Setting Goals and Objectives in Couples Therapy...

Setting Goals and Objectives in Couples Therapy

Good couples therapy goals are not about stopping fights or fixing your partner. They are about seeing the cycle you are both caught in, shrinking the time it takes to repair after a rupture, and learning to reach for each other from the soft place underneath the anger or the silence.

A real treatment plan turns those goals into small, measurable objectives, such as naming your cycle out loud within the first month or coming back to each other within a day instead of three, and it moves through stages: de-escalation, restructuring the bond, and consolidation.

If you want help turning the list in your head into goals you can actually work with, Figlet, my AI relationship coach, is there at 2 in the morning, or right now.

You are exhausted. You and your partner keep having the same fight, and you are sitting down to write out, one more time, what you want from couples therapy. Maybe you have already made the list. Better communication. Stop fighting about the dishes. Figure out the sex thing. Get on the same page about money. Handle the in-laws. Divide the household load. Learn some tools. You want a roadmap. You want a checklist. You want to hand the therapist a stack of grievances and have them help your partner see, finally, what you have been trying to say for years.

I see this every week in my San Francisco practice. One partner walks in with a list. The other partner walks in braced, already knowing they are about to be the defendant. And I have to be honest with you, right at the start, because if I do not say this now you will spend a year of your life and a lot of money learning it the hard way.

If your goals for couples therapy are to stop fighting, communicate better, or fix your partner, you are carrying a can labeled water that is actually filled with gasoline. Every time you throw that can on the fire of your disconnection, you make it worse. So here is what to put on the list instead. Not tips. A different frame entirely. One that comes from seventeen years in the room with real couples in real pain, and roughly 36,000 relationship assessments in the data behind Figlet.

The Problem Is Almost Never What You Think It Is

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Here is the clinical truth. The problem you are fighting about is rarely the actual problem. Whether it is sex, money, the dishes, your mother, or what time he comes home, the content is a red herring. You think you are fighting about logistics. You are fighting for your emotional survival.

Underneath every argument you have ever had, your body is asking one of two ancient questions. Are you there for me. Am I enough for you. That’s it. Every proxy war about the tone of a text, the sigh at the door, the money in the joint account, is downstream of one of those two questions not landing with a clear yes.

This is not poetry. This is attachment theory in the plainest possible language. Adult romantic partners function as each other’s primary regulators. Your brain treats the body next to yours the way a child’s brain treats a parent. When that bond wobbles, your amygdala pulls the fire alarm before your thinking brain gets a vote. Cortisol dumps. Reason exits the building. And what looks like a fight about the dishwasher is actually two survival responses screaming, in code, are you still with me.

If you walk into couples therapy with a goal of resolving the dishwasher, and the therapist agrees to help you resolve the dishwasher, you will resolve the dishwasher and be fighting again by Thursday about the calendar, then the tone at breakfast, then the way she looked at his mother. The content changes. The ache underneath does not.

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From Empathi’s research: in 58,221 completed relationship assessments, 74.1% of the 6,159 couples where both partners completed were in the pursue-withdraw cycle. Both partners typically describe the other as the one withdrawing.

Read the full research from 58,221 assessments

The First Real Goal: From Two Suffering Bubbles to One

So what should the actual objectives be. Let me give you the ones I write on the whiteboard with couples in my office.

The first goal is to move from I-consciousness to We-consciousness. Right now you live inside your own bubble of suffering. I am hurting, and you did it to me. Your partner lives in theirs. I am hurting, and you did it to me. Two separate suffering bubbles, and every time they collide they burst.

The primary milestone of couples therapy is not fewer fights. It is arriving at a shared suffering bubble. We are both hurting. We are both hurting each other. And here is the part that changes everything: we are hurting each other because we love each other so much. If you did not love this person, none of this would sting. Their sigh would not lodge in your chest. Her silence would not send your body into a five-alarm fire.

The problem in your relationship is not a me problem or a you problem. It is an us problem. Until both of you can hold that, no communication tool on earth is going to help.

The Second Goal: See the Waltz

Every couple in distress dances some version of a choreography I call the Waltz of Pain. It has three steps, and both of you know them in your bones without ever having been taught.

Step one, a negative perception of your partner. He does not care. She is impossible to please. Step two, a reactive emotion. Anger, panic, shame, dread. Step three, a protective action. You blame, criticize, demand, escalate. Or you shut down, rationalize, retreat, go flat.

When you do your one-two-three, your partner gets hurt, and they do their one-two-three right back. Round and round you go. One of you pursues for connection. I call this the Relentless Lover. The other retreats for safety. I call this the Reluctant Lover. Neither of you is the villain. The cycle is the villain.

A real objective of couples therapy is to see this dance from the outside. To step back and go, oh, there we go again. Not to stop it in the moment, at first. Just to see it. You are not two bad people. You are two younger selves inside adult bodies, using the only strategies you knew how to use to stay safe. When the armor steps aside for even a moment, you stop fighting each other and start fighting the loop. That is the shift. That is what the whole thing rests on.

The Time Machine Error (Or, Why You Cannot Skip This Part)

High-achieving couples want to skip straight to the solution. They walk in with an agenda. Fix this. Fix that. Give us tools. Give us a script for hard conversations.

I call this the Time Machine error. You are trying to jump ahead before we have actually connected. If we start working on how to communicate better, or how to plan date nights, before we have established an emotionally secure bond, we are building a house on quicksand.

No good solutions come from a state of disconnection. None. So the third goal of couples therapy is process over content. We have to resolve the present-moment disconnection before we can touch the dishwasher. Twenty minutes of emotional meeting first. The solution is the fruit of connection, not the precursor to it.

If your couples therapist starts with communication tools before helping you see the cycle and reach each other underneath it, get a new therapist. The tools do not work on quicksand.

The Fourth Goal: Give Up the Dream of Not Fighting

Here is the one that stings. You have to give up the dream of never fighting again. It is not going to happen. If you love each other, you will scare each other and get your feelings hurt for the rest of your lives. Disconnection is a feature of intimacy, not a bug.

Good relationships are not defined by staying perfectly happy. They are defined by how quickly you give each other a chance to repair. The magic is in the repair. Not the absence of rupture. The presence of return.

The real goal is to shrink the box of suffering. From ten hours to ten minutes. From three days of icy silence to a twenty-minute reach. From a week of separate bedrooms to a single hard conversation before bed. That is progress. Not the elimination of conflict. The acceleration of return.

This is the proof of work of love. Repair takes energy. It takes heat. It takes sitting there with your defenses on the floor, owning your part, and reconnecting when everything in your body wants to leave the room. Every successful repair is a block in the chain of your relationship, an immutable record that says: we can come back to each other. Your body starts to trust it. And once your body trusts it, the fights get less scary, because they stop being existential.

I’ve written more about this repair-first frame in my piece on toxic dynamics versus toxic people. The difference matters, and it changes what you should be aiming at in therapy.

The Fifth Goal: Make a C, Not a Wall

In the room, we use an experiential process I call Making a C. Picture the letter C.

The top point of the C is where every fight starts. Pure reactivity. The story of the other person. He is selfish. She is impossible. From the top of the C, you can only attack or retreat. Nothing else is available.

The therapist’s job, and eventually your job, is to curve down. Down into awareness. Oh, we are in the cycle again. Down further, into what is actually happening underneath the anger. Down to the bottom of the C. This is your primary emotion. Your vulnerability. The place where you can admit, out loud, that you feel alone. That you are terrified of being a disappointment. That you have felt invisible for months. That you love this person so much you cannot bear how much power they have to hurt you.

When you speak that vulnerable truth from the bottom of the C, and your partner receives it, validates it, and comforts you, the C closes into an O. A securely attached loop. That is the objective. Not to eliminate the descent into hurt. To make sure the descent completes the circle instead of ending in a wall.

The Sixth Goal: Empathy Cubed

Most people only know one direction of empathy. I feel for you. Or I feel for myself. Empathy Cubed is compassion for me, compassion for you, and compassion for us, at the exact same time. The system itself becomes an object of tenderness.

This is the goal, and I want to name it plainly because most people never even hear it articulated. You are not aiming to be right. You are not aiming to win. You are aiming to hold your own pain, your partner’s pain, and the pain of the loop you both created, all at once, without collapsing into any one of them.

That is a real skill. It takes months. It is worth every hour.

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The Seventh Goal: Build the Middle Apartment

I see this pattern constantly. One partner lives in the emotional penthouse. Full of energy. Protesting. Demanding visibility. The other lives in the basement, retreated with the janitorial supplies, trying to stay safe from the noise upstairs. Each of them is convinced the other one is the problem. The penthouse partner wants the basement partner to come up. The basement partner wants the penthouse partner to quiet down.

The goal of couples therapy is not to drag one of you up or force one of you down. It is to build a well-appointed apartment in the middle of the building where both of you can actually live. Where the protector parts, the Bull that charges or the Fixer who manages, can retire from active duty. Where the two vulnerable people underneath the armor can finally meet.

If you are the pursuer, your work is to notice that your protest is scaring your partner even though it feels, from the inside, like the only way to be seen. If you are the withdrawer, your work is to notice that your silence reads as abandonment even though it feels, from the inside, like the only way to keep the peace. Neither of you is wrong. Both of you are using strategies that made sense somewhere else, in some earlier system, and are backfiring here.

There is more on this dynamic in what I’ve written about avoidant partners and in the piece on feeling unworthy of your partner’s love, which is often the exact wound the withdrawer is protecting.

The Final Objective: The Sovereign Us

The ultimate goal of couples therapy is not codependence. It is not fusion. It is not losing yourself in the other person. There is a myth in our culture that sovereignty means you do not need anyone, that healthy adults are self-contained, that the goal of growth is to stop being affected by your partner. That is a trauma response dressed up as wisdom. I call it orphan sovereignty, and it is a lonely dead end.

True sovereignty is the ability to self-regulate and co-regulate. To have your own ground, and to build shared ground with another person. To be a whole self who chooses, every day, to belong to a whole we. That is what I mean by a Sovereign Us. Two people who are not merged, not walled off, but genuinely with each other. That is the destination.

It takes time. It takes proof of work. It takes learning to see the cycle, learning to make the C, learning to repair faster, learning to hold empathy in three directions at once. But it is real. I have watched it happen thousands of times.

Couples Therapy Goals vs Objectives: What Is the Difference?

People use the two words as if they mean the same thing. In a treatment plan they do different jobs, and knowing the difference is what turns a wish into something you can actually track.

A goal is the direction. It describes the bond you want: we can repair faster, we can see our cycle, we feel safe enough to be soft with each other. A goal is allowed to be big, because it is pointing at the ache underneath the fights.

An objective is a small, observable step toward that goal. You can see it. You can count it. You can tell whether it happened this week. “Communicate better” is not an objective. “When one of us notices the Waltz starting, we say so out loud, and we do it at least once a week” is.

Here is the trap I watch couples fall into. They write objectives about content (no more fights about the dishwasher) and goals about the other person (he will open up). Flip it. The goals belong to the bond. The objectives belong to you, to what you will do with your own body, your own reach, your own repair. Nobody can make an objective out of their partner’s behavior.

Examples of Couples Therapy Goals and Objectives

These are the kinds of goals and objectives I actually write with couples. Notice that every one of them is about the dance, not the dishwasher. Use them as a starting point and put them in your own words. If you want the full picture of the dance itself, I have written about it in the Waltz of Pain.

Goal: See the cycle we are both caught in

  • Within the first four sessions, each of us can describe our own step in the cycle (I pursue, I criticize, I go quiet, I leave the room) without describing the other person’s step first.
  • We give the cycle a name we both agree on, so either of us can call it in the moment.
  • At least once a week, one of us says some version of “wait, this is the thing we do” in the middle of a fight, and the other does not scoff or double down.

Goal: Shrink the box of suffering after a fight

  • Track how long it takes to come back to each other after a rupture. Write it down. If it takes three days now, the first objective is two.
  • One of us reaches back within 24 hours of a fight and names what happened, and the other receives it without punishing.
  • Over three months, the time from rupture to repair drops from days to hours.

Goal: Slow the body down before the words

  • Each of us can name our own early warning signs (tight chest, racing heart, clenched jaw, going flat).
  • We agree on a pause signal, and when either of us is flooded we take a short break (ten minutes is often enough) and come back, rather than leaving the conversation for the night.
  • The partner who asks for the pause says when they will return. The partner who waits says “take your time, I will be here.”

Goal: Speak from the bottom of the C

  • Once a week, each of us shares one fear or need from underneath the anger or the silence (“I feel alone,” “I am scared I keep failing you”), not one complaint.
  • Within three sessions, each of us can name one unmet emotional need of our own.
  • The receiving partner reflects back what they heard before responding, at least once in every hard conversation.

Goal: Rebuild trust after a betrayal

  • The partner who broke trust answers questions about the affair openly in session, for as long as the hurt partner needs, without telling them to move on.
  • We agree on the transparency that would help (phones, schedules, contact with the affair partner) and we keep that agreement every week.
  • The hurt partner names what triggers the panic, and the other partner learns to respond to it with comfort instead of defense.

Goal: Reconnect emotionally and physically

  • We each name what makes affection feel safe and what makes it feel like pressure.
  • We create one regular time each week for closeness with no agenda and no score keeping.
  • When one of us turns down sex or touch, we say what is going on inside instead of going silent, and the other partner hears it as information, not a verdict.

Goal: Solve the content problems from connection, not from panic

  • Money, chores, kids and in-laws go on a weekly list, and we only discuss them once both of us are regulated.
  • For each content issue, each of us can say what our body is afraid of underneath it (being controlled, being alone, being a disappointment).
  • We try one agreement for 30 days and then check how fair it feels to each of us before we change it.

How a Couples Therapist Builds a Treatment Plan

A treatment plan is not a contract you sign in the first session. It is a map that gets drawn, and redrawn, as the therapist learns how your particular dance works. Here is how I build one.

Step 1: Assessment

The intake asks the basics: relationship history, what brings you in, individual mental health background. Ours also asks something that surprises people. What does your partner do well? What first drew you to them? That is not fluff. It is diagnostic. It tells me whether you can still reach positive feelings about each other or whether contempt has taken over, and that changes the whole plan.

In the room, I am building a map of the dynamic, not of who is right. Who leans in, who leans away. Whose jaw is clenched. Whose voice cracks. One of you pursues and one withdraws, or one explodes and the other shuts down. The body tells me what the story cannot.

A good therapist also asks about safety, privately with each partner, and explains their policy on secrets. That step is not optional. It decides whether joint sessions are the right place to start at all.

Step 2: Goals that follow the stages of EFT

I work in Emotionally Focused Therapy, so the plan follows its three stages. Most couples in EFT need somewhere around 12 to 20 sessions to see meaningful change, though betrayal and long, entrenched cycles can take longer. I have written more about the timeline in how long couples therapy takes.

  • Stage 1, de-escalation (roughly sessions 1 to 8). The goal is to see the negative cycle and step out of it. Objectives look like naming the cycle, naming each partner’s position in it, and shortening and softening the fights. Most couples feel some relief here, just from having the pattern named.
  • Stage 2, restructuring the bond (roughly sessions 8 to 16). The goal is to reach the softer emotions underneath the anger and the withdrawal and share them. The pursuer finds the fear of abandonment under the criticism. The withdrawer finds the fear of failing under the silence. Objectives look like the withdrawer staying present through a hard conversation and the pursuer asking for what they need without criticism.
  • Stage 3, consolidation (roughly sessions 16 to 20 and beyond). The goal is to practice the new way of being together on real life. This is where the money conversation and the in-law plan finally get solved, because now you are solving them from connection.

Step 3: Connection first, every single session

Inside each session I follow a sequence I call the Connection First Protocol. Safety first, so both nervous systems are inside the window of tolerance. Then connection, so both of you are actually present. Then the thinking brain comes back online. Only then, problem solving. The treatment plan works the same way on a larger scale. Problem solving is step four, not step one. Most couples, and most bad therapists, try to start there. It never works.

Step 4: Review and revise

Goals drift. The thing you came in for in month one is rarely the thing you are working on in month four, and that is usually a good sign. A good therapist checks the plan with you regularly and asks whether the objectives still fit. If your therapist has never once talked with you about what you are working toward, ask.

For the people who want to see one on paper, a simple plan for a pursue and withdraw couple might read like this:

  • Presenting concern: the same fight, about different content, several times a week. One partner escalates, the other shuts down. Both feel alone.
  • Goal 1: de-escalate the cycle. Objective: both partners can describe the cycle and their own part in it by session 6.
  • Goal 2: shorten repair. Objective: repair begins within 24 hours of a rupture, most weeks, by month three.
  • Goal 3: restructure the bond. Objective: each partner shares one vulnerable fear or need in session and the other responds with comfort, not defense.
  • Goal 4: consolidate. Objective: the couple solves one long standing content problem together at home and reports back.

How to Set Your Own Couples Therapy Goals

A couple in my office spent the first twenty minutes of a session reading off a meticulous, bulleted list of each other’s failures. She was leaning across the couch, her voice tight, itemizing every time he had forgotten a chore, messed up a schedule, or said the wrong thing. He sat frozen, arms crossed, staring at the floor while she read him his rap sheet. I let her get through about half of the list before I gently asked her to put the paper away.

She was not being cruel. What I saw was a terrified person trying to establish a connection, starving for a sign that she mattered. And what he heard, in every line, was proof that he was a disappointment who could never get it right. So he went quiet to survive the flood, which confirmed her worst fear. That list was a goal sheet written by a protector. It could never have taken them where they wanted to go.

Here is what I ask couples to do instead.

  1. Write separately first. Not what you want your partner to change. What you want to feel more of. Safer. Less alone. Seen. Trusted.
  2. Turn each complaint into a goal. “He never listens” becomes “I want to feel heard when I am upset.” “She is always on my case” becomes “I want to feel like I am enough for her.” Underneath almost every complaint is one of the two questions: are you there for me, am I enough for you.
  3. Add one objective you own. For each goal, write one small thing you will do, with your own body and your own words, that you could count by next week.
  4. Trade lists. Read them out loud. If your partner’s list sounds like a different relationship from yours, good. That is the cycle showing itself, and it is exactly what therapy is for.
  5. Bring three, not thirty. A few goals you both understand will carry you further than a full page. You can always add more once the first ones start moving.

Ellyn Bader at The Couples Institute makes a useful distinction between “having” goals (what you want to get), “being” goals (who you want to be in the relationship) and “doing” goals (the actions that follow). I find the “being” question cuts through a lot of protector noise. Not “how do I get her to stop,” but “who do I want to be when she is upset.”

When the two of you want different things

This is the most common thing in the world. Usually one partner wants more: more sessions, more talking, more reassurance. That is often the Relentless Lover, and the therapy room can feel like the one place their reach finally gets answered. The other partner wants less, because for them, sitting in a room being asked what they feel is not soothing. It is exposing. That is often the Reluctant Lover.

Neither of you is wrong. You are watching the loop show up in the goal setting itself. Name it out loud, gently, with the therapist there. And if one of you does not want to come at all, the willing partner can start individually, not to build a case, but to work on their own regulation and their own part of the dance. Often, when the reluctant partner sees real change, they get curious enough to join.

How to Know Your Goals Are Working

Progress in couples therapy is not a straight line. You might feel a breakthrough in session four, hit a wall in session eight, and have the most important conversation of your relationship in session fourteen. So you need markers that are more honest than how the last session felt. These are the ones I watch for.

  • You catch the pattern in real time. Someone stops mid argument and says, “Wait. I’m doing the thing.” It does not feel dramatic. It is everything.
  • Repair takes less time. A fight that would have taken three days to come back from a year ago takes ninety minutes. Not because the fight was smaller. Because your capacity to regulate got bigger.
  • Tuesday feels one degree different. You notice you did not brace as hard when they came home. You did not check their face for approval quite as often. Small. Real. Structural.
  • You have new fights, not the same old ones. The old loop about her mother and his phone gets replaced by fresh disagreements about actual current life. That is progress.
  • You can repair without a referee. A rupture happens on Saturday, and by Sunday one of you has turned back toward the other without saving it for the next session.

Ninety minutes a week does not change a marriage. What you do at home, between sessions, is where the objectives actually get met. If you want to see what that practice looks like, here is the couples therapy homework I actually give.

When the First Goal Is Safety

Everything on this page assumes two people who are hurting each other out of fear, not one person controlling the other. If you are afraid of your partner, if they threaten you, hurt you, or control your money, your phone or who you see, the first goal is not couples work. It is your safety. Tell your therapist privately. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is there at 1-800-799-7233, and if you are in immediate danger, call 911.

Bringing This Home

If you are about to start couples therapy, or you are in it and stuck, here is what to put on the list instead of what most people put on the list.

Instead of “stop fighting,” write “shrink the box of suffering.” Instead of “communicate better,” write “see the cycle we co-created.” Instead of “fix my partner,” write “meet each other underneath the armor.” Instead of “resolve the money issue,” write “learn what my body is actually saying when we fight about money.” Instead of “learn tools,” write “learn to reach for each other in the middle of a rupture.”

Those are goals a couples therapist can actually work with. Those are goals that lead somewhere. The other list, the one you walked in with, is the list your protector parts wrote. It sounds reasonable. It will keep you exactly where you are.

What to Do Tonight

You do not need a therapist in the room to start. Here is something small you can do tonight.

  1. Find your list. The one in your notes app or your head. Read it once and ask: which of these is about my partner’s behavior? Circle those.
  2. Rewrite one line. Take one circled complaint and turn it into what you want to feel. “Stop being on your phone” becomes “I want to feel like I matter to you in the evenings.”
  3. Name your own step. Write one sentence about what you do when the fight starts. I chase. I criticize. I go quiet. I leave the room. Just your step, not theirs.
  4. Turn the flashlight around. The next time you feel the tightness tonight, before you say anything, notice where it is in your body. Chest, throat, stomach. That is where the real information is.
  5. Offer one sentence from underneath. If the moment is calm, try: “I think we keep doing the same dance, and I miss you.” Then stop. Do not explain. Let it land.

Common Questions

What are realistic couples therapy goals for the first three months?

In the first three months, aim to identify your negative cycle, name your positions in it (usually pursuer and withdrawer), and reduce the intensity and length of your fights. Not eliminate them. Reduce them. You are learning to catch the dance earlier and repair faster. Communication tools and content-level problems come later, after the emotional bond feels steadier.

How do you write couples therapy goals with your partner?

Sit down separately and write not what you want your partner to change, but what you want to feel more of in the relationship. Then trade lists. If your list is full of behaviors your partner should perform, you are still in I-consciousness. Rewrite it in the language of the bond. Safer. More connected. Faster to repair. Less alone.

What is the difference between short-term and long-term goals in couples therapy?

Short-term goals are about de-escalation. Seeing the cycle, slowing down reactivity, having fewer catastrophic fights, learning to repair within hours instead of days. Long-term goals are structural. Building secure attachment, integrating each other’s histories, developing shared meaning, and building a whole we that neither swallows nor abandons either of you. Short-term work makes long-term work possible.

Can couples therapy work if only one partner wants to change?

Sometimes, yes. If one partner is genuinely committed to seeing the system and doing their own work, the cycle can shift even if the other partner is reluctant at first. Systems change when one part changes. But if both partners refuse to look at the co-created dance and only want the other person fixed, no therapist on earth can help.

What are red flags that couples therapy is not working?

If after three to four months you cannot name your cycle, if the therapist takes sides, if you leave every session feeling more prosecuted or more hopeless, or if sessions focus only on content and never on the emotional bond underneath, something is off. Good couples therapy should make the fights make sense, not multiply them.

What is the difference between a goal and an objective in couples therapy?

A goal is the direction you are heading, like “repair faster after fights” or “feel safe enough to be vulnerable.” An objective is a small, measurable step toward it, like “one of us reaches back within 24 hours of a fight, most weeks.” Goals describe the bond. Objectives describe what each of you will actually do.

What are some examples of marriage counseling goals?

Common goals include seeing and naming your negative cycle, shortening the time it takes to repair, managing flooding so conversations do not blow up, rebuilding trust after an affair, and reconnecting emotionally and physically. Good goals are about the pattern between you, not about changing one person. Content issues like money, chores and in-laws usually get solved later, once the bond is steadier.

What are the goals of Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples?

EFT aims to de-escalate the negative cycle, restructure the bond by helping each partner reach and share the softer emotions underneath their protective moves, and then consolidate the new pattern in real life. The underlying goal is a secure bond, where both partners can answer “are you there for me” with a clear yes.

What are the goals of Gottman couples therapy?

The Gottman Method focuses mainly on behaviors and skills: managing conflict, turning toward each other’s bids for connection, using repair attempts, and building friendship and shared meaning. EFT works more at the level of the emotional bond underneath those behaviors. Many therapists borrow from both.

How many goals should we set at the start of couples therapy?

Fewer than you think. Two or three goals you both understand, each with one or two objectives, will carry you further than a long list. You can add more once the first ones start to move.

How often should couples therapy goals be reviewed?

Regularly, and especially when the work shifts from one stage to the next. Goals naturally drift as the cycle calms down and new material comes up, and that is usually a good sign. If your therapist has never asked what you are working toward, raise it yourself.

This is not a you problem or a them problem

“When two insecurely attached people interact, their protector strategies collide to form a negative feedback loop I call the Waltz of Pain. Your protector meets your partner’s protector. Their protector meets yours. Two childhood strategies collide, and the relationship becomes a reenactment of wounds neither partner caused.”

“Neither partner is the villain. They are two younger selves inside adult bodies trying to stay safe in the only ways they once knew.”

Figs O’Sullivan, LMFT

What to Do Next

Setting the right goals is the whole game. Get the goals wrong, and you spend a year rearranging deck chairs. Get them right, and everything opens.

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The cycle is the enemy, not your partner. Rewrite the list.

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Figs O'Sullivan is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #79062) and the founder of Empathi. For 17 years he has helped couples move out of disconnection and back into secure, loving connection, drawing on Emotionally Focused Therapy and attachment science. With his wife Teale, he runs a San Francisco couples therapy practice, is a relationship expert to the Stars and Silicon Valley, and built Figlet, an AI relationship coach trained on their clinical work. His approach has guided more than 58,000 relationship assessments.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are the most important goals to focus on in couples therapy?+
Safety comes first, period. Before we can work on anything else, both partners need to know they won't be destroyed for being honest in that room. Most couples arrive in a defensive crouch because vulnerability has led to pain before. The real goal isn't to solve your fights about money or chores (those are just the cherry on top). The goal is to help you both step out of the Waltz of Pain, that negative cycle where your childhood strategies collide and turn each other into enemies. Once you have safety, you can start doing the proof-of-work of empathy that actually changes things.
How long does it take to see progress in couples therapy?+
Here's what I tell couples: this isn't about quick fixes or life hacks. We're building a cathedral, not a food truck. The Babies in Love framework reminds us that when your attachment bond feels threatened, your nervous system thinks you're going to die. That kind of rewiring takes time. I usually see couples start recognizing their patterns (the Versus Illusion, where you think your partner is the enemy) within a few sessions. But learning to consistently offer each other the Missing Experience, that emotional nutrition you both needed as kids? That's months of practice.
Do we need to set specific objectives or can therapy be more organic?+
Look, I'm not interested in treating your relationship like a project management spreadsheet. The objectives emerge as we work together. Maybe you came in saying you want to 'communicate better,' but what you really need is to stop the Time Machine Error, where you jump to problem-solving before you've actually connected emotionally. The body keeps the real ledger of what needs healing. Your nervous systems will tell us what the priorities are. If you want support between sessions figuring out your patterns, try Figlet, our AI relationship coach. It's like having me in your pocket when things get heated.