Is Couples Counselling Worth it

It is a fair question to ask before spending money on something that requires both of you to be uncomfortable in a room with a stranger.

At Energetics Institute, Richard and Helena Boyd have run a couples practice in Perth since 2005. This page answers it with the actual numbers rather than the ones on most therapy websites, including where the figure you have probably already read came from and why we will not use it.

The Short Answer

For most couples, yes, and by less than the industry claims and more than the sceptics assume.

Couples therapy has genuine research support as a treatment for distress in romantic relationships, with measurable gains in relationship satisfaction. It is not a coin flip and it is not a guarantee. What determines the answer for you is less about whether it works in general and more about your situation, your timing, and whether both of you actually want to be there.

What The Research Actually Shows

Here is the honest picture, stated the way we would want it stated to us.

The average couple who completes therapy in controlled trials ends up better off than about 80 per cent of comparable couples who got no help at all. At the end of treatment roughly half recover, about a fifth improve without fully recovering, a fifth are unchanged, and around one in eight are worse off than when they started.

Gains are not guaranteed to last, and this is the part almost nobody publishes. At five year follow up, about a third of couples remain recovered, which means many couples hold the change and a substantial number do not. Relationship education courses show a similar shape, with clear benefit during the course and some decline afterwards.

There is also real evidence on prevention. In a study of 174 newlywed couples followed for three years, the divorce rate was 24 per cent among couples who did nothing, and 11 per cent across three different interventions. The catch is instructive. One of those three was simply watching films about relationships and discussing them together, and it matched two intensive professional programmes.

Where The 70 To 80 Per Cent Figure Came From

You will read that couples counselling has an improvement rate of 70 to 80 per cent, and that it is highly effective. We went looking for the source.

It traces back to a 1999 meta analysis by Johnson SM and colleagues covering four trials of a single model, three of which were run by that model’s own founders. Four small studies of one branded approach, generalised into a claim about couples therapy as a whole.

The 80 per cent that appears everywhere is most likely a mangling of something real but different. The average treated couple does better than about 80 per cent of untreated couples, which is a comparison against people who got nothing, not a proportion of couples who succeed. Those are very different statements and only one of them is true.

We are not being pedantic. If a page opens with an invented success rate and then asks you to trust its advice about your marriage, the number is telling you something about the page.

When Couples Counselling Is Worth It

These are the situations where we would say it is worth your time and money.

Frequent arguments that follow the same script, where you can predict the next three moves and still cannot stop them. Emotional distance that has crept in without an event to explain it, where you are more like efficient housemates than partners. Loss of physical intimacy that neither of you raises. Trust issues after a betrayal, where you want to rebuild trust but have no idea how. Major life transitions, since a new baby, a job loss, illness or a move puts pressure on relationship dynamics that were previously fine. Those are specific issues rather than vague relationship problems, and specific is what therapy is good at.

It is also worth it proactively. Couples therapy is not just for couples in crisis, and coming before the crisis point is easier work with better odds. Plenty of our clients arrive with no single presenting problem, just a sense that something is drifting.

One more, and it is the one people least expect. Avoidance tends to do more damage than the difficult conversation would. Most of what we see is not a problem that was too big, it is a problem that was never said out loud.

When It Is Not Worth It

Being straight about this matters more than filling a diary.

Couples counselling is generally not appropriate where there is family violence or coercive control. Australian professional guidance is that joint counselling is usually contraindicated, because you cannot speak freely in front of someone using control against you and what you say can be used against you afterwards. Individual counselling is the safer starting point. If this is your situation, contact 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732, the Women’s Domestic Violence Helpline on 1800 007 339 or the Men’s Domestic Violence Helpline on 1800 000 599, or 000 in an emergency.

It also tends not to work as a last ditch effort when one partner has already decided and is attending to demonstrate they tried. That is not a moral failing, it is just a different task, and there are structured approaches designed for exactly that situation rather than couples therapy proper.

And where the primary difficulty is one person’s untreated mental health, individual therapy usually needs to come first or run alongside. Talk therapy for depression or anxiety is not a detour from the relationship work. The same applies where childhood trauma is driving the pattern, since that is often better to explore individually before bringing it into the room together.

What Actually Makes The Difference

The variable that predicts outcome is not the method, which is worth knowing before you shop for one.

Different structured approaches perform similarly to each other in the research. What matters more is whether both partners are genuinely willing to be there, and whether you can be honest with the particular couples therapist in the room. The working relationship with your counsellor does real work, and if it is not right after a few sessions that is information rather than failure.

Timing matters too. The first sessions are a real checkpoint. About a third of couples are already off track by the third session, and couples who are off track early benefit considerably less. That is why the focus from the second session onward should be on whether anything is actually shifting, and we ask you directly rather than assuming it.

Between session practice helps as well. Homework assignments are a normal part of the process, and in individual therapy research people who engage with them do somewhat better, though that has not been tested specifically in couples work.

What You Actually Get For The Money

Worth being concrete about what changes, since better communication is a vague promise.

What therapy teaches is mostly specific. How to raise something without the other person hearing an accusation. How to notice unhealthy relationship patterns while they are running rather than afterwards. How to handle conflict without damage, which is a real skill and not the same as arguing less. Communication skills of that kind are learnable, and if you want to improve communication in a way that survives a bad week, this is what it looks like. Active listening gets taught everywhere and matters less on its own than whether both people feel heard once the conversation ends.

The other thing you get is a structure for honest conversations that has not been available at home. Open discussions about intimacy, money, family or resentment are hard to start cold, and much of what a counsellor does is make them possible rather than supply answers. Naming feelings you have been carrying alone is often the most helpful part, because emotions that never get said tend to come out sideways as challenges about something else entirely.

Counselling can also be worth it when the relationship ends. Separating clearly, particularly with co parenting ahead, is a legitimate outcome, and couples who do that work tend to do it better.

What This Looks Like In Practice

These are composite examples drawn from our couples work, with identifying details changed.

A couple in their forties came in six months after deciding to separate, wanting to do it without wrecking the children. They stayed separated. What changed was that the handover conversations stopped being a continuation of the marriage.

A couple in their thirties booked because of frequent arguments about housework. The arguments were not about housework. Neither of them had said anything about the previous eighteen months, during which one had lost a parent and the other a job.

Frequently Asked Questions

The questions people ask us most often before booking.

How Many Sessions Before You Know If It Is Working?

Sooner than most people expect, though not in the way it is often sold. There is no reliable three to six session improvement window despite what you will read. What you can assess soon after the initial session is whether the conversations are going somewhere different from the ones at home, whether you both feel able to speak, and whether you are becoming more on the same page about what you are actually trying to address.

Is It Worth It If Only One Partner Wants To Go?

Sometimes, and it depends what you mean. Dragging a reluctant partner rarely works. One partner attending individual therapy about relationship issues often does, because patterns need two participants and change when one stops running their half.

Does A Couples Counsellor Take Sides?

No. A skilled therapist works with what happens between you rather than deciding who is right, and the relationship is the client rather than either person. Naming a pattern honestly can feel like siding with someone on a given day, which is different from actually doing it.

Is Couples Counselling Covered By Medicare?

No. There is no Medicare item for couples or relationship counselling in Australia. Rebates under the Better Access scheme apply to individual sessions with specific provider types for a diagnosed condition, so relationship therapy sits outside it regardless of who you see. Relationships Australia WA offers counselling on a sliding scale based on household income.

Getting Started In Perth

So, is couples counselling worth it. On the evidence, for most couples who both want to be there, yes, with roughly half recovering and a real minority who do not, which is a better return than most things you could do with the same money and considerably better than waiting.

The honest framing is that couples counselling is not a repair service you drop a relationship into. It is a structured space, some genuinely useful techniques, and a person whose job is the thing between you rather than either of you. What you do with that is what determines the outcome, which is both the limitation and the point.

If the same argument keeps happening, or the conversations have quietly stopped, that is usually the moment it is most workable and the moment people most often wait. Coming early is easier work than coming late.

We see couples at our Inglewood rooms and online across Western Australia, evenings and Saturday mornings included, with no referral needed. Call us on 1300 956 227, book a session, or read more about what to expect from couples counselling and our couples counselling services.

This page is general information and is not professional medical advice or a diagnosis. If you are distressed, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14, or 000 in an emergency.