What Can I Expect in a First Couples Therapy Session?

Preparing for your first couples therapy session

Before your first couples counseling session at Colorado Therapy Collective, you will have already had the opportunity to complete a comprehensive questionnaire asking about you and your relationship. This will include questions about your identities, your history as it relates to your relationship, what you like about your relationship, and what you’d like to change (and many more!). Many of the couples we work with share that this helps them to really start to reflect and prepare for the first therapy session. It also gives your therapist an opportunity to learn about you and to prepare for the session. While these questionnaires are no substitute for actually talking with your partner or your therapist, it does help your therapist get oriented.

During your first session

During your first couples therapy session, your therapist will check to see if you have any questions about the practice policies that you received via the client portal, and will review important information about how confidentiality works in the context of couples therapy, and exceptional situations in which your therapist would be required to break confidentiality, such as when someone is in imminent danger or there is ongoing child or elder abuse. This is a great time to ask any questions that might have come up for you in reviewing the policies, as well as any questions you may have about the process of couples therapy.

After reviewing important policies and laws impacting couples therapy, your couples therapist will begin to explore what brought you to couples therapy, and how it feels to actually be in the process. We will begin to explore what brought you and your partner together in the first place, as well as the places you are getting stuck that has led you to seek support.

Your therapist will listen carefully to how you and your partner each view the problem, and will also try to understand how conflict or misunderstanding plays out in real time in your relationship. At Colorado Therapy Collective, we believe that every couple, even (and especially!) those that love each other, has some version of a negative cycle that can take hold in their relationship, in which partners miss each other and end up feeling more disconnected. Typically these negative cycles play out with some repetition and consistent elements. In a first session, we’ll begin to explore what you and your partner’s negative cycle tends to look like, and will start to get curious about the underlying emotions that are driving it.

There is a good chance that in your first session, your therapist will ask you to turn and share something directly with your partner. We specifically look for feelings and thoughts that don’t typically get expressed between you, but that feel important for your partner to see and understand. We know that sometimes this can feel a bit awkward, but we also know that there is A LOT of research that shows it is really important for the change process. We want you to start practicing and getting comfortable with this early in the process. We also are happy to slow down and explore any discomfort or awkwardness that comes up around this.

Your couples therapist will help you talk honestly about your concerns while also making sure that the therapy space feels like a safe and productive space, not a space where the negative cycle gets to run rampant.

As you close the initial couples session, you will hopefully feel that your therapist understands how you see the problems you have come in with, as well as how we plan to address them in couples therapy. You may have a slightly different idea about what is driving the problems that you see in your relationship.

Scheduling Individual Sessions and Next Sessions Together

If you haven’t already, your couples therapist will work with you and your partner to schedule individual sessions in which they can review your questionnaire with you in more depth, and learn more about your unique history that informs the way you show up in this relationship. After these individual sessions, you will come back together and future sessions will include both you and your partner. We highly recommend scheduling weekly sessions as you begin your couples therapy work so that you can build momentum. We feel strongly that you will get more benefit from consistent sessions than inconsistent or very spaced-out sessions.

What about homework?