With time, some of them do make progress, coming to understand their role in negative relationship dynamics and learning to take a more empathetic view of their partner. They point fingers, reach stalemates, and struggle to see how past trauma has shaped the way they treat their partners. Had I been running emotional errands for the two people down the hall without realizing? I wasn’t sure whether it was wise, or fair to my parents, to apply what Guralnik had said to my own life, but I had some ideas about how I might do so.Ĭouples Therapy makes for good TV: The couples come off as vivid and earnest, but there’s still lots of drama, if not quite the over-the-top kind you can find on reality shows like The Bachelor and Real Housewives.

“Anxiety tells you something about your parents’ unhappiness, and your being recruited to do something about it,” Guralnik tells the woman.Īt this point, I had to close my laptop and stare at the wall for a few minutes. Deep into the second season, Guralnik challenges one woman to consider that the bursts of anger she feels toward her husband aren’t actually about him, but are instead motivated by anxiety inherited from a demanding mother who considered herself a failure. The Showtime docuseries follows Orna Guralnik, a real-life psychologist in New York, as she works with couples over the course of several months.

It was as apt a time and place as any for entertaining some heavy psychoanalytic ideas that would, no doubt, cause me to reflect on my life. I watched the entirety of Couples Therapy from my childhood bedroom while visiting my parents in July.

Zocdoc couples therapy