Couples therapy

Couples therapy: why a third person in the room helps

Many couples don't come because they've stopped talking. They come because they talk a great deal and nothing arrives.

The conversation exists, but it circles: every argument ends up being about the last argument, and whatever hurt in the first place never gets said.

A third person in the room isn't there to decide who's right. They're there because from inside a dynamic you can't see the dynamic — you only see the other person feeding it.

Communication problems in a relationship

The problem is rarely what the arguments are about. It's their shape.

Whoever raises the subject sounds accusing. Whoever listens feels on trial and defends themselves. The defence reads as not listening. And the original subject — the reason it started — never reaches the centre.

The first thing we do in session is slow down: stop at the point where the conversation changed direction, and look at what happened there. It's usually much earlier than either person remembers.

Emotional distance and lost intimacy

There's a difficulty that produces no arguments at all. It produces silence.

The affection is still there, living together works, the household runs. What's gone is the sense of being in the same place.

Often there's no moment when it happened. It's a series of small withdrawals: conversations not had because of tiredness, subjects avoided to prevent a row, gestures that stopped meaning anything. No single withdrawal seems important. The accumulation is.

Repeating conflict and relationship crisis

When the same argument returns in different words, it isn't a memory problem. It's a cycle.

Each person responds to the other's response, and the starting point disappears. At that point the argument is no longer about the thing: it's about who's right regarding how last time went.

The work is interrupting the cycle before it closes — which requires recognising it while it's happening, not afterwards.

Infidelity: when trust has broken

After infidelity, the question that arrives in the room is almost never "should we stay together?". It's "can I trust again?".

Those are two different questions and they need to stay separate. The first is a decision. The second is a process, and it doesn't answer to willpower: nobody decides to trust.

The work here is slow and concerns both people: the one who betrayed and the one who was betrayed have two different paths to walk, and forcing them to coincide doesn't work.

Couples therapy in English in Milan, Monza and Cernusco

I'm an Italian psychologist and psychotherapist, registered with the Order of Psychologists of Lombardy. I see couples in two practices in Milan, in Monza and in Cernusco sul Naviglio, and online.

I work in English and in Italian — which makes therapy possible for couples where the two partners don't share a first language. That situation is common in Milan, and it isn't a detail: an argument conducted in someone's second language is a different argument.

The first session is about understanding what the couple is asking for, and whether couples therapy is the right form for that request. Sometimes it isn't: occasionally the more useful path is individual work, for one or both.

When it makes sense to ask for help

— Do arguments always end the same way?

— Have we stopped raising certain things to avoid a row?

— Is there a subject we've been avoiding for months?

— Are we together by choice or by habit?

You don't need to be on the edge of separating to ask for a consultation.