Is Communication Really the Problem in Couples Counseling?

“We need help with communication” is the most common request in couples counseling, and most of the time communication is not what is broken. Communication is a medium. Something else is trying to move through it: a change in behavior, a task, a feeling of being known, a no, a decision, some fun, a shared sense of what matters, or a repair. Naming which one failed is what tells us where to work.

That is the whole post in a paragraph. The rest is the argument for it, the eight things communication is usually in the service of, and what tends to go wrong with each.

A Misunderstanding Inside the Field

I have practiced couples counseling for years and I used to teach the course. Nearly every couple arrives with the same sentence, and for a long time I have half-joked that communication is almost never the actual problem. It is either a symptom of something underneath or the medium through which that something gets resolved or does not. What surprises me is that this does not seem to be common knowledge, and not only among the public. The field itself tends to treat communication as the thing to fix.

We can teach the fundamentals of good communication, and sometimes we should. Asking questions. Attending to the emotional content of the story rather than its logistics. Setting what the words say next to what the face and body are saying. Asking the question that lets the other person feel important. I have written about those capacities in How to Become a Better Communicator and about the habits that undo them in Invalidating Communication. This post is about something else: what happens when the communicating is working fine and the conversation still fails.

The metaphor is deliberately absurd because that is what the situation often is. The person is communicating correctly. The message leaves them intact and arrives intact. It does not produce the result it was for, and we respond by refining the technique.

Communication is in the service of something else. The question is what.

The Eight Purposes of Communication

In the earlier post I named four purposes of communication: play, strategy, relational connection, and existential meaning. For the question this post is asking, the list needs to be cut finer, because the finer cuts are where the misdiagnosis happens. When a couple says communication is broken, the conversation was trying to do one of at least eight things.

Purpose	What the conversation is for	What is usually missing
Influence	What the conversation is forChanging what the other person does	What is usually missingA behavioral response
Strategy and coordination	What the conversation is forGetting a task done together	What is usually missingInformation, clarity, or attention
Connection and intimacy	What the conversation is forFeeling known and important	What is usually missingAttunement
Agency and boundaries	What the conversation is forSaying yes and saying no	What is usually missingA clear no, or respect for the no
Negotiation and shared decisions	What the conversation is forDeciding together when preferences differ	What is usually missingTolerance for two valid positions
Entertainment and play	What the conversation is forEnjoying each other	What is usually missingReceiving the offer instead of correcting it
Shared meaning and culture	What the conversation is forDiscovering what matters to us	What is usually missingSelf-reflection
Repair	What the conversation is forRestoring the bond after harm	What is usually missingSincerity and resilience

These are not eight separate categories, and nothing in a real conversation sorts itself this cleanly. There is no influence without strategy and without a boundary. Negotiation needs connection or it becomes a contest. Repair needs agency, or the apology is a surrender. A single conversation moves between several of them in a minute. The distinctions still earn their place, because each purpose asks for a different thing from the person listening, and giving the wrong thing is one of the main ways a conversation fails while the words stay perfectly clear.

1. Influence

There is a kind of communication that gets parodied in sketch comedy now: the modern, emotionally intelligent, vulnerable exchange that comes out sounding contrived and insincere. The parody lands because it is pointing at something real. Here is my own version, made as asinine as I can make it on purpose, so the thing underneath becomes easy to see. The therapist invites Wilhelmina to share, vulnerably and with I statements, what has been bothering her.

Cut scene.

The emotional information has been received. We still have a dog-poop problem.

The depth of Wilhelmina’s feelings about Joe’s hands has nothing to do with it. Her first sentence was the clear one, and the session spent twenty minutes translating it into something softer. What is missing is not understanding. What is missing is that the understanding does not change anything Joe does.

This is influence: whether what matters to one person can affect the choices of the other. A large share of what gets called a communication issue is an influence issue. The message was sent. It was received. It may even have been reflected back with warmth. And the other person’s behavior continued exactly as before. If I understand your experience and that understanding does not reach my hands, then my understanding is not worth much to you, and no one should have to pretend otherwise.

The same structure shows up in ordinary form. “When you drive over the pass, text me when you get to the other side.” The empathic version of the response is to reflect that there is some nervousness about mountain passes that could be released and assuaged by a text message. The actual response is to send the text. I am being unfair to active listening here on purpose, and I will give it its due below. The point stands: when a request has been understood and keeps going unanswered, clarity is no longer the missing variable.

Influence does not mean compliance. We can understand a request and decline it, and a relationship with no room for declining is its own problem. But a pattern of understanding followed by no change is a pattern about whether one person’s experience is allowed to carry weight in the other person’s choices. Practicing how to say it differently will not supply that.

2. Strategy, Understanding, and Coordination

We need to put a table together. I explain the steps, and the table ends up assembled wrong.

Maybe my directions were unclear. Maybe a detail went unheard. This is the one category where the problem often is the exchange of information itself, and a communication skill is the fix. Slower directions, a question before we start, a check halfway through.

It is also possible to communicate a badly informed plan with perfect clarity.

Strategic conversation needs adequate information, understandable directions, attention, and enough follow-through to finish. Laziness about the first one gets blamed on the second one often.

3. Connection and Intimacy

Sometimes sharing our experience is the entire point. We want to feel known, accompanied, and important to the person in front of us. This is the purpose most communication advice is written for, and it is the purpose Wilhelmina’s therapist thought the session was about.

Here is where attunement lives, and I owe it the due I promised. We track the emotional significance of the story rather than its facts. We notice what the body and face are saying and set it alongside the words. We ask the question that shows we are following. We let the other person feel that they matter, which in attachment terms is the whole project: every one of these interactions gets cataloged, and the catalog becomes the expectation the next interaction starts from. A response such as “you shouldn’t feel that way” cuts the connection we were there to make. Some people need real help with this, and the help is real work. The less-is-more version of reflection, a word or two and a check, tends to land better than the long version, because the long version announces that a technique has arrived.

So emotional reflection belongs here. The failure in the dog-poop scene was never the reflection. It was offering reflection as the complete response to a conversation that was asking for something to change. Wilhelmina asked for a change in what Joe does with his hands, and the session gave her a reflection of her feelings about them. Both people left with a listening technique and the same dog-poop problem.

4. Agency and Boundaries

We communicate what we want, what we consent to, and what we will participate in. We say yes and we say no. This is where empowerment and communication get confused for each other.

Sometimes fear keeps us from saying either one. We anticipate disappointment, anger, or abandonment, and we start taking care of our partner’s reaction before we have stated our own position. Everything is fine, we say, and the resentment accumulates underneath the fine. From the outside this looks like unclear communication. From the inside it is self-worth, fear, and the question of whether we have permission to have needs at all. Am I allowed to want this? If I say no, do I lose you? Teaching the sentence does not touch the fear that prevents the sentence. What is missing is courage, the willingness to say it while still afraid, and that is built somewhere other than a communication exercise.

A clearly spoken no that gets bulldozed is a different situation. The no was communicated. It was understood. It was overridden anyway. One person in the first scenario needs support finding and expressing a boundary. In the second we are back to influence: whether the no carries weight with the person who heard it. Calling both of these communication problems puts the work in the wrong place twice.

5. Negotiation and Shared Decisions

One of us wants Chinese food. The other wants Italian.

Neither preference needs correcting. Both are valid, and if we want to eat together we still have to pick a restaurant. The capacity this requires is dialectical: two legitimate positions stay real at the same time while we decide what is possible together. Most of what couples decide is subjective. There is no fact that settles Chinese against Italian, and a shared decision will sometimes include one person’s disappointment without anyone having done anything wrong.

Larger decisions carry the same structure and not always the same resolution. Where to live, whether to have another child, how much to give to a parent who is failing. Understanding each other well can reveal compatibility or incompatibility; it cannot manufacture agreement. Some differences do not compromise, and discovering that through clear communication is communication succeeding at its job.

6. Entertainment and Play

Communication is as much about having fun as it is about anything else on this list, and this is the purpose we are most likely to forget is one.

We tell stories, exaggerate, riff, and hand the other person something to build on. It works the way improv works. The other person receives the offer and adds to it, and the pleasure is in the movement between us. The point of the story is to make the people in the room feel good, and to feel important in each other’s company.

Correcting an irrelevant detail stops the movement. The story happened Wednesday, not Tuesday. The restaurant was on the other side of town. We have established accuracy and ended the enjoyment, and we have told our partner something about whether they can be loose with us. There are conversations where precision matters. Recognizing play means knowing when the detail is incidental and the fluidity itself is the point.

7. Shared Meaning, Values, and Culture

We also talk in order to find out what matters to us, and to build something out of it.

What makes a life fulfilling? What does spirituality mean to each of us? What kind of family are we making, and which traditions do we carry forward or let go? This is how two people create a culture of their own. These conversations ask for curiosity and self-reflection, and here the limitation is often not in the talking at all. If we have had little practice noticing our own emotional responses, examining what we inherited, or forming a position on our values, we cannot hold up our end of the conversation, because there is no position yet to express. The other person experiences a partner who will not engage. The partner experiences not knowing what they think.

Sometimes the work is giving ourselves the time to find out what we mean. The conversation is where that gets discovered, and the discovering is the culture being built.

8. Repair

Something happened. One of us was hurt, and now we have to talk about it.

Repair is the conversation that acknowledges harm and restores standing between two people. It asks for humility, self-reflection, and the ability to sit in discomfort while someone describes what we did. It is also the clearest example on this list of why communication is not the problem, because the words of an apology are easy, and an apology with the right words can still be hollow. Without sincerity, without the feeling of it, the sentence does nothing.

“I’m sorry” goes wrong in two ways.

When the apology carries the feeling, something paradoxical happens. The rupture becomes the place where the bond gets stronger. Being hurt, and then being felt in the hurt, produces more intimacy than the absence of the rupture would have. Repair done sincerely does not return us to where we were. It takes us somewhere closer, and that is not a thing the words can do on their own.

Repair also has a receiving side, and it fails there too. The apology was sincere, it carried the feeling, and the person who was hurt cannot let it land. We re-litigate. We keep the injury as evidence for the next argument. We accept the words and withhold the standing. Letting a sincere apology count is its own capacity, and a relationship where repair is offered and never received is as stuck as one where it is never offered.

Two Capacities That Run Through All Eight

Two things come up so often in couples work that they deserve naming on their own. Neither is a ninth purpose. Each is a gestalt that several purposes produce together, and each is something people mean when they say they cannot communicate.

Redirecting

Nearly every disruptive pattern has the same effect: the conversation leaves the purpose it was serving. One of us goes neurotic. One of us plays the victim. One of us bulldozes, or answers a critique with a counter-critique about something from last March. The original purpose is still sitting there, unserved, while we argue about the detour.

Redirecting is the capacity to notice that and bring the conversation back. It borrows from influence, because something has to change in the room. It borrows from strategy, because we need to know where the conversation was going. It borrows from agency, because we are declining the detour without accepting the invitation to fight about it. “We were talking about the dishes. I will hear about my mother another time.” Said without contempt, it is one of the clearest signs of a differentiated communicator: we can see the pattern while it is happening and decline to be pulled into it.

Comforting

Someone we love is overwhelmed, grieving, frightened, or ashamed. A child, a partner, a friend. Comforting is mostly connection, and it is subtler than connection as we usually practice it, because less is more, especially verbally. Presence, a few words, a hand, the willingness to stay in the room without fixing anything. The long empathic sentence that works in a calm conversation can land as noise in a flooded one.

It also has a strategic element, because comfort is specific to the person. How someone is comforted has a great deal to do with their attachment pattern. One partner needs words and closeness. Another needs room, with us somewhere nearby. The same offer, “I love you, I’m here,” can land as relief, as pressure, as a burden, or as indifference, depending on who receives it. Comforting well means learning how this particular person is comforted, which is a different question from how we would want to be.

What Gets in the Way

It bears repeating that these purposes are not separate rooms. A request for change carries a need for reassurance. A practical conversation turns playful. A disagreement about dinner reveals whose preferences tend to win. Most conversations are serving two or three purposes at once, and the question is rarely which one, singular, but which one is failing.

The first difficulty is misreading the kind of conversation we are in. We answer a request for influence with emotional reflection, an invitation to play with a factual correction, a bid for connection with a plan. The words may be fine. They belong to a different conversation than the one our partner started.

The second difficulty is the main one, and it is us. Each purpose has its own way of breaking, and most of those ways come down to what we do with discomfort. Something uncomfortable gets activated and we avoid, deny, minimize, blame, or explain before we know we are doing it. We skip the subject. We insist everything is okay. We start blaming before our partner has finished the sentence. We caretake their feelings at the cost of our own position, or we turn contemptuous and sarcastic because we feel exposed. Codependent caretaking on one side, aggressive blaming on the other, and both are the same move: get out of the discomfort. These behaviors do disrupt communication, and they are better understood as our own neuroses meeting the conversation than as a shortage of technique. Changing the wording leaves the fear, the shame, or the intolerance of disagreement untouched. The shapes these moves settle into between two people are the subject of cycle work.

And then there are the moments when the message was understood and the response still does not come. Competing priorities. Limited capacity. Missing information. An unwillingness to change. None of these is a communication problem, and every one of them gets called one.

Clear communication can describe a problem it has no power to solve.

Couples counseling that treats all of this as communication produces a recognizable outcome. The two people get better at speaking. The reflections grow more accurate and the I statements more fluent. Sessions feel like progress. And a couple can become highly skilled at describing a relationship that neither person is yet willing or able to live differently.