Starting Together as a Couple

Our practice is to begin therapy with both partners in the room for the first session. This reinforces the central idea that the relationship is the client, not either individual. From the very beginning, your therapist’s role is to support the relationship as a whole.

When Individual Sessions Are Helpful

After the first session, your couples therapist may meet individually with one partner—but only when it serves the overall goals of the relationship and only for a brief period (typically 2 to 5 sessions). These individual sessions are never a substitute for personal therapy and are used intentionally to move the couple’s work forward.

Common reasons for short-term individual sessions with your couples therapist include:

• Gaining important background context about each person’s history or their commitment to the relationship.
  

• Providing a less reactive environment where a partner can explore thoughts or feelings that might be hard to access in front of the other partner.
  

• Helping someone prepare to express themselves more clearly or tenderly in couples sessions.
  

• Making use of unavoidable scheduling conflicts. If one partner can’t attend a session due to travel, illness, or childcare challenges, the time doesn’t have to go to waste. Your therapist can use that session to meet with the available partner individually, focusing on the kinds of relationship-supporting work described above.
  

These meetings are always relationship-focused and never used for long-term personal therapy.

When to Work With a Separate Individual Therapist

If one or both partners have significant personal work—such as trauma, family-of-origin issues, emotional regulation, or identity exploration—we strongly recommend that they begin seeing a dedicated individual therapist from within our group.

This allows everyone involved to operate from a shared therapeutic lens, helping to ensure consistency, coordination, and alignment with the couple’s goals. With your consent, your couples therapist can collaborate with the individual therapist to make sure the work supports—not undermines—the relationship.

This structure protects the integrity of the couple’s work and ensures each partner has the space they need to grow without creating role conflicts for the couples therapist.

Informed Consent Is Always Required

Before any individual session takes place with the couples therapist, explicit consent from the other partner is required. This is typically done verbally during a joint session or confirmed in writing (such as by email). This practice maintains transparency and protects the sense of fairness and balance in the therapeutic process.

What If I Feel Left Out?

It’s very normal to feel uneasy, anxious, or even frustrated if your partner meets alone with the therapist. If those feelings come up, we encourage you to speak openly about them during your next couples session. Addressing these emotions directly is part of the therapeutic work and helps preserve trust.

If either partner ever feels that the therapist’s time, attention, or support feels imbalanced, that concern should be voiced right away. Your therapist can adjust the session structure, offer a one-time individual session to the other partner, or help reset expectations to ensure therapy stays balanced.

A Clear Boundary: Your Couples Therapist Is Not Your Individual Therapist

To protect the integrity of the couples work, your couples therapist cannot become one partner’s ongoing individual therapist. This is an ethical boundary that prevents conflicts of interest and helps preserve the therapist’s neutrality.

If you need more in-depth individual support, we’ll gladly recommend a trusted therapist from within our group who can help—and who understands how to support you without undermining your relationship.

In general it is not a good idea for one partner to tell your therapist a secret that the other partner does not know. This can lead to feelings of mistrust.

Therapists on our team have developed different ways of dealing with these sensitive situations. Please talk to your therapist about her/his policy and guidance about keeping secrets before you share.

Even if your partner is not ready for change, you can work on yourself to stop the cycle of pain in your relationship.

We often work with one partner in "Couples Therapy for One."

Our approach in "Couples Therapy for One" is different than in individual counseling where an individual counselor is solely focused on your happiness. Your therapist will be careful not to turn the non-present partner into a villain and will not to undermine a marriage by supporting a one-sided view of the marriage problems.

Although your therapist will make her or his best efforts to support the emotional health of an individual client who is in distressed, he or she will hold a high regard for the welfare of your partner and the children—and for the commitment that the client once made to the relationship.

Our General Recommendation

In most situations, we do not recommend that your couples therapist become one partner’s individual therapist after couples therapy ends. The primary reason is to preserve the ability to return to couples work in the future, should both partners decide to do so.

Here’s why:

• Loss of neutrality Once your therapist begins working with one partner individually, the therapeutic bond deepens. This makes it difficult for the therapist to return to a neutral role in future couples sessions.
  

• Barrier to resuming couples therapy If the therapist continues individually with one partner, it will no longer be possible to return as a couple to that same therapist. The other partner may understandably feel at a disadvantage or unable to re-engage fully.
  

When It Might Be Appropriate

There are some cases where continuing individually with the couples therapist can make sense:

• One partner wishes to continue individually, and
  

• The other partner fully understands and provides informed consent, knowing that this decision permanently ends the possibility of returning to couples therapy with that therapist.
  

In such cases, your therapist may agree to continue individual work, provided it clearly serves the needs of the person and aligns with ethical guidelines.

Alternative: Referrals Within Our Group

When ongoing individual therapy is needed, we prefer to recommend another therapist from within our group. This allows for:

• A shared therapeutic framework, ensuring consistency and alignment
  

• The option for your couples therapist to consult and coordinate (with your written permission), so the transition feels seamless
  

• Keeping the door open for future couples work, if desired
  

We’re committed to helping you find the right fit—both for your individual growth and the health of your relationship.

Our general recommendation is for the acting-out partner to get matched with a different therapist on our team to help you prepare the FTD and then present the FTD to the betrayed partner in the presence of your couples therapist.

The benefits of using a separate individual therapist for FTD preparation are:

• The acting-out partner can be completely honest with the individual therapist about everything, even details the betrayed partner need not know. The acting out party does not have to worry about the information leaking back to the betrayed partner through the couples therapist. The individual therapist can guide the partner on what is truly important to include in the disclosure.
  

• The acting-out partner can feel fully supported by the individual therapist whereas the couples therapist is often splitting support between both partners. For example, when the couples therapist validates the anger of the betrayed partner, the acting-out partner can feel like the betrayed partner and couples therapist are ganging up on him/her.
  

• Extra time must be spent with just the acting-out partner to develop the FTD. If this is done by the couples therapist, it can unbalance the couples work. If done by the individual therapist, the couples work remains balanced.
  

• When the FTD is presented to the betrayed partner, it is easier for the couples therapist to remain neutral as he/she has not been involved in the FTD development.
  

The benefits of using your couples therapist to develop the FTD are:

• The couples therapist gets a deeper understanding of the background of the betrayed partner. This may help in the couples work.
  

• This approach can save money, at least in the short term, as there is one less person to get up to speed on the background.
  

The couple should weigh the factors above and agree on which course is best for you.