Last month’s Existential Moment suggested that Existential-Humanistic (E-H) therapy, though not a formal couple’s model, naturally extends into relational work. This month begins to give fuller shape to that frame. Watch this brief scene from The Break-Up. Notice how an argument about dishes quickly becomes a disconnected, polarized argument about feeling unseen and unsupported, criticized and unappreciated. Then return to the reflection below.
Any coherent couples’ model must arguably begin with a theory of distress and health: what goes wrong in the relationship and what therapy seeks to cultivate. From an E-H perspective, distress is not located primarily in either partner, but in the relational, co-created field. The question is not who is right or who must change, but how each partner’s ways of being, particularly their protections, contribute to a shared pattern that constrains openness, contact, and responsiveness.
Each partner brings protective ways of being into the relationship. These protections often began as understandable responses to vulnerability, but in a couple, they become interactive. One partner’s protection activates the other’s, organizing the relationship around defense rather than encounter. The problem is not simply that partners criticize, demean, defend, or shut down. It is that these moves harden into repetitive ways of being together, narrowing and constricting their capacity for constructive engagement.
Over time or with pressure, these protective exchanges create a polarized field. Partners occupy increasingly fixed positions, meeting each other through negative anticipation. As this lens hardens, goodwill erodes, appreciation fades, understanding thins, trust weakens, and commitment is threatened. Openness narrows, responsiveness declines, and the cycle begins to feel inevitable. The field itself begins to shape how each partner perceives, feels, and responds.
From this perspective, health is not the absence of distress, so much as the couple’s growing capacity for presence, contact, flexibility, and responsiveness. Partners become better able to hold what emerges between them rather than organize against it. The relationship becomes less structured around protection and more open to encounter. Healing begins when the couple can stay present and attuned long enough for something new to become possible.
Related Blog Posts:
Explore polarized fields, protections, and protective patterns in E-H therapy in previous posts.
Read more about working in the here-and-now.
Read the Existential Moment posts on E-H couples therapy .
View all the Existential Moment series posts on EHI’s blog.
Existential Moment Author: Scott Gibbs, LMFT, EHI Board Member-at-Large | Website: www.mscottgibbs.com | Twitter: @Novum_Organum
