If you’ve been wondering where I disappeared to recently, here is the truth: Ryan and I went offline for a two-day couples therapy intensive workshop and couples therapy retreat. We didn’t go because everything is broken; we went because we wanted to learn how to succeed in navigating relationship life transitions and build emotional safety.
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You don’t just go to therapy to fix things when they are broken; you go to therapy to have tools. Having a neutral guide who challenges you to see your blind spots is exactly how you level up in your relationship.
We’re talking about doing the deep, internal family of origin work, identifying the childhood wounds that built our current “superpowers,” and learning how to stand in our adult selves. Let’s dive in.
What to Expect at a Couples Therapy Intensive
If you are looking into intensive couples counseling, you might be wondering what actually happens in the room. Unlike traditional talk therapy where you sit on a couch and vent about your partner, experiential relationship therapy challenges you. Our therapist, Dave, didn’t have us focus on our specific relationship issues with each other at all.
Instead, he guided us through Internal Family Systems (IFS) and parts work. When we walked in, the room felt almost like a nursery or rec room, complete with blankets, plush toys, and big pieces of paper on the walls for us to draw on.
✨ Related: Navigating a new relationship after divorce? Check out my thoughts on [Divorce & Co-Parenting] →
We’re moving away from just telling our stories and toward actively engaging with the different sides of ourselves. Dave helped us see that our greatest superpowers in life are also the very things that can take us down in our relationships.
The IFS Framework: Understanding Your Protectors and Exiles
In IFS therapy, you learn that you have different “parts” of yourself. Through experiential therapy and psychodrama, we actually stepped into the roles of these different parts to understand why they show up.
The Parts Work Cycle
How IFS therapy breaks down your internal responses.
1. The Exile
Your core child self that carries early emotional wounds and pain, like feeling scared or lonely.
2. The Protectors
The parts of you (like the overachiever or the avoider) that developed to protect the Exile from feeling pain.
3. The Captain
The intense protector that tries to guide the ship alone and tie up the other emotions.
4. The Adult Self
The grounded version of you that validates all your parts but ultimately takes the reins and makes the decisions.
Transformation Tip: Before you can take your power externally in life, you have to do it on the inside first by standing in your Adult Self!
Scroll down for more info.
Fuel Your Mind: Relationship Resources from my podcast:
Deep-dive conversations with leading experts to help you master your relationships.
Couples Therapy Topics to Discuss: Uncovering Emotional vs. Financial Safety
When rebuilding emotional intimacy, one of the most profound couples therapy topics to discuss is finding the root of what actually makes you feel safe. During our intensive, I realized that my core underlying feeling from childhood was being scared. Growing up, my dad provided incredible financial safety for our family, always ensuring we had “enough to be happy.”
When he passed away, my safety net vanished. Since then, I unknowingly developed an intense “Captain” part of myself—a protector that piles immense pressure on my own shoulders to create safety and handle everything alone. Ryan discovered his core childhood feeling was loneliness, leading to a dynamic where he either complies to please people, or pushes them away out of avoidance.
We realized that no amount of money or bank account balances can truly provide safety if you haven’t dealt with your core wounds. For me, in this relationship, the true goal is emotional safety.
🧠 Stepping into Your “Adult Self”
One of Ryan’s biggest breakthroughs was physically visualizing the concept of the “Adult Self.” Here is what he learned:
- Acknowledge the Parts: See your different reactions (the people-pleaser, the avoider, the intense captain) as team members or children.
- Take the Reins: You have to step into your Adult Self and say, “I hear you, but I’m going to decide what we are all doing here today.”
“That’s where internal power and leadership comes from—knowing your intuition.”
How to Prepare for Couples Therapy: The Family Origin Exercise
If you want to start identifying communication patterns and doing this internal work right now, here is a powerful call to action based on the exact exercise Dave had us do on day one.
Get a piece of paper and draw a picture of the emotional climate of your home during conflict when you were a child.Use absolutely no words—just colors, shapes, and figures to represent the energy and the people in your household. Once you have drawn it, try to boil that entire environment down to one core feeling (like lonely, angry, or scared).
When you nail down the true feeling of your “exile,” it will hit you like a ton of bricks. You will begin to see how that specific feeling shaped the protectors you built and the superpowers you rely on today.
xo,
Related reading:
Divorce and Co-Parenting: Navigating New Dynamics