Unlike many contemporary approaches to couples therapy (e.g., Gottman), existential-humanistic work does not offer a defined, manualized model with specific techniques or stages for working with couples. Instead, it provides a way of understanding and engaging human experience that naturally extends into the relational space. This piece aims to make explicit what is often implicit in existential-humanistic practice as applied to couples, offering a brief, high-level framework that will be explored in greater depth in future Existential Moments.
In an existential-humanistic frame, distress in couples is not located in one partner or the other, but in rigid, self-protective ways of being that negatively organize their relationship. These patterns create polarized fields, pulling partners into repetitive cycles that further narrow openness and constrain responsiveness. The aim is to help partners remain present to their lived experience so that they can hold and engage what emerges, potentially deepening connection, expanding how they relate, and transforming the dynamic.
The couple can be understood as a living, co-created relational field, not simply two individuals with problems. In each moment, the relationship is constituted by what each partner is experiencing, the meanings each is making, how each is participating, and, thus, what is emerging between them. This frame parallels “the dimensions of the therapeutic encounter,” in this case, with two persons of the client, one person of the therapist, and an interpersonal field that unfolds both within the partners’ dyad and within the triangle that includes the therapist, where the relationships are co-created, observable, and worked with in real time. The relations are happening in the here-and-now (e.g., in tone, posture, contact), as partners enact the relationship with each other and, importantly, in ways and to degrees, with the therapist.
Change occurs as partners become more aware of and better able to relate to their immediate experience and the protective ways of being that shape their interaction in the here and now. The therapist works within this process, at times engaging each partner to deepen and clarify their experience, and at times supporting how partners engage one another by interrupting constrictive patterns, fostering more direct and responsive contact, and helping repair misattunement and disconnection. In this way, the couple can begin to relate differently in real time, expanding their capacity to choose how they are with each other and gradually transforming the relational dynamic itself.
Related Blog Posts:
Explore core wounds, protections, and protective patterns in E-H therapy in previous posts.
Read more about working in the here-and-now and the therapeutic relationship .
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
