There Are No Proven Ways to Help Couples Thrive

Shira Hearn

Mar 16

3 min read

Updated: 18 hours ago

This page used to be a list of proven ways to help couples thrive. I took it down, because I do not believe it, and I would rather have a smaller website than a dishonest one.

Here is what is wrong with the phrase.

"Proven" is doing something dishonest

Nothing on those lists is proven. Communicate openly, express gratitude, make time for each other, keep dreaming together — these are descriptions of couples who are already doing well. They are the symptoms of connection, presented as the cause of it.

Reading them when your marriage is in trouble is like reading a list of habits of wealthy people when you cannot pay rent. Technically accurate. Useless at the specific moment you needed it.

And there is a cost to it, which nobody mentions. Couples read the list, try earnestly for a fortnight, notice nothing has changed, and draw the only available conclusion: that they must be the exception. That whatever is wrong with them is worse than the ordinary problems these articles are written for.

They are almost never the exception. They are running a pattern that generic advice cannot reach.

What does have evidence behind it

Something does, and it is worth being precise rather than promotional about it.

Emotionally Focused Therapy has the strongest research base of any couples approach. The figures often quoted — roughly 70 to 75 percent of couples moving from distress to recovery, around 90 percent showing significant improvement — come from early research syntheses led by Dr Sue Johnson and colleagues. They are real findings from real studies, and they come from particular samples under particular conditions, which is why I would rather cite them with that caveat attached than print them in bold with an exclamation mark. The longer version, with sources, is here: EFT and why it matters.

What the evidence supports is not a list of behaviours. It is a specific claim: that most recurring conflict is about whether you can still reach each other, and that the loop preventing it can be interrupted.

The uncomfortable part

There is no version of this that you can do entirely from an article, including this one.

If the pattern between you is mild, generic advice may well be enough, and you should take it and stop reading therapist websites at midnight. If you have been having the same argument for six years, no amount of gratitude journalling is going to touch it, and continuing to try is mostly a way of postponing the decision.

You already know which of those you are.

What I do

Emotionally Focused Therapy, couples exclusively. I can usually describe your particular loop back to you in the first session, which most couples find unsettling for about ninety seconds and then a considerable relief. the pursuer-withdrawer cycle is the most common shape it takes.

Sessions run 100 to 110 minutes — the mini-intensive, the only format I offer — at $180, private pay, in person at my office in Webb City, MO.

More on how I work: couples therapy in Joplin.

Call or text 417-768-9089 · shira@radicalrelationshiptransformation.com