Are You Feeling Stuck With Couples In Your Therapy Sessions?
Couples Therapy Consultation & Support for Licensed Therapists
Feel More Confident Working With Difficult Couples
Clinical consultation and support for licensed therapists who want to strengthen their couples therapy skills, navigate challenging cases, and become more effective in the room.
Couples therapy can be some of the most rewarding work we do as therapists—and some of the most challenging.
You may be comfortable working with individuals but find yourself feeling stuck when two people enter the room with years of resentment, defensiveness, emotional withdrawal, anger, betrayal, or unresolved conflict.
Perhaps sessions quickly become arguments. One partner shuts down while the other escalates. You find yourself trying to keep the peace rather than doing meaningful therapeutic work. Or you leave sessions wondering:
“What am I supposed to do with this couple?”
I provide consultation and professional support for licensed therapists working with couples who want practical guidance, a stronger clinical framework, and greater confidence handling difficult relational dynamics.
Couples Therapy Requires a Different Set of Skills
Working with two people isn't simply individual therapy with another person in the room.
You are working with a relational system.
Each partner brings their own history, attachment wounds, defenses, trauma, expectations, triggers, and protective strategies into the relationship.
Before long, you may find yourself sitting in the middle of the same painful cycle the couple experiences at home.
Effective couples therapy requires learning how to recognize that cycle—and knowing when and how to interrupt it.
My consultation approach helps therapists move beyond simply facilitating communication and toward identifying and changing the relational patterns keeping couples stuck.
Consultation Through a Relational Life Therapy Lens
I am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and Certified Relational Life Therapist with extensive experience specializing in couples therapy.
My work is strongly influenced by Relational Life Therapy (RLT), developed by Terry Real.
RLT provides therapists with an active and practical approach to identifying dysfunctional relational patterns while helping clients develop greater accountability, emotional maturity, boundaries, and relational skills.
Rather than remaining primarily neutral while a destructive pattern unfolds, the therapist learns how to intervene effectively while maintaining respect and connection with both partners.
Consultation can help you develop the confidence to recognize what is happening in the room and determine where the therapeutic leverage actually is.
Areas We Can Work On
Consultation is individualized to your clinical work and the couples you treat. Topics may include:
High-conflict couples. Learn how to slow escalation, maintain structure, and prevent the therapy room from becoming another place for the couple to fight.
Pursuer-withdrawer dynamics. Understand what happens when one partner intensifies while the other shuts down, avoids, or emotionally disappears.
Winning and losing strategies. Identify the behaviors each partner uses to protect themselves that ultimately damage intimacy and connection.
The Adaptive Child. Recognize when clients are responding from old survival strategies rather than their healthier adult selves.
Accountability without shame. Help clients recognize harmful behaviors without turning the intervention into blame, humiliation, or defensiveness.
Boundaries. Help couples understand protective and containing boundaries and develop healthier ways of responding to anger, criticism, control, withdrawal, and emotional reactivity.
Infidelity and betrayal. Navigate the intense emotions, accountability, disclosure, grief, and repair that often accompany relational betrayal.
Intimacy and emotional disconnection. Help couples understand how resentment, avoidance, unresolved injuries, and dysfunctional relational strategies interfere with emotional and physical intimacy.
When one partner seems to be doing most of the work. Determine how to address relational imbalance without unintentionally aligning with one partner against the other.
Knowing when couples therapy may not be appropriate. Think through situations involving active addiction, significant instability, coercive dynamics, untreated mental health concerns, or circumstances in which traditional couples work may need to be modified or postponed.
Get Out of the Referee Position
One of the easiest traps for therapists treating couples is becoming the referee.
Partner A tells their story.
Partner B explains why Partner A is wrong.
The therapist tries to validate both perspectives.
Twenty minutes later, everyone is debating what happened Tuesday night.
The goal of effective couples therapy isn't determining who has the better version of the story.
It is helping clients understand:
What happens inside you when you're triggered?
What do you do next?
How does that behavior affect your partner?
What is your responsibility for changing it?
That shift can dramatically change the therapeutic process.
Develop Your Own Voice as a Couples Therapist
Learning a couples therapy model is important.
Learning how to use yourself effectively in the room is equally important.
Therapists sometimes become so concerned about appearing neutral that they hesitate to intervene when destructive behavior is occurring directly in front of them.
Other therapists intervene too strongly and inadvertently create defensiveness or an alliance with one partner.
Consultation can help you develop the clinical judgment to know when to:
Slow the interaction down
Interrupt destructive behavior
Confront with compassion
Support accountability
Work with shame and defensiveness
Teach relational skills
Maintain appropriate boundaries
Bring the conversation back to the relational pattern
Help partners move toward repair
The goal isn't for you to become another version of me.
The goal is to help you become more confident and effective as yourself.
Bring Your Difficult Couples Cases
There are cases that stay with therapists after the session ends.
You may find yourself wondering:
Did I push too hard?
Was I too passive?
Am I missing something?
Why does this couple keep having the same session every week?
Am I accidentally reinforcing the problem?
Should I continue seeing this couple?
Consultation provides a confidential professional space to slow the case down, examine the relational dynamics, consider your own reactions to the couple, and develop a clearer plan for the next session.
Instead of walking into the next appointment hoping something different happens, you can enter with a clinical direction.
Who Is This For?
This service is designed for licensed mental health professionals who currently work with couples or want additional support developing their couples therapy skills.
You may be a therapist who primarily treats individuals and has gradually begun seeing more couples.
You may already specialize in couples therapy but want another experienced couples therapist to consult with on difficult cases.
Or you may be interested in incorporating concepts from Relational Life Therapy into your existing clinical approach.
Consultation can be ongoing or focused around a particular case or clinical challenge.
About Richie Pryor, LMHC
I am Richie Pryor, LMHC, a couples therapist and Certified Relational Life Therapist specializing in helping couples identify and change the patterns that create conflict, resentment, emotional disconnection, and loss of intimacy.
My clinical work has given me extensive experience sitting with couples experiencing communication breakdowns, recurring conflict, infidelity and betrayal, intimacy concerns, emotional withdrawal, parenting disagreements, relationship ambivalence, and deeply entrenched relational patterns.
I understand how demanding couples therapy can be for the therapist.
My approach to consultation is practical and collaborative. We won't simply talk about theory. We will look at what is actually happening with your couple, what is happening inside the therapy room, and what you can do differently in your next session.
Become More Confident in the Couples Therapy Room
You don't need to have every answer.
But you do need a framework for understanding what is happening when a couple becomes reactive, defensive, withdrawn, angry, or stuck.
Having another experienced couples therapist to think through difficult cases with can help you develop that framework.
If you are a licensed therapist looking for couples therapy consultation, case consultation, or professional support using a Relational Life Therapy-informed approach, I would be happy to talk with you about whether consultation would be helpful.
Couples Therapy Consultation for Licensed Therapists
Individual consultation available in person and online. Group options also available
Richie Pryor, LMHC
Certified Relational Life Therapist
Ready to strengthen your couples therapy work?
Contact Richie to schedule a consultation. Richie@richiepryor.com
$200 per hour consultation