When you keep having the same argument — couples therapy for recurring conflict

The argument that starts from nowhere

It begins over something small. A tone of voice. A message left unanswered for four hours. Something on the kitchen bench that you had both agreed would not be left on the kitchen bench again.

Ninety seconds later you are somewhere else entirely, and neither of you could say when you left the original subject behind.

You know the shape of what comes next, because you have been here before. One of you presses for an answer. The other goes quiet, or goes reasonable, or goes out of the room. Or you both raise your voices and say the sentence you have each said perhaps forty times, and it lands exactly as it landed the last time.

Afterwards there is a particular kind of tiredness — an argument that resolved nothing and cost a great deal. Sometimes an apology. Sometimes two days of careful politeness. Then, in a fortnight, the same conversation from the top.

If that is where you are, it does not mean the two of you are badly matched, and it does not mean one of you is the problem. It means something between you is running in a loop. Loops are not broken by trying harder inside them.

Most disagreements between couples are never resolved

There is a distinction here worth having, because it changes what you are aiming at.

Some difficulties are solvable. They have an answer, and once the answer is agreed the difficulty goes away and does not return.

Most are not. The research that underlies the Gottman Method found that the greater part of what couples disagree about is perpetual — rooted in differences of temperament, of upbringing, of what each person needs in order to feel at ease — and still present, in some recognisable form, years later. Two people with genuinely different relationships to tidiness, or to money, or to family obligation, do not stop having that difference by discussing it more thoroughly.

The workable goal, then, is not to win the argument and not to finally settle it. It is to change what happens between the two of you when it arrives.

That is a smaller aim than most couples come in holding, and a far more achievable one. A perpetual difference handled with some humour and some affection is liveable for decades. The same difference handled with contempt, or with a slow and quiet withdrawal, is what ends marriages. The content did not decide that. The handling did.

The older story in the room

There is usually more than the present relationship inside a fight that will not resolve.

Each of you learned something about conflict long before you met — whether raised voices were survivable, whether anybody came back afterwards, what happened to the person in the house who said plainly what they wanted. Those lessons are not held as memories. They arrive as certainty: this is what is happening now.

Depth-psychological work — Jungian and psychodynamic — attends to that older material. What each of you carries that predates the marriage. What one cannot tolerate in oneself and therefore finds intolerable in the other. The way a partner comes, for a while, to stand in for someone who is not in the room at all.

This is unhurried work, and it is often where a recurring conflict finally loosens, because the loop has been fed from somewhere neither of you had yet looked.

Who this suits

Couples who are still arguing. That sounds an odd thing to say, but a live argument is workable material. A couple who have stopped bothering are a harder starting point, though not a hopeless one.

Couples who have read the books, agreed the fair-fighting rules, and found that the rules dissolve at exactly the moment they are needed.

Couples where the relationship has begun to feel like a low-grade weather system rather than a place to live — watchful, irritable, tiring — without anything having happened that would explain it.

Couples who are perfectly civil at a dinner party and cannot get through a Sunday.

Therapy Atelier sees couples only. Individual therapy, family work and work with children are not offered here. Where individual therapy would be useful alongside the couples work, that is said plainly and a referral offered.

When weekly is right, and when an intensive is

For most couples, weekly is right. A ninety-minute session, week after week, gives the pattern time to be noticed, interrupted, and practised against in ordinary life between sessions. Recurring conflict is a habit held by two nervous systems, and habits change by repetition. That is the weekly couples therapy offered here.

Weekly has one limitation. You open something, work at it for ninety minutes, then close it and carry it for six days. Sometimes the six days undo it.

Where the pattern is long-standing, where you are travelling in from Melbourne or further, or where the arguments have become frequent enough that a week is not long enough to recover between them, consecutive days do something that weekly cannot. What surfaces on the first afternoon is still live the following morning, rather than gone by the following Tuesday.

There are three- and five-day couples intensives, arranged privately, and a fuller account of what three or five consecutive days actually involve elsewhere on the site.

Where the argument that keeps returning follows a betrayal, the work takes a different shape from the beginning, and couples therapy after an affair sets out how that is approached.

Who you would be working with

Therapy Atelier is led by Tumee Hugginson, psychotherapist and couples therapist. She holds an MA in Clinical Psychology, is trained to Level 3 in the Gottman Method, works in Emotionally Focused Therapy, and brings a Jungian and psychodynamic training to this work.

The practice sees couples, and only couples.