Weaponizing Couples Therapy: When Therapy Becomes Another Place to Fight
Couples sometimes enter therapy hoping the therapist will confirm what they already believe: My partner is the problem, and I need you to make them understand that.
That expectation is understandable when someone feels deeply hurt or has spent years trying unsuccessfully to resolve the same problem. It becomes a problem when therapy is used to build a case against a partner rather than examine the relationship accurately.
Couples therapy can then become another setting for the same power struggle the couple has at home.
Recruiting the Therapist to Your Side
One of the clearest signs is an effort to establish an alliance with the therapist against the other partner.
A person may present a detailed account of everything their partner has done wrong and wait for the therapist to deliver a verdict. They may repeatedly ask whether a behavior is “normal,” whether their partner is a narcissist, or whether the therapist agrees that any reasonable person would feel the same way.
The request underneath these questions is often: Tell my partner that I am right.
A couples therapist has to resist that invitation while remaining willing to make clear clinical distinctions. Neutrality does not require pretending that every conflict is symmetrical. An affair, financial deception, coercion, violence, or serious substance problem requires appropriate accountability.
Most couples, however, also need help understanding what each person contributes to the patterns that continue between them.
Therapy Language Can Become Ammunition
Psychological language has entered ordinary conversation, which has given people useful ways to describe their experiences and a large vocabulary for diagnosing each other.
Terms such as gaslighting, narcissism, trauma response, attachment style, boundaries, and triggered can clarify an experience when they are used accurately. They can also end a conversation.
“You're gaslighting me” may replace a discussion about two genuinely different recollections. “That's my boundary” may be used to describe an attempt to control someone else's behavior. An attachment label can become a permanent explanation for everything a partner does.
Clinical concepts are most useful when they increase understanding. Using them as verdicts can make disagreement almost impossible because one person's interpretation acquires the authority of a diagnosis.
Selective Accounts Create Distorted Conclusions
Every person tells a story from a point of view. Couples therapy becomes difficult when relevant information is consistently omitted, minimized, or presented without the context necessary to understand it.
A partner might describe the other's anger without mentioning the affair that preceded it, or describe intrusive questioning after an affair without acknowledging months of continued deception. Someone may report that their spouse monitors spending while omitting substantial undisclosed debt. A partner may describe the other as controlling around alcohol without disclosing how much they are drinking.
Context allows the therapist to understand what is happening accurately.
A therapist working from incomplete information can inadvertently reinforce a distorted account of the relationship.
Accountability Cannot Apply to Only One Person
Some couples spend considerable energy examining one partner.
There may initially be a good reason. After infidelity, active substance misuse, financial deception, or another serious breach, one person's behavior may require immediate attention and disproportionate accountability.
Over time, however, productive couples work requires each person to examine what is theirs to address.
A partner who can describe the other's deficiencies in extraordinary detail but has little to say about their own behavior will have difficulty making use of couples therapy. The same is true of someone who agrees readily with observations about the relationship but consistently explains why none of them apply to their own conduct.
Self-examination is one of the basic requirements of the work.
The Therapist Has to Manage the Process
A couples therapist should recognize when sessions are becoming organized around prosecution and defense.
I may interrupt when a long account of a partner's failures stops producing useful information, ask for missing context, or redirect a question that asks me to decide who is right. I may ask someone to describe their own behavior during an interaction before returning to what their partner did.
I also pay attention to what happens between partners during the conversation: interruption, contempt, withdrawal, intimidation, repeated correction, attempts to control the narrative, and difficulty tolerating a partner's account when it differs from one's own.
The purpose is accuracy. I need enough information to understand the relationship without allowing either partner to control the entire account of it.
A Therapist Should Take Sides on Certain Behaviors
Couples therapy should not turn every problem into a shared communication failure.
Violence, coercive control, threats, serious deception, and abuse require clear assessment. Couples therapy may be inappropriate or unsafe when one partner cannot speak freely without fearing consequences afterward.
Infidelity and financial deception also require specific accountability. The betrayed partner's reaction to discovering an affair should not be treated as equivalent to the decision to have and conceal the affair. A couple can eventually examine broader problems in the relationship without using those problems to distribute responsibility for the betrayal.
Good couples work requires the ability to distinguish mutual patterns from individual actions.
When Therapy Itself Enters the Argument
Couples can begin taking the therapist home with them.
“Even Regina said you withdraw.”
“The therapist agrees that you need boundaries.”
“You didn't tell her what really happened.”
“Wait until I tell her about this next week.”
Once therapy becomes evidence in arguments outside the session, the work can become adversarial very quickly.
I would want to know that this is happening. Therapy is considerably less useful when partners spend the week collecting evidence for the next session or invoking the therapist's authority to win disagreements at home.
What happens between sessions is part of the clinical information.
What If You Feel Blamed in Couples Therapy?
Feeling challenged does not necessarily mean that therapy has become biased. Effective couples therapy will sometimes be uncomfortable, and there may be periods when one partner's behavior receives more attention because it requires more attention.
A better question is whether you can disagree openly with the therapist and your partner without being dismissed, punished, or presumed wrong.
Tell the therapist directly if you believe important context is missing, you feel consistently cast as the problem, or statements from therapy are being used against you at home. A competent therapist should be willing to examine the concern rather than becoming defensive about it.
If you cannot speak freely during or after sessions because you fear your partner's reaction, tell the therapist privately if it is safe to do so. That raises a different clinical issue and may change whether conjoint therapy is appropriate.
Couples Therapy Requires a Different Kind of Argument
People do not need to enter couples therapy calm, objective, or equally ready to take responsibility. Many arrive angry and convinced that their partner needs to change.
The work requires enough willingness to discover where your account may be incomplete.
That includes tolerating information you do not like, acknowledging behavior you would rather explain away, hearing how your actions affect another person, and allowing your partner to describe an experience differently from the way you remember it.
A therapist can identify patterns, insist on accountability, interrupt destructive exchanges, and challenge distorted narratives. The therapist cannot make productive couples therapy out of a process whose only acceptable outcome is proving that one partner was right all along.
Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT provides couples therapy in Hermosa Beach and by telehealth throughout California. Her work includes high-conflict relationships, infidelity and betrayal, substance-related relationship problems, discernment counseling, and couples in crisis.
