Focus on You

Almost every couple walks into therapy carrying the same unspoken request: confirm my version. Tell me I’m right. Tell me the problem is them. Tell me I’m not the only one who sees it this way. Beneath the pain, beneath the history, beneath all the detail, this is what quietly drives that first step through the door. It feels reasonable — when you’re hurting, you want your experience to be recognised. But this stance comes with a cost. It fixes your attention on the other person. And that outward focus, more than any single incident, is what keeps people stuck.

This is the part that often takes the longest to land. The issue isn’t that your partner’s behaviour doesn’t matter, or that your interpretation is wrong. The issue is the orientation itself. As long as your attention is directed outward — what they did, what they didn’t do, what feels unfair — you miss the only place where change is actually possible. You. The demand for validation feels natural, but it’s a trap, and it preserves the very dynamic you want to break.

Most attempts at change collapse for the same reason. The request is always some variation of the same message: tell me I’m right, fix them, and make this feel better without asking me to do anything differently. Shift the relationship, but leave me untouched. But nothing shifts until each person begins to look at themselves. That’s the real starting point.

There’s a paradox here. Everyone wants things to get better. Everyone wants the pain to end. But when it comes to the one thing that actually produces change — altering our own stance — we resist it fiercely. We become experts at avoiding it. We tell long, detailed stories about our history, our past therapy, our self-work, our insights. Useful, yes. Transformative, not necessarily. Because none of those stories expose the blind spot. And the blind spot is always the same: it feels safer to catalogue what was done to us than to look directly at what we are doing now.

This isn’t about blame. It’s not about dismissing your pain. It’s the uncomfortable reality that real change begins with your own position. When you focus on yourself, you move out of the powerless role of trying to alter someone else and into the only place where you have any leverage. That shift doesn’t absolve the other person, but it creates the only conditions under which anything between you can change.

If you’re looking for quick fixes — scripts to say, rituals to follow, surface-level tricks to brighten things up — you’ll be disappointed. These don’t shift anything fundamental. What does is the willingness to step away from your partner’s side of the ledger and examine your own.

If you’re reading this alone, good — that’s where most real change begins. If you’re reading it together, even better — it shows the capacity to take the step side by side. But either way, the starting point doesn’t change: stop looking outward. Slow down. Look inward.

That is where change begins.

There’s another piece to this. When we stop examining ourselves and keep interpreting the other, something starts forming quietly in the background — a version of them constructed from disappointments, arguments, guesses, and assumptions. That version slowly replaces the person in front of us. And that is where the caricature begins. It’s also where couples lose each other long before they realise it.

The work — whether done alone or together — is to interrupt that drift. To return the focus to yourself. To clear the distortion. To move from reaction into choice.

Because nothing changes until you do.