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Figs O'Sullivan

  • November 4, 2026

Making Sense is Not Enough – Gotta Have All the Feels...

Making Sense is Not Enough – Gotta Have All the Feels

Listen: the Figlet podcast episode on this

Full episode with show notes

🎧 Prefer to listen? Making Sense is Not Enough: Gotta Have All the Feels the audio version from the Figlet daily podcast.

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Part of the art of couples therapy is sometimes you actually have to lead people even more deeply into their pain. Once a couple is deescalated, once they stop looking like two tigers fighting with each other, then I help them feel even deeper the sadness and pain they get in when they’re disconnected.

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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

Why do therapists make you feel worse before you feel better?+
I'm not trying to torture you, I promise. But here's the thing: once you stop the Waltz of Pain (that vicious cycle where you're both reacting), the real work begins. The fight was actually protecting you from the deeper hurt underneath. When one partner says 'I feel abandoned,' that's not just a thought, it's a full-body experience that needs to be felt and witnessed. Your nervous system has been keeping score of every disconnection. Making sense of it logically isn't enough. We have to go into the basement of those feelings so your partner can finally understand what their withdrawal or criticism actually does to you.
How do you get through the painful emotions that come up in couples therapy?+
The pain you're feeling? That's not new pain. That's old pain finally getting the attention it deserves. When we're babies in love, we're wired to feel existential threat when our bond is threatened. The key is learning that feeling the sadness or fear fully, with your partner present and attuned, is what actually heals it. I tell couples: you're not drowning in the feeling, you're swimming through it to the other side. Your partner can't fix what they can't see, and they can't see what you won't feel.
What's the difference between talking about problems and actually healing them?+
Talking about your problems is like describing a fire. Feeling them together is actually putting the fire out. I call this the Time Machine Error when couples try to jump ahead to solutions without doing the emotional repair first. The solution is never the problem. The problem is we try to solve things with our heads when our hearts are still bleeding. Real healing happens when your partner witnesses your pain without trying to fix it, argue with it, or minimize it. If you're struggling with this process, Figlet, our AI relationship coach, can help you practice staying present with difficult emotions between sessions.