Clients often ask Figs this important question when initially reaching out for relationship help. His advice: “Be persistent, but skillful.”
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Answer:
A couple in my office last week perfectly illustrated the absolute worst way to start therapy. The wife sat on the edge of the couch, clutching a notebook, furiously listing every reason she had been forced to drag her husband in for a session. Her husband sat as far away as physically possible, his arms tightly crossed and his jaw clenched, bracing himself as if he were sitting on trial for a crime. I have watched this hundreds of times in my sixteen years of clinical practice. Pop psychology and frustrated friends will tell you that a partner who refuses to go to counseling is simply stubborn, narcissistic, or totally uninvested in saving the marriage. As a clinician, I have to tell you that this common assumption is completely wrong. When your spouse aggressively resists couples therapy, they are almost never making a malicious choice to ignore your pain. Their nervous system has simply gone into a profound state of biological protection.
What I actually see inside the resistant partner is a terrified human being who is drowning in the fear of inadequacy. You are both trapped in a severe negative cycle that I clinically call the Waltz of Pain. In this cycle, the anxious partner desperately pursues connection to avoid abandonment, and right now, that pursuit looks like aggressively demanding professional help. But to the avoidant partner, the idea of sitting on a therapist’s couch feels like walking into an execution chamber. They hear your plea for counseling as a devastating promise that they are about to spend an hour a week paying a professional to confirm that they are an utter disappointment who can never get it right. They know they are already failing at home, and the thought of failing in front of an expert is simply too much to bear. So, their amygdala fires, their prefrontal cortex goes entirely offline, and they withdraw, refuse, or get deeply defensive to survive the emotional flood of shame.
The profound tragedy of this dynamic is that the more you push therapy as a desperate ultimatum, the more your partner’s survival brain detects an engulfing threat. You cannot force a terrified nervous system into vulnerability by using logic, anger, or ultimatums about divorce. They secretly want to feel secure and loved just as much as you do, but their body currently registers your demand for therapy as an emotional trap they cannot possibly survive. If you want to stop dragging a defensive, resentful roommate into a counseling session and instead invite a willing partner to safely heal your attachment bond with you, we have to entirely change how you are having this conversation.
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