When I first meet a couple, one of the things that stands out most is how they are sitting in the waiting room. Before we have even started talking about why they are here, that moment already tells me a lot.
When I open my door, if I see two people sitting with several chairs in between them, I know it is going to be a difficult session. They are sitting at opposite ends of the room, and they could not be further apart if they tried. In those moments, I can usually tell that they are both hurt, frustrated, and angry, even if neither of them is saying very much yet.
People come to me for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they are cuddling in the waiting room, both nervous and scared, but really wanting to work on the relationship. They might not know how to do that yet, and they might be unsure of what is going to come up once we start talking, but they want to be there and they want to try. Other times, the distance between them feels very real, and it is clear that a lot has already happened before they walked through the door.
In these situations, conflict can feel so personal, so heated, so charged. That is something I have been thinking about and researching a lot lately. Why do we fight the way we do, and what actually gets in the way of having these conversations earlier.
There are a lot of things that get in the way. There is so much that goes unsaid in relationships. There are things that get assumed rather than talked about. There are things that get swept under the rug because they feel uncomfortable, or awkward, or not bad enough yet. People tell themselves they will deal with it later, or that it is not worth bringing up, or that raising it will only make things worse.
Sometimes people are too scared to bring something up because they are worried about how their partner will react. They might be worried it will turn into an argument, or that they will not be understood, or that it will create distance rather than closeness. Over time, that silence starts to take a toll.
Resentment can build up slowly, often without people realising it is happening, until one day it either explodes in a way that feels shocking, or it shows up in a quieter moment where you look at your partner and think, I do not even know who you are anymore. Do you even know me.
This is something I talk about in the podcast as well. Most couples do not come to therapy just because something huge happened out of nowhere. They come because there were little things that kept getting brushed past for a long time, and eventually those little things start to feel very big.
As I said in the episode, “We probably should have done this earlier, not just because something huge happened, but because there were little things that we just kept brushing past.”