What If My Husband Won’t Go To Therapy?
You want your partner to go to individual or couples therapy and they won’t go! This is a common frustration. While there is no magic way to get them to do what you want, here are some tips to help you reduce the potential barriers to getting the outcome you want.
Individual or Couples Therapy?
You might want your partner to go to individual therapy to deal with an individual issue which impacts your relationship. Examples of this would be: wanting your partner to get support for feeling depressed or being anxious or having trouble coping with a change or loss. Because the target of those issues is your partner, you want them to engage in therapy as an individual. You might want this when your relationship dynamic is otherwise healthy or the urgency of addressing relationship issues is secondary to your partner getting good individual support.
Be aware that individual therapy can support you in clarifying and coping with your relationship issues. But, the research shows that individual therapy for one partner has no beneficial impact on relationship outcomes the same way that couples therapy does. Even the best individual therapy can only help you do the best you can on your end of the relationship. It is essential for both people to directly participate to have the best benefit for relationship issues. Individual therapy is good at supporting individual autonomy. But, relationship issues are not only about autonomy but also connectedness and the dynamic between you. Your relationship issues are probably not all your problem or only about things you can individually control. But, individual therapy can only address your functioning and things you can control. That’s why it’s limited in addressing many relationship issues.
In other situations, you might want your partner to go to therapy because your relationship is suffering, the relationship itself needs to change, and you worry that you are reaching a breaking point where a fix is urgent to avoid separation. Or, you realize that chronic relationship issues have created resentment or loss of a sense of satisfying intimacy. In many situations, the answer is both individual and couples therapy is desired but with inter-related goals. There are many situations where each person gets individual support from their own therapist while they see a third provider for couples sessions.
Let’s examine common barriers that keep a partner from being open to therapy.
In my twenty-five years of practice, about 99% of partners who are resistant to going to therapy are cisgender male. This explains the title of this video and has to do with therapy being seen as a sign of weakness which violates conventional notions of masculinity. Sometimes a male partner may assume that how they will be expected to behave during a session conflicts with how they want to act in the home. They may be apprehensive about having conform to those assumed expectations. Of course, regardless of gender, a partner may see therapy as a threat to their power in the relationship and resist going as a strategy to maintain that sense of power.
A way to address these issues of perceived threats to a sense of strength and power is to name them and deal with them directly. This doesn’t mean you have to work out all the complexities of power issues in your relationship before your partner will begin sessions. But, it can be worth acknowledging that seeing a therapist likely will impact the dynamic of your relationship. But, the goal is to co-create a more mutually satisfying relationship. The reality is most of us therapists are supportive of more egalitarian power-sharing in intimate relationships. However, most of us also don’t jump into relationship dynamics like a bull in a china shop as that would be unethical and unhelpful. Prior to going to therapy, you can affirm to your partner that whatever a therapist might say to you in a session, you two still are the ones who decide what you do in your relationship.
One way to help your partner get over the above concerns is to look for a therapist who will do a brief introductory phone call prior to the first session in order for your partner to chat with them to get a sense of the therapist’s style and help them get their concerns about therapy addressed. Even if the therapist you have chosen doesn’t do such calls, you can ask if your partner can go to the first session alone to have that discussion or even start the first session for a portion of the time with you out of the room so that type of interaction between your partner and the therapist can take place.
Check out my video on this topic below:
What if my husband won’t go to therapy?
If your partner is reluctantly agreeing to go to couples sessions with you, don’t use your individual therapist you have already been seeing. Also, have your partner make the initial email or phone contact with the prospective therapist. Any contact you have with the therapist may threaten your partner’s ability to trust the process enough to be open to proceeding. This is because any perceived alliance you have with the therapist will potentially be seen as a threat. Your partner doesn’t want to think the therapist is unduly biased against them due to your influence early in the process.
Here are some additional tips for helping your partner be open to therapy:
Let your partner know that going to therapy doesn’t mean bringing up and working through everything in their past. A common barrier for people to going to therapy is the worry that they must be open about everything and limitless in scope. Neither are true. Sometimes making the goals of therapy more clear and focused will help someone be less apprehensive. It may be better to let them know something like, “I want us to be able to communicate better between us when one of us is frustrated.” That’s a clear and focused goal. Because most couples go on for a long time before getting to the point of scheduling an initial session with a therapist, both partners know that the issues are quite complex. When your partner thinks going to therapy will mean opening up to an overwhelming amount of personal work, they will naturally be reluctant.
I don’t recommend threatening your partner with separation if they don’t go to therapy unless you absolutely mean it. While people have limits and breaking points, if you reach your limit, it will be about the issues, rather than whether or not a therapist is involved. What I mean is that you might reach a place where you are clear that if something doesn’t change around an issue that you are at the point of separation or some other renegotiation of your relationship. But, the therapy would be a tool to fix the issue. The issue remains the important thing.
For example, let’s say that your partner is jobless, and you are at the point that you are going to separate if they don’t get a job. Even if you think they are hampered from being employed due to an issue that could improve with therapy, it’s really about the job. They might go to therapy and still not have a job at the end of it. It is fine to let your partner know that going to therapy represents to you their commitment to improving the relationship and that their avoidance of going is resulting in frustration. However, the primary focus is on the relationship goals which therapy can support.
It might be helpful to ask your partner what they think of therapy in order to understand their barriers to going. They might have the notion that therapy is a step to divorce. Or, they might have had a friend who went to therapy and didn’t have a good result. When you know more about the specific concerns your partner has with therapy in general, you can look for a YouTube video or online blog post that might help them see it differently. Or, you can encourage them to have an individual conversation with a therapist to get their concerns addressed.
Let your partner know that you hear their concerns and that if you begin therapy and an issue arises, you can address the issue directly or look for another therapist. For example, if your partner says, “Therapists are biased against men and is going to take your side just because you’re a woman,” then you could let them know, “If we see the therapist acting in a biased way in a session, I support our bringing that up with the therapist.”
I don’t want to be labelled as crazy!
One reason people avoid going to therapy is because they don’t want to be diagnosed as mentally ill. Part of the reason this is a problem is the way insurance reimbursement works. While many insurance plans won’t cover couples sessions at all, those that do only do so if one of the people has an official diagnosis code on the claim form. And, marital problems won’t count as a diagnosis. So, for reimbursement to occur, the therapist has to justify a diagnosis for at least one of you. While cost-prohibitive for many people, the simplest way around this is to pay out of pocket and then no diagnosis is warranted by a claim form.
If your partner is reluctant because they tried it in the past and hated it or heard from a friend that it was useless, know that we therapists vary quite widely regarding our style, experience, and level of competency. If one therapist wasn’t satisfying, then that doesn’t mean all others will be the same. You should see someone who has experience with relationship issues and who has been working in the profession for at least a decade.
I hope this information has been helpful. I believe that many of these barriers can be addressed for many partners out there and wish you the best with your project. Once people actually go to couples therapy, I usually hear later that they wish they would have done it sooner. So, that’s why I made this video since it’s those perceived barriers that delay the service.
To be helpful, I made a companion video to this one which you can show to your partner and in which I explain all these same issues but aimed at your partner instead of you. Watch that here.
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