I am periodically asked if I work with couples, so I decided to tell you what my professional position is regarding such therapy. My opinion is that I’m not sure that couples counseling, without individual therapy for partners, can help significantly improve relationships. The essence of the work of a family therapist is to help partners in a safe environment realize and talk about their experiences to each other, and through this come to agreement on controversial issues. But the problem is that most often the inability to realize something in oneself, talking about this to your partner, and especially dealing with it - these are topics for personal therapy. So, when done well, family therapy usually results in partners eventually going to individual therapy anyway. So why make this detour?) I also see a big problem in our social context. In the post-Soviet space, the level of psychological illiteracy is off the charts, due to tragic historical events that left a huge number of emotional wounds among our ancestors. Therefore, in our everyday communication there is a lot of psychological violence that we do not even notice. This is a natural consequence of the fact that previous generations were not occupied with building successful relationships, but with survival. Therefore, we often unconsciously transfer this style of communication into our personal relationships, which cannot but influence them. Unfortunately, if partners have not in any way comprehended the influence of this background on themselves before the relationship, then going to a “family” psychologist often becomes just a way at least somehow drag your partner to a specialist. In this case, there may be an unspoken request - “well, tell him/her that it hurts me to treat myself this way, and that this can’t be done to me!” But our relationships with others are a consequence very deep patterns of behavior. To change them, it is not enough to simply learn “how to” and “how not to” act in a relationship. First, you need to see what you are actually doing in a relationship now. And why are you actually doing this? It is important to understand when this pattern was formed, and why it was needed in the conditions in which you were before. After this, you will be able to think substantively about what you really want instead. And only then, through long training, will it be possible to stop treating yourself poorly first, and then with other people this will also gradually begin to work out. As you can see, it turns out to be a multi-step approach. And it will be difficult (in fact, almost impossible) to pull it off when your partner is sitting in the next chair. Not only technically (one hour of consultation even for one person is often not enough), but also psychologically. No matter how much we want maximum acceptance in a couple, we have a natural guard regarding what we are ready to reveal about ourselves to a romantic partner and what not . It’s not for nothing that the role of a therapist is often equated with the role of a parent—acceptance is needed to heal mental trauma. But if the partner gives acceptance identical to the parent’s, the romantic relationship ends. They don’t sleep with their parents. Therefore, if the essence of the problem in a couple is the deep-seated trauma of one of the partners, then at the moment it is discovered, couples therapy should also end. I don’t want to say that there is no point in counseling couples at all - of course, it can be very useful. For example, if a couple is in crisis. A child is born - the family system has changed, and both parents are too exhausted to speak “words through their mouths” without breaking down. Then a family psychologist can be a “mediator” in negotiations, plus an expert figure with useful information, for example, about the child’s age-related crises. That is, this is definitely useful if people in a couple generally have an adequate dialogue between two stable adults, but there is some then a specific difficulty that a specialist can help solve. But in our society such a situation is very rare. So my opinion is that before starting couples therapy, it is better for partners to undergo personal therapy