The CognitiveLit
Common couples issues
Emotional Closeness
In many relationships, there is a strong longing for closeness, warmth, and love, yet distance can still arise. Perhaps you express your love in different ways, or past experiences have made it difficult to trust.
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When closeness does not feel natural, it can lead to frustration, sadness, or doubt. Thoughts such as “Do you care about me?” or “Is something wrong with me?” may surface. A painful sense of being alone can emerge, even when you are together, often leading to silence, defensiveness, or demands, which in turn increase the distance between you.
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Couples Therapy provides a safe space where you can, through guided conversation, approach each other with curiosity and care rather than blame or pressure.
We work on increasing understanding of each other’s needs and love languages, and on creating space for vulnerability. There may be fears, old wounds, or different ways of interpreting each other’s signals. As it becomes easier to express love and safer to receive it, the bond between you also strengthens.
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Communication and Interaction
In many relationships, it is not the lack of love that is the problem, but the difficulty of reaching one another. Sometimes we get stuck in old patterns, criticism, silence, defensiveness, or guilt. Unclear, avoidant, or hurtful ways of communicating can create frustration, misunderstandings, and emotional distance, even though our true longing is to be understood and met with respect.
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Couples therapy offers an opportunity to identify and change these very patterns. Together we explore what lies behind negative reactions, and how they can be transformed. Through guided conversations, safer communication is built, where both partners feel heard, respected, and understood. When dialogue becomes a space for closeness rather than conflict, the foundation of your relationship is strengthened.
Disagreement in Decision
Differences in priorities, values, or life goals such as approaches to finances, work, family, or parenting are common sources of tension in a relationship. When these differences are not addressed, they can lead to misunderstandings, arguments, or silence that creates distance.
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Couples therapy can help you navigate these differences. We explore the values that shape each of you, the experiences that have influenced them, and how they impact your shared life. This can foster deeper self-awareness and understanding of each other’s perspectives. You will also receive support in formulating shared goals and a vision that both partners can stand behind.
Trust and Loyalty
Trust can be deeply shaken by betrayal, infidelity, or broken promises, leaving both partners feeling doubt, worry, and hurt. Loyalty and trust form the foundation of any close relationship, and when these are challenged, strong emotional reactions are natural.
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Rebuilding trust takes time, courage, and openness. It involves acknowledging what happened, understanding why, and working together to find a constructive way forward.
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Couples therapy provides a safe and supportive environment where both partners can be heard without blame or judgment. By addressing each partner’s needs and concerns, even damaged trust can begin to heal. The ultimate goal is to create a strong, lasting foundation for your relationship, grounded in respect, open communication, and shared values.
Sex, Closeness, and Intimacy
Sexual compatibility is a common challenge for many couples. Partners may express and experience closeness and desire in different ways. Differences in needs, desires, and expectations can create frustration and distance, especially when understanding and communication around intimacy are lacking.
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Couples therapy can provide valuable support in bridging these differences. In a safe and supportive environment, guided conversations allow you to explore both sexual and emotional needs without fear of judgment or misunderstanding. The goal is for both partners to feel seen, heard, and secure enough to share their desires, fostering greater intimacy, connection, and mutual satisfaction.
Jealousy and Insecurity
Jealousy is a feeling that many people experience in close relationships, sometimes as a temporary reaction, sometimes as a recurring challenge. At its core, it is often about fear of loss, insufficient self-esteem or previous experiences of betrayal. Jealousy can develop into control, conflict and reduced trust in the relationship. ​
In therapy, we create a safe space where you can explore the feelings that lie behind jealousy, such as worry or vulnerability. We work both with your communication, and with the individual's need for emotional security. The goal is to promote trust and confidence, where both experiences can take place without guilt or shame.
Problem-Solving and Stress
Life makes demands on work, family, and everyday life. When stress becomes high, it is easy for relationships to fall by the wayside. Maybe you get stuck in discussions without making progress, or you avoid them altogether because you don't have enough energy.
Sometimes it is about different ways of dealing with stress, different needs for recovery, or different views on how to solve problems. Irritations grow and what once united can feel like another burden.
Couples therapy can help you understand how you can support each other instead of ending up on opposite sides of the problem. By exploring your patterns, needs, and reactions, you will gain tools to handle pressure together.
The relationship can become a place of relief and security, not yet another source of stress. The aim is to face both everyday problems and life's heavier periods side by side, to promote the ability to carry life together with greater understanding, trust, and community.
Life Changes
Life changes, sometimes quickly and unexpectedly, sometimes through decisions we have made ourselves. Even positive changes can create stress, uncertainty and a feeling of drifting apart in a relationship. Changing jobs, moving, having children or going through other major life events not only affects the individual, but also the relationship.
Previously functioning patterns are challenged and communication can break down when roles change. It is then easy to feel alone or misunderstood, even though both are trying their best.
Couples therapy offers a space where you can work through what you are going through together. We explore how the change affects both of you, what needs arise, individually and as a couple, and how you can meet with increased understanding and care.
Instead of seeing the change as a threat, you are given the opportunity to use it as a path to deeper connectedness and development. Through conversation, reflection and concrete tools, you will receive support in adapting to a new reality in a way that strengthens your relationship and helps you find your way back to each other, even in what feels new and uncertain.
External Stress Factors
Relationships do not exist in a vacuum. Financial pressures, family illness, conflicts at work, moving, legal difficulties or demanding life situations can intrude into everyday life and put the relationship to the test.
When energy is spent on dealing with what is happening outside, there is often less energy left to take care of what is happening between you. You may become more easily irritated, more withdrawn or your conversations may mostly be about practical necessities.
In Couples Therapy, there is space to stop and see how external circumstances affect your relationship and how you can face what is difficult together. Sometimes one of you carries more than the other, sometimes you carry different things, but still feel alone in it.
We explore how you are affected in different ways, and how you can rediscover togetherness, cooperation and support in each other. A relationship that not only holds, but carries, in the midst of storms.
Loss and Grief
When a loss affects your life, a death, a miscarriage, an illness or something else that fundamentally changes your life, it affects not only the individual, but the entire relationship. ​​
Sometimes people grieve differently, or in completely different ways. Some grieve through silence, depression or anger, others show a seemingly unaffected surface. It can feel difficult to know how to support each other, or how to express your feelings yourself. Grief can create a feeling of loneliness, misunderstanding or distance at a time when you may need each other the most.
Couples therapy can provide support in understanding how grief affects each of you, and together. By exploring how you experience and deal with the loss, we create space for you to grieve side by side, instead of separately. With gentle guidance, reflection and exercises, you will be helped to put into words what is difficult, to listen to each other's experiences.
When grief is allowed to exist in different ways but in a shared space, warmth, contact, and new meaning can also begin to take place again in your relationship.
After a crises
Some crises redraw the map of a relationship. It can be about infidelity, life-changing events, or a longer period of distance and pain that has shaken the foundation between you. Sometimes it is possible to find your way back to each other. Sometimes the path forward looks different than the one you once planned. Couples therapy can be a support both in rebuilding after a crisis and in exploring whether and how you want to continue together.
For some couples, therapy becomes a place where trust slowly begins to return, where conversations deepen, and where hurt can be healed. For others, it becomes a space where the decision to part ways can mature with dignity and consideration. Together, you can create a dignified ending, so that you can both move forward with healthier steps, and with greater understanding of yourselves and each other.