Most people think couples therapy for older couples is not a thing. Newlyweds learn to communicate each other’s language. Parents are overwhelmed by toddlers. Maybe a couple in their forties somewhere are trying to save a marriage before the kids notice.
But some of the most meaningful work I do is with couples in their sixties, seventies, and eighties.
What Brings Older Couples to Therapy
Which pattern is running your relationship?
Take the free three minute quiz and meet the creature behind the cycle you keep getting stuck in.
The same thing that brings everyone else: suffering.
Answer:
A couple in my office last week sat as far apart on my couch as physically
possible, separated by thirty five years of marriage and a wall of absolute
resignation. The husband looked at his watch, sighed heavily, and told me they
were probably just too old to ever change their communication habits. His wife
stared out the window and quietly added that they had simply run out of things
to say to each other. I’ve watched this hundreds of times in my sixteen years of
clinical practice. Society and pop psychology will tell you that older couples
inevitably grow apart, lose their romantic spark, or become permanently set in
their stubborn ways. As a clinician, I have to tell you that this common
assumption is completely wrong. When a couple in their sixties or seventies sits
in my office in dead silence, they have not lost their capacity for love. Their
nervous systems have simply collapsed under the sheer weight of decades of
unaddressed attachment pain.
To understand what is actually happening in a marriage that has lasted
decades, you have to understand the framework of the Body as the First Ledger.
Your nervous system keeps an immutable, biological record of every single moment
you felt unseen, unprotected, or abandoned by the person you love. When you are
thirty years into a marriage, that ledger is incredibly long. The small hurts
that you brushed off in your early thirties did not magically disappear. They
calcified. What looks like a stubborn refusal to communicate is actually a
profound biological protection strategy. The anxious partner has spent decades
relentlessly pursuing connection, screaming into a void until their nervous
system was forced to shut down from pure exhaustion. The avoidant partner has
spent those exact same decades withdrawing to escape the crushing, recurring
shame of never getting it right. They are not two polite roommates who have
naturally drifted apart. They are two terrified human beings whose protective
biological armor has become so incredibly thick that neither can find the door
anymore.
The profound tragedy I see with older couples is that they often believe
their long history of pain disqualifies them from ever experiencing genuine
connection again. The exact opposite is actually true. That immense shared
history provides the most beautiful opportunity for profound relational repair.
When I help these couples stop trying to solve the logical, logistical problems
of their retirement and instead focus safely on the deep attachment wounds they
have carried for decades, the entire dynamic shifts. They suddenly realize they
are not fighting a stubborn old stranger, but rather looking at the exact same
frightened human being they fell in love with all those years ago. The human
nervous system is remarkably resilient, and it is absolutely never too late to
fundamentally rewire your bond. If you are tired of living together in quiet
isolation and want to know how to safely dismantle the walls you have built over
a lifetime, here is exactly what the clinical path back to each other looks
like.
Conversation: 2d6d572e-0615-40d0-857d-57a25ae124cd (turn 1)
They scared themselves. They scared each other. They scared themselves together by the sheer force of their disconnection, and it put at risk the very center and core of their life.
By the time an older couple walks through my door, they’ve usually accumulated enough data to see the pattern clearly. Decades of it. The same fight. The same withdrawal. The same pain dressed up in different circumstances.
Couples in their thirties and forties can still fall for the story that says, “I wouldn’t have this problem with someone else.” Older couples have a harder time believing that lie. They’ve been around long enough to see: this is actually my stuff. This is both our individual stuff. The pattern is undeniable now.
And there’s something else. They know there won’t be another opportunity. This is the relationship. This is the time.
The Urgency Is Real
I want to be honest about something. We are fighting the clock.
As people get older, they do get more set in their ways. They’re more likely to say, “This is just the way I am.” They can lose the flexibility to look at themselves, to stay dynamic, to learn and grow.
So while it’s never too late, the sooner you start the work, the better. The sooner you begin to look at yourself and look at what you create with another person, the sooner you can start creating the corrective experiences that heal your past, your present, and your future.
The folly of youth is thinking you can put off the work until later. But “later” has a way of arriving faster than anyone expects.
What I’ve Seen
I recently worked with a couple. He was 83, she was 76. They came to me because they thought it was impossible.
He felt it was obvious: once again, I’m not good enough. I’m just unlovable. She thought: here I am being mistreated again, and if I don’t get out, I should be ashamed of myself.
Within a month of weekly sessions, I was able to show them that’s not actually what was happening. They were just two people who love each other, scaring each other.
I helped them see the whole system. I helped them have empathy and compassion and love for themselves and for each other. And I helped them develop a protocol they can use when they get into these impossible situations, so they can do what their hearts long for: enjoy the profound depth of love they have for each other for the rest of the life they cherish.
That’s what’s possible.
How the Work Actually Feels
If I may be so bold, one of the things that separates me from other therapists is that I can explore deeply vulnerable material and honor that material while still being a typical Irishman. A twinkle in the eye. The ability to make even the deepest material light, funny, and irreverent at just the right temperature and quantity so that we can do the deep work but keep taking the pressure off.
The pacing matters. It has to work for each of the two nervous systems in front of me.
There had to be some benefit to being Irish. Multiple generations of being able to read a room, tell a story, feel the pain and the agony, and meet it poetically. It’s inside these bones, this heart. And I can share it with couples so that we can do the deep emotional work without them ever getting overwhelmed. Without it being too much.
The experience ends up being a delightfully fun social hour with a 54 year old Irishman that you’d be as happy to meet for a pint as you would for a couples therapy session. Sometimes it doesn’t feel that different from having a pint. Other than we’re not having pints.
Why I Love Working with Older Couples
Working with older couples is a delight. They just get the value of the present moment in a way younger couples often don’t.
They understand how fleeting it is. What a thin veil we actually live on between the past and the future. How ephemeral the present moment really is, and yet it’s the only thing that ever actually exists.
Helping older couples find moments of looking back on their life, finding hope for the future, and connecting with themselves and each other in the present moment, with gratitude, grief, joy, appreciation. I don’t know what to say other than it’s the highest form of honor to be trusted with that.
What Becomes Possible
Here’s something neuroscience backs up: we cannot literally change the past. We cannot jump into a time machine and travel to the future. But if we create a truly emotionally transformative experience in the present moment between a couple, right now, in my office, that transformation actually rewrites the old painful files in your memory’s filing cabinet.
The past isn’t as painful after a corrective emotional experience as it was before. And it changes how your whole organism leans toward the future.
The remaining chapters of your life can be filled with more joy, more optimism, more gratitude, more connection. And dare I say it, you become more able to face what is to come for all of us, if we’re privileged enough to have our faculties about us as we move toward the inevitable end.
It’s only with age that we have the privilege to really see it coming with open eyes. Not in what Ernest Becker referred to as the denial of death, but with presence.
The Leverage of Limited Time
With younger couples who have children, I have a particular leverage when they get stuck. When they can’t find it in themselves to soften, to move from “I” to “we,” to stop being stubborn and let go of ego, I can say: imagine your negative cycle as viewed from your kids. Your relationship is the primary ground their entire world stands on. If you can’t do it for yourselves, at least do it for them.
With older couples who are in need for couples therapy, I have a different leverage.
They’re aware, in a way that young people can never fully grasp, that there aren’t as many chapters left. We’re closer to the end of this adventure than we are to the beginning or even the middle.
I’m 54. It’s only in the last two or three years that I’ve really felt this myself. My wife is thirteen years younger than me. When she talks about all the places we’ll still live, Ireland, Bali, San Francisco, New York, I’m acutely aware that I don’t have as many chapters left in my book as she does.
That awareness, when it finally arrives, can be a gift. I can use it to help older couples stop wasting time in their negative cycle. To move from the stubborn first-person perspective of “look what you’re doing to me” toward seeing: look at how we both get hurt when we’re disconnected. Look at how we both hurt each other.
That’s what I call empathy cubed: empathy for me, empathy for you, empathy for us.
Suffering Is the Ingredient
Suffering is what brings people through the door and keeps them in the seat long enough to do the work.
Nobody does the deep work of going inward, finding the places they’re most wounded, communicating that place to their partner, letting that part be loved in an undefended way, seeing the pattern they’re capable of co-creating, unless they’re genuinely suffering.
It’s easier for me to help a couple who is genuinely in pain than a couple who comes in just wanting to “improve.” Suffering keeps you honest. It keeps you from falling for the call of season two of your favorite Netflix series as an alternative to doing the real work.
The Privilege of This Work
I’ve had the pleasure of working with multiple generations of a single family. I start with the adult children. Then I see their siblings and spouses. And by sheer luck of longevity, by being a trusted provider to a family’s emotional wellbeing over years, I eventually become the couples therapist for the parents. The grandparents.
There is something particularly special about helping people in their sixties, seventies, and eighties become more fully themselves. To learn how to love for the remaining years.
It’s not too late. But don’t wait.
Watch: It’s Never Too Late for Couples Therapy
Figs O’Sullivan shares why couples therapy for older couples can transform the remaining chapters of your life together.
I’m currently writing a book called The Sovereign Ground that explores these ideas more deeply. If you’d like to be notified when it’s available, you can sign up here.
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Every couple has a pattern they cannot see. Find yours.
In love, each of you is a Relentless or a Reluctant, which makes you one of three kinds of couple: Relentless and Reluctant, two Relentless, or two Reluctant. The free quiz reveals your creatures and the cycle they fall into together. About three minutes.
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