Couples Therapy: Both Separate and Together

There are many different reasons for wanting to go to couples therapy. But what most couples have in common is the desire to improve their communication. Yet, standing in the way of good communication is a major obstacle—one that many aren’t even aware of.

When we enter a romantic relationship with another person, both of us bring along our emotional baggage. This baggage has been accumulating since the day we were born and includes our emotional intelligence (EQ), experiences, traumas, behaviors, and patterns. Because we each carry different baggage, we also speak different emotional languages.

When problems arise in a relationship, it’s because we stumble around in our own and each other’s baggage—often without realizing it. In doing so, we trigger each other’s unhealed wounds, many of which were formed long before we met. As long as these wounds remain unhealed, it’s impossible to change how we react, because it’s as if the scab on the wound keeps getting ripped off again and again.

The way each of us handles problems depends entirely on the patterns we’ve learned throughout life. And our baggage keeps growing—it’s not just the baggage from childhood we carry; we also add the baggage from every relationship we’ve ever had, including all our romantic ones. It’s no wonder communication between two people can be so challenging. It can wear down the relationship and eventually lead to a breakup.

Then we meet someone new and start over with a blank slate. But there’s just one problem: that baggage—we bring it right along with us into the new relationship, like “Santa on the sled” (as we say in Norwegian). And so it keeps growing—along with the divorce statistics.

The baggage we carry will always get in the way of communication. That’s why it’s more useful to start by looking at what we’re actually bringing into the relationship. “10 tips for better communication” isn’t enough, because there’s no quick fix. In couples therapy, it’s often helpful to come together for sessions, but it can also be valuable—together with your therapist—to consider individual therapy. Because even though it’s easy to point at the other person, the only one we can truly change is ourselves. And if both partners clean up their own baggage, there’s less to trip over. Only then does communication have a real chance—because now you’re speaking the same language.

In any relationship between two adults, each partner carries 50% of the responsibility for the relationship—but each has 100% responsibility for their own feelings and their own baggage.
If both take that responsibility seriously, it’s possible to hit the full jackpot in love.
Welcome to therapy :-)