As a therapist, some of the most valuable learning comes from failure. From being stuck, from getting it wrong, from losing clients, and from being challenged in ways that disrupt how you understand your own work. All of this is valuable in forcing us to re-examine what we are doing. For me, this has gone hand in hand with a journey of personal development on the one hand, as well as an increasing push toward becoming more nuanced in what I do and how I do it.

Looking back, one of the more central failures in my work has been that I was not fully present.

A central challenge in my development has been learning to be present not as a therapist performing a role, but as a person in the room who is affected by what is happening. That actually cares. And perhaps this seems unusual for a therapist to say, but it is true. I was present with my mind, but I was not present with all of who I am. I was a technician, and did not allow myself to be present as a full, raw, and imperfect human being.

For a long time, I relied heavily on structure and intervention, and those remain essential. But on their own, they create distance. Something began to shift as I did my own personal therapy. The more I became able to stay present as a human being, emotionally available rather than positioned behind technique, the more the work changed. Not performative empathy, but actually feeling empathy for both people in the room.

My own personal journey directly impacted on softening me in relation to couples. I was still challenging and direct, but there was now more human connection to carry and enable this to land. I was less busy solving a logical problem and more present as a person, and more connected with each of them in their distress, pain, and the madness of what relationships can do to us.

I know that my own mental health breakdown in a relationship, leading to a serious suicide attempt and psychiatric hospitalisation, played a significant role in this. It shaped my ability to connect with and understand what we can do and become in relationships.

Linked to this was a second failure, that I was not connecting with couples relationally enough. This is related to presence, but not the same thing. Presence is about how I am in the room. Connection is about what happens between me and the couple as a result.

I could describe the pattern, track the sequence, and apply interventions that were precise. But, the problem was not the conceptual clarity or the operationalisation thereof, but that I was not engaging the couple sufficiently as people.

At times, I became more invested in the formulation and the process than in the lived experience in front of me. There was not enough space for what it actually felt like to be them in that moment. The work became accurate, but disconnected. It functioned, but it did not connect. You could feel the gap, even if everything was technically sound.

What was missing was relational engagement. Not in a general sense, but in the moment. Staying with their experience, allowing it to take up space, and working with them as people rather than primarily as carriers of a pattern. Without that, the work loses something essential, even when it is technically correct.

I did not establish strong enough relationships with each partner, and as I became more able to do this in my everyday life, I became more able to do it in the room.

In couple therapy, couples leave, often faster than in individual therapy. The intensity of the work, combined with a lack of connection or safety, means they simply do not return. I have lost many couples over the years because the balance was off. There was not enough relational contact to hold the work.

The third area of failure has been intensity.

I can be a challenging therapist. I am comfortable interrupting, confronting, and working directly with what is happening in the moment. This is part of how I work. But too much, too soon, overwhelms the system. The intensity rises beyond what one or both partners can tolerate, and the work collapses. One person checks out and the process fragments.

I had to learn that my own high threshold had become a blind spot, leading me to lose couples for whom it was too much. Over time, my work has shifted toward slowing down and allowing successful moments and positive shifts to consolidate. Not only across the process, but within sessions themselves.

There needs to be more breathing room, more rhythm. Not every session can be so intensive that it becomes an ordeal. Success needs space to land, to be experienced, and to stabilise before moving further.

What this has required is not becoming less direct, but becoming more precise in how and when intensity is used. It has meant slowing down, paying closer attention to regulation, and watching whether both partners can stay in the interaction before pushing further. It also means not challenging everything at once, even when it is visible.

I am grateful for the way my work with couples has intersected with my own development, at times acting as the catalyst for challenging myself and my way of working, and at other times benefiting from my personal journey of being more present, more connected, and more able to breathe.