My Goals for Couples Therapy Go Beyond Not Fighting

Shira Hearn

Oct 1

8 min read

Updated: Oct 5

Home › Blog › My Goals for Couples Therapy

By Shira Hearn, LMFT | Radical Relationship Transformation

I’m greedy when it comes to what I want for the couples I work with.

Getting you to stop fighting is part of the job. Of course I want that. If every conversation has the potential to ruin your evening, a little peace would be lovely. You should be able to ask a question in your own kitchen without wondering whether you’ve just committed the next three hours to an argument.

But I’m not satisfied with getting your relationship into neutral.

I want you to enjoy each other. To talk easily. To bring something up without rehearsing it in the car first. I want you to know how to find your way back when a conversation goes badly, and eventually to recognize where it’s heading early enough to change course.

And I want us to deal with the things that still hurt. The things you’ve technically discussed but have never really repaired.

My goals for couples therapy are better communication, more emotional connection, a way out of recurring fights, the ability to catch conflict before it escalates, and repair for past hurts. At Radical Relationship Transformation, those are the changes I want us to work toward together. They go well beyond “we haven’t fought this week.”

I want you to feel at ease and emotionally connected

A quiet house can mean different things.

Maybe you’re more comfortable together. You’re understanding each other better, and small frustrations are staying small. That’s wonderful.

Or maybe you’ve figured out which subjects you’re allowed to discuss. The kids. Dinner. Whether the dog has been fed. Everything else has been quietly removed from the menu because it costs too much to bring it up.

You can get very good at living that way. You can be polite, efficient, and deeply lonely in the same house.

If you feel like roommates, I want us to make room for the closeness you miss. Being good at running a household together is useful. I also want you to feel wanted, to reach for each other, and to have something to talk about besides whose turn it is to buy milk.

If you tell me you’re fighting less, I want to know what has become possible between you. Are you talking more freely? Is there affection? Can you tell your partner you’ve had a terrible day and let them care about you? Can you be a little ridiculous together?

I want there to be room for both of you in the relationship, including the parts that need something.

That means being able to say, “I could really use some time with you,” without feeling pathetic for asking. It means your partner can hear that request without immediately feeling accused of failing you. It means a tired face can be a tired face, rather than the first piece of evidence in a case that your partner no longer wants to be married.

Ease is an ambitious treatment goal. I want the ordinary experience of being together to feel good enough that you actually want more of it.

I want you to find your way out of recurring fights

Even when therapy is going well, you can still get caught.

You’re tired. Your partner says something badly. You hear the criticism you were already expecting. They see your expression and prepare their defense. Suddenly you’re both arguing with the version of each other you know from your worst moments.

I want you to have a way out of that.

In the middle of a fight, each of you may be very clear about what the other person is doing. You can explain their tone, their timing, and the deeply irritating look on their face. Recognizing your own contribution is harder, especially when you’re hurt.

That is some of the work we do together. We slow things down enough to understand what happens inside each of you and how you respond.

Perhaps you push harder because your partner seems to be disappearing. Perhaps you go quiet because you’re convinced that whatever you say will make it worse. Then the pushing makes it harder to speak, and the silence makes it harder to stop pushing. You can read more about why the same fight keeps happening.

I want you to recognize that while there is still a chance to reach each other.

It might sound like, “I’m getting louder because I don’t think you understand how much this matters to me.”

Or, “I’m going quiet because I feel like I’ve already failed this conversation. I’m trying to work out what to say.”

Those words need to be true. Memorizing a nice sentence will only get you so far. I want you to understand yourself well enough to say something honest, and to understand your partner well enough to hear it.

That is what I mean by healthy communication in a relationship: you can say what you feel and need, listen long enough to understand your partner, and disagree without making it dangerous to be honest. You can also take responsibility and repair things when you get it wrong. Nobody needs to deliver a flawless speech.

Sometimes finding your way out means taking a break and agreeing when you’ll come back. Sometimes it means catching a hurtful comment and owning it before you spend twenty minutes defending it.

The issue may still need sorting out. But I want you to be able to stop injuring each other while you sort it out.

I want you to see the fight coming

As that understanding grows, I want you to start catching things earlier.

You know the moment. A particular tone. A question that feels loaded. The urge to say, “Well, you always…” The sudden decision that there is absolutely no point in explaining yourself.

That’s where I want you to have more choice.

Perhaps you notice that you’re about to turn disappointment into an accusation. You wanted time together, but “You’re always on your phone” is what’s about to come out.

I want you to be able to catch that and say what you were actually hoping for.

Perhaps your partner looks upset and you immediately feel the need to explain why you haven’t done anything wrong. I want you to be able to get curious about what happened before you launch the defense.

You might even be able to say, “I think we’re about to have our fight.”

There can be something surprisingly tender about recognizing it together. You both know this argument. You know where it goes and how you feel afterward. I want you to be able to help each other stay out of it while still having the conversation you need to have.

Avoiding an argument by swallowing everything that matters to you would take us straight back to neutral. The goal is to make difficult subjects more possible to discuss.

I want us to repair past hurts and rebuild trust

This part matters enormously to me.

You can get better at handling today and still carry a great deal of pain from what happened before.

Perhaps there was an affair. Perhaps your partner wasn’t there during a time when you desperately needed them. Perhaps years of criticism or dismissal have left you reluctant to offer much of yourself anymore.

There may be a particular conversation you keep returning to because something in it still feels unfinished.

I want us to make room for that.

“Why are you bringing this up again?” is a question I want us to understand. What is still hurting? What has your partner been trying to get you to understand? What happens when they try?

An apology can be a beginning. Repair asks more of both people, particularly the person who caused the hurt. It asks them to understand the impact, take responsibility for what they did, and respond differently over time.

It also asks for enough room that the hurt person can speak without having to manage their partner’s defensiveness or rush to reassure them.

I want your partner to be able to hear, “I felt completely alone when that happened,” and stay with you long enough to understand what that was like. If every attempt to talk about it ends with you comforting them, there is still work to do.

And if the hurtful behavior is continuing, we have to address that directly. A better conversation cannot make up for an injury that keeps happening.

I can’t erase your history, and I won’t decide when you should be finished hurting. What I want is for you to have a different experience together when you talk about it, supported by changes you can actually see outside the therapy room.

Forgiveness, if it comes, belongs to you. It is not something you owe me so I can consider therapy a success.

How will we know couples therapy is helping?

I want us to be able to point to what is changing in your actual life. “Things seem better” is a start. What, specifically, is better?

Perhaps an argument that used to consume the evening now ends with you understanding each other and returning to the issue. Perhaps you can ask for reassurance without starting a fight, or hear disappointment without shutting down. Perhaps you can talk about an old hurt and feel that your partner understands why it still matters.

I also want to know whether you are enjoying each other more. Are you initiating affection? Laughing? Bringing up something difficult because you trust that there is room for it? Those are examples of the progress I care about, alongside fewer hurtful arguments.

We can make your treatment goals concrete by naming the situations you want to handle differently and returning to those examples together. Both of your experiences matter. A quieter week does not count for much if one of you has simply given up trying to be heard.

There is no fixed number of sessions I can promise will get you there. I want us to judge progress by changes you can recognize and use outside therapy, and to talk openly about what still feels stuck.

I want these changes to belong to you

Ultimately, I want you to be able to do this at home.

I want you to have the difficult conversation on a Tuesday evening when I’m nowhere around. To notice when your partner is reaching for you, even if they’re doing it awkwardly. To repair a bad moment before it takes over the whole weekend.

That is part of why I work with Emotionally Focused Therapy. In our sessions, I want to help you get close enough to the feelings underneath the argument that you can share them with each other. I want you to experience what happens when your partner understands something they used to miss, and when you can respond to them in a way that helps them stay close.

We work on that together until more of it becomes available to you in your own life.

Your goals matter here, too. I’ll ask what each of you wants from therapy and what would make the work worthwhile. My being greedy does not mean I get to dictate your relationship or keep moving the finish line.

It means I’m interested in how much better being together could feel.

If you arrive exhausted and all you can imagine asking for is a week without a fight, we can start there. I’ll take that relief seriously.

And I’ll be interested in what you want once you have a little room to breathe. Whether you miss laughing together. Whether you want to feel wanted again. Whether there’s something you’ve been afraid to ask for because hoping for it feels too risky.

I want there to be room for those things in our work.

I’m greedy for you to have a relationship you can actually enjoy living in.

Work with me

I’m Shira Hearn, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT), and I work exclusively with couples at Radical Relationship Transformation in Webb City, serving the Joplin area. Learn about couples therapy at my practice or read what to expect at your first couples session.

Sessions are 90 minutes at $250, in person, with both partners present.