Couples Therapy Before the Sh!t hits the Fan...

Most couples walk into a therapist's office when a crisis is at hand... When years of resentment have calcified into contempt. When the thought of one more argument feels unbearable. Or perhaps it's the "last chance" before calling it quits.

But... What if we treated our relationships like we treat our cars? You don't wait until your car completely breaks down on the highway before taking it to a mechanic, right? You get regular oil changes, tyre rotations, and tune-ups. You catch small problems before they become expensive disasters. You maintain what matters to you.

So why do we treat our most important relationship—the one we're building our entire life around—like it should just run perfectly without any maintenance until it catastrophically fails?

The "Last Chance" Mentality Is Costing Us

My favourite couples therapist, Terry Real, founder of Relational Life Therapy, has spent decades helping couples recover from the brink. But he'd be the first to tell you that by the time most couples show up, they're trying to rebuild a house that's been on fire for years. It's possible—he's done it thousands of times—but it's much harder than it needs to be.

The "last chance" mentality means couples endure years of:

• Small hurts that become big resentments

• Communication patterns that slowly poison connection

• Unspoken expectations that breed disappointment

• Emotional distance that becomes the new normal

• Defence mechanisms that calcify into permanent walls

By the time they seek help, they're not just dealing with the current conflict. They're dealing with years of accumulated wounds, failed repair attempts, and the exhaustion that comes from fighting the same fight over and over.

What If We Thought About Relationships Differently?

Imagine this alternative: You and your partner, a few months into living together, decide to see a couples therapist. Not because anything is "wrong." Not because you're fighting. But because you're smart enough to know that merging two lives is complex, and having a guide might help you do it well.

Or picture this: You've been together five years. Things are generally good, but you've noticed a pattern where one of you withdraws and the other pursues. It's not a crisis, but it's creating distance. So you book three sessions to understand the pattern and learn new moves before it becomes entrenched.

This isn't couples therapy as an emergency intervention. This is couples therapy as relationship optimisation—catching small issues early, learning better tools, and deepening intimacy before crisis forces you to.

The Core Principles That Could Change Everything

Terry Real's Relational Life Therapy offers frameworks that are incredibly useful before things fall apart—they're relationship upgrade principles that work best when applied early and often.

We Are All Wounded

Terry starts with a foundational truth: no one escapes childhood without wounds. The question isn't "Are you wounded?" but "How do your wounds show up in your relationship?"

This principle alone could save couples years of blame and defensiveness. When you understand that both of you are bringing childhood wounds into your adult relationship—that your partner's "irrational" reaction to something small is actually their wounded child responding to an old hurt—compassion becomes possible.

Imagine learning this framework before you've spent five years triggering each other's wounds and building resentment. Imagine being able to say early on: "I notice when you don't text me back quickly, I feel panicked—and I think that's my wounded child who felt abandoned as a kid" rather than "You never prioritise me and you clearly don't care!"

The Five Losing Strategies

Terry identifies five patterns we all fall into when triggered:

1. Being Right - needing to win, prove, dominate

2. Controlling Your Partner - managing, fixing, micromanaging them

3. Unbridled Self-Expression - venting, emotional dumping without filter

4. Retaliation - getting even, punishing

5. Withdrawal - stonewalling, shutting down, leaving

Here's the thing: we all use these strategies. They're not character flaws; they're survival mechanisms we learned as children. But they're relationship killers.

Now imagine learning to recognise these patterns early in your relationship—catching yourself in the moment when you're about to deploy your 'go-to losing strategy', and choosing something different instead. This isn't advanced relationship work; it's basic relational literacy. And most of us never learn it until we've already done significant damage.

The Grandiosity-Shame Wobble

Another one of Terry's useful concepts is what he calls "the wobble"—the way we oscillate between grandiosity ("I'm better than you, I'm right, you're the problem") and shame ("I'm worthless, I always mess up, I'm the problem").

Neither position is reality. Both are trauma responses. And in intimate relationships, we typically wobble between these positions—sometimes within a single argument.

The goal is what Terry calls "full respect living"—living in reality, where you're neither superior nor inferior, where you can acknowledge your part in problems without collapsing into shame, where you can stand up for yourself without needing to dominate your partner.

Learning to recognise and interrupt the wobble early in a relationship could prevent years of painful dynamics. But most couples don't learn this framework until they're deep in destructive patterns.

Being Right vs. Being Close

Terry puts it simply: "In every moment of conflict, you have a choice: Do you want to be right, or do you want to be close? You can't have both."

This is a powerful principle for early relationship work. When couples are still in the honeymoon phase, choosing closeness over being right feels relatively easy. But as time goes on and resentments build, the need to be right—to prove your point, to win the argument, to make your partner admit they're wrong, to have things done your way—becomes overwhelming.

What if couples learned this principle before they'd built up arsenals of evidence about who's right? What if they practised choosing closeness over correctness when the stakes were still low?

Both-And Thinking: The Relationship Game-Changer

Another transformative principle in Relational Life Therapy is "both-and thinking"—the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory truths simultaneously:

• You can be hurt AND accountable for how you express that hurt

• Your partner can be wrong AND you can be wrong in how you respond

• You can be the victim in one moment AND the perpetrator in the next

• Both of you are wounded AND both of you are responsible for healing

This moves us beyond the victim-perpetrator binary that dominates most relationship conflicts. It makes space for complexity, nuance, and shared responsibility.

When couples learn both-and thinking early, they bypass years of "who's the bad guy" arguments. They can say things like: "You were late and didn't text me, which hurt my feelings (your reality) AND I responded by attacking your character, which was unfair (my accountability)."

This is sophisticated emotional work. But it doesn't have to wait until your relationship is in crisis. In fact, it's much easier to learn when you're not already drowning in resentment.

What Regular Relationship "Check-Ups" Could Look Like

So what would it mean to use relationship therapy as maintenance rather than emergency intervention?

Early Relationship (First Year):

• 2-5 sessions to understand each other's attachment styles, wounds, and typical losing strategies

• Learning to recognise when you're in your adaptive child vs. wise adult

• Building a shared language for repair and reconnection

• Establishing patterns for handling conflict before destructive patterns calcify

Transition Points:

• Before moving in together

• Before getting married

• Before having children

• After significant life changes (job loss, relocation, illness)

• After a major breach of trust

Annual or Biannual "Tune-Ups":

• 2-3 sessions to assess how things are going

• Identify any emerging patterns that need attention

• Refresh skills and tools as needed

• Deepen intimacy and connection

• Catch small issues before they become big problems

When You Notice Something Off:

• One partner consistently withdraws

• The same fight is happening repeatedly

• Feeling disconnected despite being physically together

• Sex life is declining without a clear reason

• Resentment is building over household management, finances, or parenting

The key shift is moving from "We need therapy because everything is broken" to "We value this relationship enough to invest in its ongoing health and growth."

The Cultural Shift We Need

Right now, there's often shame around couples therapy. It signals failure, desperation, last resort. People whisper that they're "seeing someone" like it's a shameful secret.

But what if couples therapy became as normal as:

• Hiring a personal trainer when you want to get in better physical shape?

• Taking your car in for regular maintenance?

• Seeing a financial advisor when you want to optimise your investments?

• Working with a career coach when you want to advance professionally?

We invest in everything else we value. We get coaching, training, and expert guidance for our careers, our health, our finances, our hobbies. We read books, take courses, and seek mentorship to improve in areas that matter to us.

But when it comes to our most important relationship—the one that affects our daily happiness, our health, our children's wellbeing, and the entire quality of our lives—we're supposed to just wing it? Figure it out as we go? Only get help when things are completely falling apart? That's absurd.

Starting Small: What You Can Do Now

If the idea of regular relationship therapy feels overwhelming or out of reach right now, start smaller:

• Read Together: Get books like Terry Real's "Fierce Intimacy" (audio only), "Us" or "The New Rules of Marriage," and read/listen to chapters together and discuss the content. Learn the concepts as a couple.

• Try a Relationship Workshop: Many therapists offer weekend intensives or workshop series that are less intimidating than ongoing therapy.

• Practice the Principles: Start applying frameworks like "both-and thinking" or catching your losing strategies in the moment. Notice when you're choosing being right over being close.

• Talk About It: Have an explicit conversation with your partner about treating your relationship like something worth maintaining, not just something to fix when it breaks.

Investing in your relationship should be seen as a maintenance tool—as an upgrade system, as a regular check-up, as an investment in something you value—it isn't a sign of weakness. It's a sign of wisdom. It says:

"This relationship matters enough to me that I want to do it well. I want to learn from someone who understands these dynamics. I want to catch problems early. I want to grow alongside my partner rather than grow apart. I want to build something strong rather than constantly repair something broken."

That's smart navigation for the long journey ahead. And honestly? It's long overdue that we normalise it.

If you're interested in learning more about Terry Real's Relational Life Therapy principles, his books "Fierce Intimacy" (Audio only), "Us" and "The New Rules of Marriage" offer practical frameworks for couples at any stage. Terry Real offers fantastic videos on relationship challenges (https://relationallife.com/) that are well worth watching. And if you're ready to try maintenance-based relationship work, look for (RLT or other trained) therapists who can help you build strength before crisis demands it.