Relationship Issues

By Team TherapyRoute

Relationship trouble is rarely about one bad person. Most of the time, two people fall into a pattern together. The same argument keeps returning. The same silence follows.

This page covers what commonly goes wrong between people, and what helps. It takes in romantic partners, family relationships and friendships.

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It is the pattern, not the person

When couples fight, the topic often matters less than the manner. Researchers who study couples code how partners speak, not only what they argue about.³ Coding means classifying each remark as it is made, rather than summarising the argument afterwards. Working this way, John Gottman singled out four habits of speech as particularly corrosive, and named them the four horsemen.⁵

Contempt is an attempt to insult a partner, or to show disrespect. An eye roll is one of the cues coders read as contempt, though it can also be plain irritation. There is a real difference between 'that is sickening' and 'you make me sick'. The first names a situation, the second attacks the person.

Criticism attacks character. A complaint stays with the specific problem: what happened, and when. Defensiveness answers a complaint with 'yes, but', or with a counter-complaint. Stonewalling is withdrawal in the middle of a conversation, going silent and still.

In Gottman's data these four ran as a cascade: criticism leads to contempt, contempt to defensiveness, and defensiveness to stonewalling.⁵ It is a pattern, not a personality. A pattern made by two people can be changed by two people.

What strain does to body and mind

Relationship pain is not only in the mind. It shows in the body as well. A romantic partner is often the closest bond a person has.¹ A partner can offer security, comfort, and a sense of belonging.

When that bond strains, stress can build up over time. Partners who were more hostile during conflict and support discussions have been found to heal from wounds more slowly, and to show higher inflammation, than less hostile partners.¹ Pressure from outside the relationship, such as a job loss, can affect both partners. Women are generally more reactive to relational stress than men, though the long view is not simple: in one study, more frequent conflict from year to year went with husbands' poorer subjective health, while the pile-up of conflict over sixteen years went with wives'.¹

The reverse holds too. On days when partners reported more physical intimacy, such as hugging and holding hands, they reported more positive feeling and showed lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.¹ Feeling cared for and understood by a partner has been linked to healthier daily cortisol patterns ten years later.¹ This is why relationship trouble can leave a person exhausted.

The echo of earlier relationships

First relationships set what a person expects from love. Bowlby described how a child's early bonds with the people who care for them build a working model of what closeness will be like.² Hazan and Shaver later carried the idea into adult life, treating romantic love as an attachment process of its own and finding that a person's attachment style went with distinct experiences in love.⁴

Attachment is the bond between a young child and the people who care for them, and insecure attachment means that early bond was not dependable. It can carry into later relationships. Partners with insecure attachment often find stress harder to handle.

Families also pass on scripts. People follow them without noticing. Bowen looked at how patterns can pass down the generations, and Boszormenyi-Nagy described invisible loyalties, meaning unspoken obligations to an earlier generation.⁶

An old loyalty of that kind can conflict with a present relationship. Seeing the pattern can make a struggle feel less like a personal failing. That is central to a psychoanalytic view of relationships, which traces the influence of earlier bonds on present ones.

Different bonds, different strains

Not every relationship strains in the same way, and what counts as a family keeps changing.

A blended family is one formed when partners bring children from earlier relationships. These carry their own particular strains. A step-parent and a child may clash.

A child can feel caught in a loyalty bind between divorced parents, where closeness to one feels like a betrayal of the other.

Friendships strain differently again, because little holds them in place. There is no household and no shared contract, and often no convention for repair, so a friendship can thin out through effort that has quietly become one-sided, or end after a hurt that neither person raises. That loss is often grieved privately, since the ending of a friendship is not marked the way a separation is. Saying plainly that something has changed, rather than waiting for the other person to notice, is usually where repair starts.

When it may be time to seek help

Ordinary conflict is part of every close relationship. Not every strain needs a therapist. Some signs, though, suggest outside help is worth considering.

Many couples seek help after an affair comes to light. Arguments that repeat without ever resolving are another common reason, and so is a slow emotional detachment between two people.

A sexual difficulty is sometimes a sign of other relationship problems. Some partners come to therapy while a relationship is ending, and their aim is to protect the children as they part.

What couples and family therapy involve

Couples and family therapy does not work by taking sides. Early on, each partner says how they see the problem. The accounts rarely match. Most people locate the trouble in the other, not themselves.²

A therapist watches how a couple communicates and solves problems. They notice how strong feeling is handled, and what roles each person holds.

Approaches differ from one therapist to another. Structural work looks at boundaries and hierarchy in a family: who is close to whom, and who is in charge of what. Bowen's method draws a genogram, a detailed family tree. Solution-focused work leans towards solutions rather than the origins of the problem.

Psychodynamic work attends to feelings and patterns a person is not fully aware of. Such a therapist also watches what passes between partners without words. A small gesture can be part of an old, repeating pattern.

When therapy is not the first step

Joint therapy is not always the right first move. Where there is violence in a relationship, safety must come first. If you are in danger, please contact your local emergency services or find a helpline on our worldwide crisis lines list.

Therapy also fits poorly when one partner has secretly decided to leave. For some, therapy conflicts with a family's beliefs. That deserves respect.

Where a child has been harmed, the child's safety comes before any couple or family work. In many countries a professional who learns of harm to a child carries a legal duty to report it, and those duties differ from one jurisdiction to another and do not fall on every profession alike. If a child is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services or the child-protection service in your country; otherwise speak to a clinician or that service before joint work begins. A therapist should name these limits at the outset rather than avoid them.

A realistic word on repair

Feeling distressed by a difficult relationship is a normal reaction, not a flaw. Good help notices a family's strengths, not only its problems.

Small repairs matter more than large gestures. Feeling understood again can slowly ease the strain. Change is possible, though it takes time and is rarely quick.

Finding the right therapist

If you decide to seek support, choosing well matters. For couple or family work it is worth asking a prospective therapist what training they have in seeing more than one person in the room, how they work when the two accounts of the problem do not match, and what they do with anything one partner tells them privately. Our guide on how to find the right therapist is a good place to begin.

Related terms

• Communication Skills - Skills that help people understand each other.
• Conflict Resolution - Ways to work through disagreements.
• Boundaries - Limits that protect people and their bonds.

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This information is for educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional relationship counselling or mental health treatment. If relationship issues are seriously affecting your life, please seek qualified help. The same is true if there are any safety concerns.

References

1. [1] Shrout, M. R. (2021). The health consequences of stress in couples: A review and new integrated Dyadic Biobehavioral Stress Model. Brain, Behavior, & Immunity - Health, 16, 100328. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8474672.
2. [2] Sadock, B. J., Sadock, V. A., & Ruiz, P. (Eds.). (2017). Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry (10th ed.). Wolters Kluwer.
3. [3] Gottman, J. M., Woodin, E. M., & Coan, J. A. (1998). Specific Affect Coding System (SPAFF), 20-Code Version 4.0. Unpublished coding manual.
4. [4] Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511-524. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511.
5. [5] Gottman, J. M. (1993). A theory of marital dissolution and stability. Journal of Family Psychology, 7(1), 57-75. doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.7.1.57.
6. [6] Boszormenyi-Nagy, I., & Spark, G. M. (1973). Invisible Loyalties: Reciprocity in Intergenerational Family Therapy. Harper & Row.