By Dr. Alisa Bartel, PhD, Licensed Psychologist · Rose on Rainier Trauma Therapy, PC
Six sessions. A worksheet about "I feel" statements. A therapist who asked what a deployment was like and then visibly did not know what to do with the answer. One of you shut down by week three and the other one kept showing up out of stubbornness. You stopped going and told yourselves you would try again later.
If some version of that is your history, I want to say the thing nobody said at the time: that was not a fair test.
What standard couples therapy may get wrong about you
Most couples therapy is built for the general population, and it works reasonably well there. But every model carries assumptions that do not necessarily apply to couples navigating careers with significant mortality exposure.
It assumes both partners can access and describe emotion at roughly similar speeds. It assumes reasonably equal availability, two people who can reliably show up Thursdays at six. It assumes you can talk about your week in the room. It assumes conflict is mostly a skills problem, and that if you learn to speak differently to each other, the temperature drops. It assumes that the impact of your career should be no different than other careers.
Now hold each of those up against your actual life.
Where each one breaks
Emotional availability. One of you has spent fifteen years being professionally rewarded for shutting emotion off under pressure. Asking that person to identify and articulate a feeling on the spot, in front of a stranger and their spouse, is not a gentle invitation. It is asking someone to do the exact thing their career taught them gets people hurt. When they cannot, the therapist often reads it as resistance, and the spouse reads it as confirmation that he does not care. Both readings are wrong and the session gets worse from there.
Availability. Shift work, 24-hour rotations, training cycles, TDY, deployment. A model that depends on weekly continuity starts breaking the first time a schedule change eats three sessions in a row. Then the couple decides therapy did not work for them, when what actually happened is that the format did not survive their calendar.
Talking about your week. This is the one civilians miss entirely. If you hold a clearance, or you worked a scene that is under investigation, or the details would genuinely damage the person hearing them, "just be open with each other" is not neutral advice. It asks you to violate an obligation, or to hand your wife images she will carry for years. Most operators solve that by saying nothing at all, and it looks identical to stonewalling from the outside.
Conflict as a skills problem. Communication skills are fine. They are also not the issue in most of the military couples I see. What I find underneath is grief. Grief for the years, for the relationship you expected to have, for who you each used to be. When grief goes unnamed it comes out as criticism, contempt, distance, or a flat sense that you are roommates now. You can teach a perfectly good communication skill to two grieving people and watch it fail every time, because the skill was never the sole missing piece.
The specific ways it backfires
Not just ineffective. Sometimes actively harmful, which is why I take this seriously.
Deep emotion-focused work with a partner who is in genuine emotional shutdown can push someone past their window of tolerance. What comes back is not vulnerability. It is a shutdown that is now worse and has a bad association attached to it. Done fast enough, that is re-traumatizing, and it is one of the more common reasons a couple never returns to therapy again.
Homework built for civilian schedules produces failure the couple then interprets as their own. Two people who missed the exercise because of a duty rotation walk in feeling like they are bad at therapy on top of everything else.
And a therapist who needs the culture explained turns you into the instructor. You are paying by the hour to teach someone the difference between the Guard and the reserves, or why the wife of a Green Beret does not simply call the unit. It is exhausting and it eats the session, and you shouldn't have to spend half of therapy explaining your life before the work can start.
If therapy has already failed you once, it is worth asking what specifically failed. A free consultation is a fine place to ask me that directly, including whether I am the right fit.
What specialized work looks like instead
Different starting point. I do not begin with skills.
We start by finding the dance. Every couple has one, and yours has a shape you can learn to see in real time: what she does, what he does in response, what that does to her, and around. Naming the pattern matters because it moves the enemy. The problem stops being each other and becomes the cycle you are both stuck in.
Then we work on meaning rather than content. Couples react to the meaning they have assigned to a behavior, not the intention behind it. What a spouse experiences as withdrawal, an operator often genuinely believes is protection. What an operator experiences as criticism, a spouse often experiences as a last-ditch attempt to be seen after years of trying. Both people are being accurate about their experience and wrong about the other person, and slowing those moments down is most of the work.
We also take the grief seriously as its own thing, rather than treating it as a communication failure with better manners.
And we teach comfort, which sounds soft but is not. Military life trains people to protect through action, sacrifice, and provision, and it trains spouses to run everything alone. Neither of those teaches you how to receive comfort or offer it. Two extremely capable, independent people frequently have no idea how to do this, and learning it changes a marriage faster than any communication worksheet I have handed out.
When there is a specific trauma sitting under the pattern, we treat it directly. Accelerated Resolution Therapy processes it without requiring anyone to narrate details they cannot or should not say out loud, which resolves the OPSEC problem rather than working around it.
Cultural competence is not a buzzword here
It is the difference between progress and damage.
A therapist who knows what a fitness report is, what happens to a marriage in the eighteen months after retirement, why a spouse stops asking about work, what a bad shift does to a house for three days after: that therapist does not need the map drawn. You get to spend the hour on your marriage.
I earned my Master's and PhD in clinical psychology with a trauma emphasis and trained in military and veteran settings including Fort Carson and VA medical centers. I am also married to a combat veteran, which I have described as where I got my second PhD, and I mean it more literally than it sounds. Some things about this life you cannot learn from a textbook. I have both.
If you are deciding whether to try again
You do not have to walk in knowing whether you want to stay. Some couples arrive certain they are fighting for it. Some are not sure. Some are split, one of each. All of that is workable, and clarity is a legitimate outcome of therapy rather than a prerequisite for it.
You also do not have to be equally invested. That is close to universal, actually. One of you has been thinking about this for years and the other is here because it is the last thing left to try. That’s fine. Both of you just have to show up.
Read more about how I work with military and first responder couples, or about when individual therapy is not enough on its own. If a standing weekly slot is unrealistic, the Warrior and Spouse Intensives compress the work into a format that fits an operational schedule.
Every battle has a target. It is worth making sure you are both aiming at the right one.
Schedule a free consultation. In-person in Colorado Springs, online across PSYPACT states.
This article is for general education and is not therapy or medical advice. If you are in immediate danger or thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 (press 1 for the Veterans Crisis Line). If you are unsafe in your relationship, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 800-799-7233.
Dr. Bartel specializes in combat trauma and PTSD treatment for military service members, veterans, and their spouses and families. She provides in-person therapy in Colorado Springs and telehealth services across 42+ states.
