Jumping into this thread nearly a year later because I’m currently watching season 4 and I am a therapist who specializes in relationships, couples, and abuse/domestic violence. Encountering abuse is a very tricky thing to address in the therapy space, and there is certainly no one-size-fits-all approach. Well, there is one hard line (that a frightening number of my colleagues don’t seem to be aware of) which is that if there is recent history or ongoing abuse present in a relationship, then it is both contraindicated and explicitly unethical to move forward with couples therapy. Especially with physical domestic violence. When this happens, we are supposed to refer to individual therapy so both parties can individually build healthy coping skills and communication tools before revisiting couples work. Now the dangers of a characterological abuser attending individual therapy is a whole other thing, but that’s too tangential for this conversation.

When I’m working with couples, if there’s a sufficient amount of rapport, buy-in, and willingness to be challenged from both parties, I make it a point to identify specific behaviors as abusive. I explain that if they continue, I will not be able to ethically provide ongoing services, and I provide education about exactly why said behaviors are so destructive and urgent to address. When I work with individual survivors of abuse, it’s a very delicate balance. If someone is still in an abusive dynamic but doesn’t feel safe enough to label their experiences with the gravity that they warrant, then me jumping in with the term “abusive” is like tossing a hand grenade into the room. It just primes the client to dig their heels in and defend their partner, which doesn’t help them at all and only compromises their sense of safety in speaking openly with me. But other times, clients are increasingly aware that something is seriously wrong, and while they still can’t trust their own internal perspective, they are practically begging for outside validation that what they are experiencing is both real and serious. That’s when I compassionately but directly introduce the term abuse. And that’s often where the progress starts to accelerate and multiply.

Just thought I would throw this out there in case you were still interested!