Couples therapy can be expensive, inconvenient, and occasionally uncomfortable, so if you are going to sabotage it, you should at least be efficient.
Fortunately, there are several reliable ways to spend months in therapy without changing very much. Most involve approaching therapy as a place to establish what is wrong with your partner while protecting your own version of events from excessive scrutiny.
Here is how to do it.
1. Come Prepared to Prove Your Case
If you want to make very little progress, approach couples therapy as litigation.
Prepare the chronology. Preserve the text messages. Remember exactly what was said during the argument three weeks ago and be prepared to correct your partner's account of it. If necessary, spend fifteen minutes establishing whether the offending comment occurred before or after dinner.
The details may be important, particularly when partners disagree about consequential events. The problem begins when establishing the historical record becomes more important than understanding why the same conflict keeps happening.
Couples can spend an extraordinary amount of therapy arguing over whose account is more accurate. Each person assumes that once the therapist understands the facts, the therapist will reach the appropriate conclusion about who caused the problem.
This places the therapist in the role of judge and turns each partner into opposing counsel. It also provides an excellent way to avoid examining the interaction itself.
If you can prove that your partner started the argument, you never have to consider what you did with the argument once it started.
2. Make Sure the Therapist Understands That Your Partner Is the Problem
Most people enter couples therapy with legitimate complaints about their partner. Some of those complaints involve behavior that genuinely needs to change.
You can sabotage the process by making your willingness to examine yourself contingent on your partner changing first.
Your anger would improve if your partner were less critical. Your withdrawal would stop if your partner were less demanding. You would be more affectionate if your partner were warmer. You could communicate more openly if your partner responded differently when you tried.
There may be considerable truth in all of these statements. Relationships are interactive, and one person's behavior affects the other.
They also create a perfect stalemate.
If each person requires the other to change before reconsidering their own behavior, neither has any reason to move. Both can remain entirely focused on a variable they do not control.
One of the more difficult parts of couples therapy is examining what you contribute to a pattern while still believing that your complaints about your partner are valid. Those two things can coexist. Avoiding that possibility makes therapy much easier and considerably less useful.
3. Spend the Session Explaining Why Your Reaction Was Justified
Most damaging behavior makes sense in context.
You raised your voice because your partner would not listen. You shut down because the conversation had become unreasonable. You said something cruel because you had been provoked. You concealed something because telling the truth would have caused an enormous fight.
An explanation can help a couple understand how an interaction developed. It becomes an obstacle when explanation is used to eliminate responsibility.
Intent and context are relevant, but your partner experienced the behavior rather than the argument you have constructed in its defense. If every conversation about impact becomes a discussion of why you were entitled to react as you did, your partner eventually learns that raising a concern will require defending the legitimacy of having been hurt by it.
A particularly effective way to keep this going is to apologize and immediately explain yourself: “I'm sorry I said that, but you have to understand what you were doing.”
The apology has now become another opportunity to prosecute the case.
4. Use the Therapist for Appeals
If your partner does not agree with you at home, bring the dispute to therapy and ask the therapist to settle it.
“Can you tell him that this isn't normal?”
“Wouldn't you agree that she is being unreasonable?”
“Isn't that avoidant behavior?”
This strategy works particularly well when the therapist has previously said something that can be quoted selectively in support of your position.
A couples therapist will sometimes tell one partner clearly that a behavior is harmful, dishonest, contemptuous, controlling, or otherwise unacceptable. Neutrality does not require pretending that every behavior is equally defensible.
The larger purpose of couples therapy, however, is rarely served by turning the therapist into the relationship's permanent appellate court. If every disagreement eventually requires an outside ruling, the couple becomes better at presenting arguments and no better at resolving them.
You may win the point and lose another opportunity to understand your partner.
5. Learn the Vocabulary and Use It Against Each Other
Therapy will give you useful language. Misuse it immediately.
Your partner is “triggered.” Their request is “controlling.” Their disagreement with your recollection is “gaslighting.” Their need for space is “avoidant attachment.” Their desire to finish the conversation is “anxious attachment.” A boundary becomes anything you want the other person to stop doing.
Clinical language is particularly effective in an argument because it allows criticism to sound psychologically informed.
It also gives the person using it a position of authority. You are no longer disagreeing with your partner; you are explaining your partner to themselves.
Very few people become more receptive after being diagnosed by the person with whom they are currently arguing.
If a concept from therapy is useful, apply it first to your own behavior. This is admittedly less satisfying.
6. Perform Beautifully During the Session
It is entirely possible to become very good at couples therapy without becoming much better at being a couple.
You can learn to speak calmly for fifty minutes. You can reflect what your partner said, identify the underlying feeling, and produce an excellent validation. You may become so proficient that the therapist could use the exchange for training purposes.
Then you can return home and resume normal operations.
Insight developed during therapy has limited value unless something changes between sessions. If you understand that you become defensive when you feel criticized, the relevant moment occurs on Thursday night when your partner says something that sounds critical. Recognizing the pattern the following Tuesday is useful; responding differently on Thursday is the work.
Couples therapy is particularly easy to intellectualize because understanding a pattern can feel remarkably similar to changing it.
They are separated by what you do the next time the pattern occurs.
7. Save Everything for Therapy
Once you have a couples therapist, you can stop attempting difficult conversations on your own.
If something happens Wednesday, make a note and save it for Monday. If your partner tries to discuss it before then, explain that the subject would be better handled with the therapist present.
There are situations in which this is entirely appropriate. Highly escalated conflicts, serious disclosures, questions involving safety, and conversations that repeatedly become destructive may require professional structure.
Ordinary disagreements cannot all wait for a third person.
A functioning relationship eventually requires two people who can raise a concern, tolerate some discomfort, clarify misunderstandings, apologize, negotiate differences, and recover from conflict without professional supervision.
Therapy should increase that capacity rather than replace it.
8. Keep Score
Make sure every change is reciprocal and simultaneous.
If you initiate affection twice, verify that your partner does the same. If you apologize, expect an apology of comparable quality. If you make an effort for three days and your partner fails on the fourth, take this as evidence that your effort was misplaced.
Scorekeeping protects against the terrifying possibility that you might contribute something to the relationship without an immediate guarantee of return.
It also converts improvement into a series of transactions.
Reciprocity is important, and chronically one-sided relationships deserve serious examination. In a distressed relationship, however, change is rarely synchronized. One person may understand something sooner, regulate themselves better during a particular argument, or take the first risk.
If every constructive action requires simultaneous matching behavior, both people can wait indefinitely for the other to go first.
9. Confuse Being Understood With Being Agreed With
This one can consume months.
Tell your partner how you feel and ask them to understand. If they accurately describe your perspective but continue to disagree with your conclusion, explain it again.
Continue until agreement is achieved.
Many couples become trapped here because they experience disagreement as evidence that they have not been heard. The conversation therefore continues long after both people understand each other's positions.
Your partner can understand why you want to spend the money and still think you should save it. You can understand why your partner wants more time with family and still want less. Two intelligent people with access to the same information can reach different conclusions.
If understanding requires agreement, some conflicts have no possible resolution.
10. Wait for Your Partner to Become Easier to Love
You will probably have legitimate reasons for being angry, disappointed, lonely, sexually disconnected, mistrustful, or exhausted. Your partner probably has some too.
Wait until those problems are resolved before becoming curious, affectionate, accountable, generous, vulnerable, or receptive.
This is one of the safest ways to ensure that neither person changes.
Long-term relationships can develop a state of mutual withholding in which each partner is waiting for evidence that it is safe to soften. Both people can explain exactly why the other should go first, and both explanations may be persuasive.
Eventually, the question becomes whether being right about the origin of the distance is more important than doing something about the distance that exists now.
How Couples Therapy Becomes Useful
Most couples who sabotage therapy are not consciously trying to sabotage anything. They are protecting themselves.
Proving the case protects against blame. Defensiveness protects against shame. Withdrawal protects against escalation. Scorekeeping protects against being taken advantage of. Demanding that the other person change first protects against taking a risk that may not be reciprocated.
Those protections usually developed for understandable reasons, and they can still prevent the very change both people say they want.
Productive couples therapy requires the ability to hold two pieces of information at once: your partner may need to change in important ways, and there is still useful work for you to do. The couples who make progress become increasingly interested in the part of the interaction they can influence directly, including what they say, what they avoid, how they respond under stress, what they are willing to acknowledge, and whether they can remain engaged when the conversation becomes uncomfortable.
If you spend the entire course of couples therapy building a better case against your partner, you may eventually leave with a very persuasive case.
You will probably leave with the same relationship.
Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT practices in Hermosa Beach and works with clients online across California. Learn more about couples therapy and couples intensives, or request a consultation.
