A gentle note before we start: this post touches on trauma and mental health, briefly and in general terms — nothing graphic, but skip ahead if today isn’t the day for it.
A couple will sometimes sit down across from me, and within twenty minutes it becomes clear that the thing sitting in the room isn’t really a marriage problem at all — it’s one spouse’s unprocessed history showing up inside the marriage, wearing the marriage’s clothes. This is one of the most common mix-ups I see, and it matters more than people realise, because pointing the wrong tool at the wrong problem doesn’t just fail to help. It can actively stall the real work for years.
When the marriage itself is the actual patient
Couples counselling is the right tool when the issue genuinely lives in the interaction between two people — a recurring communication breakdown, a values mismatch neither of you has fully named, a pattern of conflict that escalates the same way every time. Here, neither spouse is “the problem.” The pattern between you is the problem, and it takes both of you in the room, working on the dynamic together, to actually shift it. This is most marriages, most of the time — genuinely relational friction that responds well to relational work.
When one spouse needs their own room first
But sometimes what’s showing up in the marriage didn’t start in the marriage. A husband carrying an unprocessed childhood wound may react to ordinary marital conflict with an intensity that has almost nothing to do with what his wife actually said, and almost everything to do with what it unconsciously echoes from decades earlier. In cases like this, sitting the couple down together and asking them to “communicate better” often doesn’t work — not because the technique is bad, but because you’re asking two people to solve a problem when only one of them is actually carrying its source. That spouse frequently needs individual therapy first, specifically to address what’s theirs to address, before couples work can do what it’s designed to do. This isn’t a demotion or a diagnosis of failure. It’s simply sequencing the help correctly, in the right order, so it actually lands.
Why doing this in the wrong order backfires
I’ve watched couples spend a full year in joint sessions, dutifully doing every communication exercise I gave them, while the real driver — one spouse’s individual trauma or untreated anxiety — sat completely untouched underneath all of it, because we were pointing tools at the wrong location. The couples work wasn’t wrong. It was simply premature. Once that spouse began individual therapy alongside our sessions, the joint work suddenly started moving at a completely different pace, because we were finally treating the actual source instead of only its downstream symptoms in the marriage.
Galatians 6:2 and Galatians 6:5 sit right next to each other in Scripture, and I think that placement is deliberate, not accidental. Verse 2 says, “bear ye one another’s burdens,” which is the whole heart of couples work — carrying something together, as two. Verse 5 says, “every man shall bear his own burden,” which is the honest reality of individual work — some things are simply yours to carry and process, and no amount of your spouse’s love can do that specific carrying for you. A wise marriage holds both truths at once, without treating either one as a betrayal of the other.
How to tell which one you need
Ask honestly: does this issue only appear between the two of you, or does it also show up in this spouse’s other relationships — with siblings, coworkers, old friends — in a similar shape? If the pattern is bigger than the marriage, it likely needs individual attention first, and couples work will move faster once that piece is underway rather than skipped. If it’s genuinely specific to how the two of you interact, couples counselling is exactly the right room to start in.
The line I want you to keep
Not every marriage problem is a marriage problem. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do for your marriage is send one of you to a different room first, so what’s yours to carry doesn’t stay disguised as ours to fix.
I map out this exact distinction — and how to raise it gently with a spouse who might resist it — in the book.
Sacred, but Fully Known launches October 3rd. Subscribe below for more of this, every week.
— Funke
Sacred, but Fully Known: A Faith-Rooted Guide to Intimacy in Marriage launches October 3rd, 2026. Subscribe above to follow the story, and to be first in line on launch day.
