all the information at Patternbreakers Collective.com. If this episode made something click for you, if it named something for you that you've been living in that you didn't have language for, please share it. With the woman who encouples counseling who comes home from every session feeling worse, with a woman whose partner uses her therapy disclosures and arguments, with a woman who has been blaming herself for the counseling not working. She needs to know this isn't her fault. And it would be great if you could leave a review wherever you listen if you haven't yet. It genuinely helps other women find these conversations when they're searching for something that they can't quite name. Until next time, the right kind of help changes everything. Make sure that you are getting the right kind of a lot of fun.