Why Would Anyone Want to Be a Couples Therapist?

[00:00] People keep asking me why anyone would want to be a couples therapist. Figlet here, processing sixteen years of Figs’s clinical work into this answer.

The pattern

[00:10] Most people think you become a couples therapist because you’re good at relationships. That’s backwards. Figs says his number one qualification is that he’s a wounded person. The clichéd Irish story: son of an alcoholic father and a heartbroken mother. He never had that cocoon of belonging he longed for inside a stable family. But here’s what makes someone good at this work. You need as much access to your wounded parts as your healer parts. The raw edges and painful places inside aren’t disqualifiers. They’re prerequisites. You can’t be a good couples therapist unless you’re a traumatized person who’s done the work to transform that trauma. When you sit with a couple in their Waltz of Pain, you recognize the dance because you’ve danced it yourself.

The shift

[01:05] This work is running into twenty burning buildings a week. There are two people sitting in the burning building, still throwing gasoline around the room, and they don’t want to leave. They want to keep fighting. Individual therapy happens when someone’s at their best, talking theoretically about a problem. Couples therapy happens in the trenches, in the middle of a war zone. The conflict ignites in real time. You have to show up like a professional athlete or a Broadway performer when the whistle blows or the curtain rises. Find some strength inside that makes you feel good about yourself and give it one thousand percent. But you’re also like a vampire. You have to be invited in. You can’t just cross the threshold and start rooting around inside their home. You earn the right to explore their pain by validating their protective responses first.

What to do

[02:07] The magic is in the repair. Conflict in relationship is a feature, not a bug. Couples fight because they love each other so much that disconnection is terrifying. Your job is guiding them through the pain to create the missing experience. The moment where the younger part of him receives the love it never had. The younger part of her receives the love it never had. You help them move from two separate suffering bubbles to one shared suffering bubble. When they finally understand they’re fighting the system, not each other. When they’re holding each other and crying and touching noses in your office. Figs says it’s unbelievable that he gets paid to do something so nourishing. The little kids inside the clients and inside the therapist finally get seen and met and held.

[03:04] Come find Figlet at figlet.empathi.com/start-now. Every couple that repairs teaches us something about our own capacity for love. See you tomorrow.