13 signs you should fire your couples counselor
Abusive, entitled partners can weaponize couples counseling. If your therapist does any of these things, fire them right now.
Therapy is a powerful tool for personal transformation. None of us is perfect. We all carry baggage. We all have unhealthy communication styles and relationship habits. And if you are willing to take a fearless look at yourself and use the insights you gain to spur lasting change, therapy can change your life.
It can also ruin it. Especially if you’re in couples therapy with a partner who is determined not to change and eager to blame you for everything. Far too many couples therapists have internalized sexist or otherwise harmful values. This undermines their ability to disrupt sexist patterns in relationships, and can turn couples counseling into a tool of abuse.
Counseling requires vulnerability. When you make yourself vulnerable to someone who doesn’t actually want an equitable, mutually respectful relationship, you can accelerate patterns of abuse. And even well-meaning couples counselors can enable this behavior.
Here are 13 signs it’s time to move on from your therapist:
They tell you to do things they don’t demand of your partner. For instance, they instruct you that you should thank them for any small effort at household labor, while taking for granted that you should do these things without any gratitude at all.
They frame things in terms of the way women “just are” and men “just are.” Talking about gender is vital, because sexism and gender conditioning affects all relationships between men and women. But if they excuse things with gender, this is something else entirely. For example, “Men need physical intimacy before they can have emotional intimacy” or “Men and women just have different strengths.”
Your therapist treats their personal values or opinions as fact. For example, they tell you that the only way to get a baby to sleep through the night is to use cry it out, that gentle parenting is coddling your child, or that abuse justified under the guise of religion is acceptable. A good therapist helps you live better consistent with your own values. They don’t impose different values on you and pretend those values represent universal truth.
Your therapist justifies abusive or unkind behavior in any way. This includes justifying household labor inequality.
Your therapist conflates basic relationships requirements and nice extras. No one owes another person sex. But all partners owe one another basic respect and decency.
Your therapist attempts to impose social mores on your relationship, rather than listening to your values. For example, if you are polyamorous your therapist tells you you should be monogamous. Or if you have defined cheating as looking at pornography, your therapist insists that “all men” look at porn.
Your therapist only listens and empathizes. They never direct your attention to an issue or hold anyone accountable.
Your therapist allows your partner to weaponize your insecurities against you in therapy, or allows your partner to abuse you in therapy without intervening.
Your therapist validates everything, and never pushes back on anything.
Your therapist is unable to give you a treatment plan, to tell you what to expect, or to explain how you will know things are improving.
You have been in therapy for longer than a year, and nothing has gotten better.
Therapy replicates and reinforces the negative patterns in your relationship.
Your partner weaponizes what you say in therapy, and your therapist does not intervene.
You can fire your couples counselor for any other reason, too. Therapy is not a moral obligation. If your relationship makes you unhappy, you do not have to prove that it is abusive, indefinitely attend couples counseling, or try a specific length of time. You do not have to convince your partner that you deserve to leave.
Don’t waste your one and only life spending money on an enterprise that is doomed to failure. Attend couples counseling only if doing so holds your partner accountable and actually gets results.
Zawn, once again, this is SO GOOD and I'm so glad you wrote this. With my first husband, we had a therapist who VERY clearly was trying to help us stay together - like it was their personal mission - as opposed to looking at what was best for us. Then we went to a Rabbi at the neighborhood temple and he literally said "This marriage is going to be very, very hard to save. If you want to try to make it work, I would love to help you, but I want you to know the challenges ahead of you and know that it is OK if it doesn't feel healthy to keep trying" (among other things). And we were SO released and relieved. We didn't have kids, so it was a simpler proposition - but we left there with a plan and have remained friends. We even drove to the Paralegal together to file our papers and then grabbed a coffee after.
I wish people would consider couples counseling at the beginning of their relationship in order to establish a healthy and equitable foundation, not after they realize the house is on fire. At the point where most couples consider counseling, they should be looking at divorce lawyers.