At a glance
In the days after something comes out, you want it settled tonight and you want nobody to say another word. Both pull at you while you are too tired to hold either, and a conversation held in that state does damage of its own. Here is what steadies the days at home, and what a session soon afterwards is for.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- The short crisis and the long one. In couples who come to me days after a discovery I meet shock and disbelief, where couples who have been quietly unhappy for years arrive with something more settled and more bitter.
- One kept agreement changes the week. When a couple agrees one small thing about the coming week and keeps it, I watch the conflict stop being a weapon for a while.
- The partner who is leaning out. When one partner is unsure whether they can stay, I ask them, with the other one listening, what feels at risk in being open, and that question reaches further than the argument they arrived with.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
What counts as a crisis in a relationship, and what does not?
A crisis has a date on it, and long unhappiness does not. Something was discovered, admitted or said, and the version of the relationship you were both living in stopped being true that afternoon.
- An affair comes to light. One of you finds out, or one of you tells. Read more about an affair coming to light.
- One partner says they want to leave. The sentence is out, and neither of you knows yet what it is going to mean.
- A secret about money. The discovery changes what the other partner believes about the whole shared life, not only about the money.
- One argument goes somewhere new. Something was said or done that neither of you has seen before, and you are both frightened of it.
- The ordinary rules are suspended. In each of these the machinery of your week stops, and nobody in the house knows what happens next.
Drifting quietly for years asks for something different. Ordinary couples therapy suits that better, and there is nothing to be gained by treating a sadness that built over years as though it started on Tuesday.
Why do the first days feel worse than the thing that happened?
What happened took an afternoon. What you are living in now is your body, and it has not been told that the afternoon is over. Dread arrives before you are properly awake. You are frightened of your partner being in the room and frightened of them leaving it.
Your heart is up, your sleep is in pieces, and at that level of arousal you cannot hold 2 things at once. Your partner needs you to hold at least 2: what they did, and that they are still the person you live with. So you hold one at a time, and whichever one you are holding is the only one that sounds true. Then a neutral sentence is heard as an attack, you answer the attack you heard, and your answer hands your partner a real one.
What shifts that loop is one of you coming down, rather than either of you making a better point. In recordings of couples discussing a real disagreement, warmth made up a larger share of a partner’s behaviour in the 20 seconds after their body calmed than at other times1. The study cannot say which of the 2 came first, and a laboratory is not your kitchen. It still tells against what most couples do in the first days, which is to keep talking until something gives. From the couples I see in the week after a discovery, the ones who come through the fortnight best talk less in it and more carefully.
What is urgent couples therapy in Copenhagen actually for?
It is a session booked sooner rather than later, with a narrower job than ordinary couples therapy: making the coming fortnight workable and working out what help you need. It goes into the diary like any other appointment. How soon I can offer one depends on the week, and I would rather say that plainly than describe a slot that is not there.
- Getting the account straight. Straight enough that you are both describing the same event, which is harder than it sounds while you are both frightened.
- Agreeing the fortnight at home. Who sleeps where, what gets said to the children, and what the 2 of you do with the evenings.
- Sorting the decisions. Separating the few that have to be made this week from the many that only feel pressing because everything does.
- No verdict. Nobody establishes who was right, and I will not tell you whether to stay.
- When your partner will not come. Couples therapy alone is built for one person working on a relationship.
Read more about acute couples therapy in Copenhagen.
What if one of you has already decided to leave?
Then the 2 of you want different things from the same hour, and that belongs on the table in its first minutes. One of you is unsure whether they can stay. The other wants to fight for it, and hears each hesitation as the beginning of the end.
Each position then hardens the other. The partner leaning in presses for reassurance, which is the one thing an unsure partner cannot honestly give, so they move further out, and their moving further out raises the pressing. Work on how you talk to each other answers neither of your questions. Nor is being unsure the same as having decided quietly some time ago and come to say so, and the partner leaning in does not get to decide which of those it is.
The field has a name for it, the mixed-agenda couple, and a short separate piece of work aimed only at clarity about direction. Of 100 consecutive cases at the clinic that developed that work, about half went on to couples therapy and most of the rest moved towards ending the marriage2, which is one clinic’s record rather than a forecast for you. A recent perspective on how couples work is planned puts the same question, improving the relationship or questioning whether to continue it, ahead of any choice of method3. Read more about discernment counselling.
What helps at home before the first session?
Do less, on purpose, and make the few things you do predictable.
- Eat and sleep, even badly. Exhaustion decides more of a fortnight than most couples give it credit for.
- Hold the permanent decisions. Nothing announced to family and nothing that cannot be undone while neither of you has slept.
- One conversation a day. At a fixed time, with an agreed end. Talking all night is longer, not more honest.
- Write the questions down. Ask them in daylight, a few at a time, and stop when the one you asked has been answered.
- Agree a stop sentence. Whoever uses it names the time they will come back, for instance half an hour from now, at nine.
- Name the return time every time. A break without one lands as being walked out on. With one it lands nearer to care, even when the person leaving the room is furious.
- Tell one person outside the house. Somebody who will not take sides and will not repeat it.
As a suggestion rather than a clinical threshold, a fortnight is about as long as most couples can run on arrangements like these before the arrangements themselves start to chafe. None of it repairs anything and it is not meant to: it buys the conditions in which the work becomes possible. The steps are the wrong size for the problem when every attempt floods within minutes however carefully you set it up, when nothing you agree survives the night, or when one of you is drinking through the evenings to get through them. What stays open for a while is whether this is a relationship in trouble or a relationship ending, and pressing that question to an answer in the first week produces a wrong answer more readily than an early one. You are welcome to book a session, or the free 30-minute call if you want to ask before you bring your partner into it.
Questions people ask
How soon could we be seen, and what decides that?
It depends on the diary in the week you ask, so it is worth asking rather than assuming either way. If I cannot offer you something soon enough to be useful, I will say so when you make contact.
What happens in a first urgent session?
Most of the hour goes on what has happened, what each of you needs for the coming fortnight, and what kind of help fits. You are not asked to decide anything about the future of the relationship in it.
What if my partner will not come?
Come on your own, because changing one half of a pattern changes the pattern. That work is slower in some ways and it is not a lesser version of couples therapy.
Do we have to know whether we want to stay together before we book?
No, and saying out loud that you do not know is more useful than arriving with a position you do not hold. Where the 2 of you want different things from the session, that is the thing to name in the first minutes.
Is one session enough, or are we agreeing to a course of therapy?
One session is one session, and nothing in it commits you to more. What a first hour can honestly do is steady the fortnight and show you what sort of work would help, if any.
If you cannot wait, acute couples therapy means I see you both quickly, often within days rather than months.
You may also find these helpful
Sources
- Yuan, McCarthy, Holley and Levenson, Physiological down-regulation and positive emotion in marital interaction, Emotion, 2010
- Doherty, Harris and Wilde, Discernment counseling for mixed-agenda couples, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 2016
- Capozzi, A research-driven flowchart to approach change in couples, Frontiers in Psychology, 2025
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
