When to Get Help

This course is education, not therapy. It can help two people who are trying to reach each other do that better. Some problems need more help than a course can give, and some aren't about communication at all. This page explains how to tell the difference and where to turn.

For yourself: if you're dealing with depression, anxiety, drinking or drug use, or grief, an individual therapist or your doctor is the right place to start. That's true even if the relationship is where the pain shows up.

When a relationship needs more than a course

Consider couples therapy if any of these sound familiar:

• The same fight keeps happening for months, and neither of you can get out of it, even after trying the skills in this course.
• Contempt has crept in: eye-rolling, mockery, name-calling, a feeling that your partner looks down on you or you look down on them.
• One or both of you has mostly stopped trying, or you feel more like roommates than partners.
• There's been a serious breach of trust, such as an affair, hidden debts or a major lie, and you want to try to rebuild.
• A big life change (a new baby, a job loss, an illness, a death in the family) has knocked the relationship off balance.

Couples therapy works best when it starts before things become desperate. The relationship researcher John Gottman estimates that unhappy couples typically wait years before getting help. Going early is a sign that you care about the relationship, not a sign that it has failed.

Finding a couples therapist:

• Look for a therapist trained specifically in couples work, not just individual therapy. Two approaches with good research support are Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and the Gottman Method. Both have directories of trained therapists: the ICEEFT "Find a Therapist" directory at iceeft.com and the Gottman Referral Network at gottman.com.
• General directories such as Psychology Today's therapist finder let you filter by specialty, insurance and location.
• Many therapists offer a free 15-minute phone call first. Use it to ask about their experience with problems like yours.

When it isn't a communication problem

Communication skills don't fix abuse. If any of the following is happening, the problem isn't that the two of you communicate differently, and working harder on communication won't solve it:

• Your partner threatens you, frightens you, or hurts you physically.
• Your partner controls you: checks your phone, controls the money, decides who you can see, or tracks where you go.
• Your partner isolates you from friends and family.
• You find yourself walking on eggshells, changing what you say and do mainly to avoid their reaction.
• You're pressured or forced into sexual activity.

Abuse happens to men and to women, in every kind of relationship. Specialists call a pattern of domination like this coercive control, and it can be dangerous even when there's no physical violence.