You have been with your significant other for a few years, and it’s the partnership you’ve always wanted. Yet, you feel like there are a few certain areas that you find yourself struggling with. A fight you always have, a pain that you haven’t really processed, or a topic you constantly avoid.
You think you could use help, but you aren’t sure about couples therapy for young couples- is it depressing to need therapy this soon?
Consider if you shifted this perspective. Instead of looking at the start of therapy as a warning sign, consider how fortunate you are to be living in a time where there are couples therapists all over the country that are trained to help people with exactly what you’re struggling with.
A lot of the reaction or resistance you might feel is just due to judgements and perceptions you’ve picked up throughout your life and from society. They don’t actually mean anything.
Starting preventative couples therapy is not a signal of defeat. However, not addressing your issues, communications breakdowns, and hurts will only lead to further problems. The reality is, avoiding them means that they both continue to live on in both of you, no matter how hard you try to ignore them.
Therapy is exciting, rejuvenating, and hopeful. It will give you a nonjudgemental space to breakdown what’s been going on from both perspectives. And there is no better time to start then now. In this post, I’m going to walk through all the reasons you should start couples therapy when you are young.
Reasons Not To Go To Couples Therapy
As a couples therapist, I almost always recommend therapy. I believe whole-heartedly in its potential to create meaningful change, deepen connection, and help people feel more understood in their relationships.
Yet, there are some situations where couples therapy might not be the right step, at least not right now. So before we talk about all of the reasons you should start therapy, let’s address a few that you should not:
- One or both partners isn’t open to participating or doesn’t feel emotionally safe enough to engage in the process.
- There is ongoing abuse, intimidation, infidelity, or fear of retaliation. Safety must come first, and couples therapy isn’t the place to resolve those dynamics.
- Untreated substance use or severe mental health struggles are actively interfering with the ability to communicate or regulate emotions.
- One partner has already emotionally checked out or made a decision to end the relationship, making the goals of therapy misaligned.
- The intention is to “fix” the other person rather than understand and shift shared relational patterns.
If any of these situations resonate, it doesn’t mean therapy is off the table completely or forever. Instead, it might mean a different type of support (e.g., individual therapy, trauma therapy, etc.) is needed first.
Couples Therapy for Young Couples- Why You Should Start Before Things are Bad
Beginning therapy early in a relationship isn’t only about fixing problems. It’s about creating a strong foundation to support you in the long-run. Here are some of the benefits of couples therapy for young couples.
Break Unhelpful Patterns Early
While you might think it makes sense to wait until things are really bad before you start therapy, think about this:
Imagine you are experiencing some ankle pain. You don’t really think much of it, and you figure that you shouldn’t be suffering ankle pain at this age. So you keep going- walking, running, dancing on your ankle. But the more you do, the more it hurts. When you finally go to the doctor, you learn you had a fracture from the start, only now, it’s much worse and will require you to be totally immobile for a period of time.
Relationships are the same way. Ignoring the pains does not heal them; rather, it makes them much worse over time. Adding judgement instead of being open to where you need support won’t do you any favors.
It is much harder to work through problems when you have been living in them for over half of your life. Entering couples therapy when you are still young, before the patterns have become engrained in your habits, will make it easier for you both to do something different.
Whether you are in your 20s, 30s, or 40s, dating, cohabitating, or living together, you are sure to benefit from building out good habits from the start.
Find a Communication Pattern that Works
Therapy will help you identify and break unhelpful patterns before they become your normal. They will also help you to replace those patterns with ones that are effective, functional, and healthy for both people involved.
Couples have ways of communicating with one another that reflect their own relationship histories and attachment styles. It’s pretty rare for two people of different backgrounds to meet, join in an intimate relationship, and communicate in a way that is fully effective to the other, right away.
This couples cycle guide will help you have early conversations with your partner to figure out what you have been doing and how you move toward a communication style that works for you both.
Discover the Meaning of Your Conflicts + Heal from them
Working with a couples therapist will help you and your partner understand past conflicts and hurts.
Maybe there are small things that have happened that you never even felt like you should bring up. Perhaps there are bigger fights that you’ve had that you both want to leave behind, even though you still don’t really understand what happened yet.
A therapist will give you the safe space you both need to process what these events were like for you, how they impacted you, and how they impacted your relationship.
Counseling will also give you the chance to process your own emotions and share them with your partner, creating the ultimate healing experience.
Build Greater Intimacy
As you enhance your communication and heal past wounds, you are bound to feel more closely intimate to your partner.
If you’ve ever been in individual counseling, you know how personal and transformative it is. Couples therapy is next-level; it becomes a naturally intimacy-building space as both partners open themselves up to one another in a structured, non-blaming, honest way.
Guided by your therapist, as you share with your partner, both about how your own past and this relationship has impacted you, you will learn how to develop a secure attachment, and how to talk about sex with your partner.
This secure base will become the greatest asset your relationship has, giving you both a foundation of trust that allows you to feel supported as an individual and safety to explore sexually.
A lot of relationships get started without this proper foundation, which makes them even more susceptible to hurt and dysfunction in the long run. Setting yourselves up with a secure base is the ultimate way to protect your relationship from breaking (e.g. affairs, deceit, etc.) in the future.
Learn About your Partner Before Making a Life-Long Commitment
You are going to learn a lot about your partner as you move through life together. It is inevitable that people grow and change over time.
Equally valuable is learning as much as you can about the person in front of you before you vow to share your entire life together.
Therapy is a space to explore the inner-workings of your mind, the way you express emotions, the way you experience others, and the actions you take in response to your thoughts and emotions.
This is all really important information to have about a partner before you decide to spend your life together, make sacrifices for each other, have kids together, and more.
Establish a Pattern for Dealing with Challenges in the Future
There is no such thing as a conflict- free relationship or marriage. Humans are too complex for that to be true. (Remember, being silent about things that hurt you is not the same as being conflict-free.)
Therapy is going to guide you to understand your tendencies, the parts of you that are more vulnerable to getting hurt by your partner, and the communication patterns that work.
All of these insights and understanding, coupled with the repeated communication practice in sessions to rewire your habits, will equip you to handle difficult times that come up in the future, because they will. But now, you have each other to get through anything you face.
Build Adaptive Relationship Habits
By starting therapy early, couples establish healthy habits and relationship rituals like weekly check-ins, shared values discussions, or repair conversations after conflict.
These small, consistent practices build trust, emotional safety, and a sense of “team”, all of which help prevent miscommunication from becoming disconnection. These intentional practices help prevent small misunderstandings from consolidating into entrenched patterns .
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