Philippe Jacquet has spent a significant part of his clinical career working with couples — in private practice, in hospital settings, in rehabilitation, in residential treatment. The work is consistent across all those contexts, and so is the moment that most often defines whether it will succeed: the moment when two people stop arguing about whose version of the problem is correct, and begin to look at it together.
Ninety percent of the time, they don’t agree on what the problem is
Couples arrive knowing that something is wrong. What they rarely agree on is what, precisely, the problem is.
A couple sits down with Philippe. One partner says: the problem is we don’t have enough sex. The other says: the problem is we don’t have enough emotional intimacy.
The first: if we had more sex, we would feel more emotionally connected. The second: if we were more emotionally connected, we would have more sex.
Both are right. Both are locked in a loop that neither can exit alone. The first task of couples therapy is to help them see this loop clearly — to agree, for the first time, on what they are actually dealing with.
Conflict is not the problem — how it is managed is
This morning, lying in bed, there was a moment of wanting to get up — and simultaneously, a pull in the other direction: stay warm, stay under the duvet. A small, internal conflict. If a single person, alone in bed, experiences conflict between two impulses — then two people, with two different histories and two different nervous systems, will inevitably experience conflict with each other.
This is not a sign that something is wrong with the relationship. It is the condition of any relationship between two real people.
What people are most hurt by is rarely the problem itself. It is the way the conflict around the problem was handled. The words chosen at eleven at night when both people are exhausted. The escalation that nobody intended and nobody could stop.
A framework for conflict
One of the most practical contributions couples therapy can make is helping two people build a framework within which conflict can happen safely.
This means agreeing, in advance, on rules. When there is something to address, we sit down and speak about it deliberately — not at eleven at night in bed. We agree on a time limit — thirty minutes, an hour. If we have not resolved it within that time, we take a break and return.
These are not complicated rules. They are, however, rarely in place in relationships where conflict has become chronic. Installing them changes the texture of disagreement — from something dangerous and unpredictable to something that can be entered and exited without lasting damage.
The difference between two people
Part of the work is helping each partner understand how the other sees the world — not to agree with it, but to recognise it as a genuinely different perspective rather than a wrong one. Philippe works equally with same-sex couples and couples of different gender identities — he does not work from a normative template of what a couple should look like. But difference, in whatever form it takes between two people, has an impact. Understanding how the other sees what they see is often the beginning of something that argument alone could never reach.
“Couples arrive knowing there is a problem. What they rarely agree on is what the problem actually is. My first job is to help them find out. Because you cannot solve something together if you are each solving a different problem.” — Philippe Jacquet
Book a consultation with Philippe Jacquet — psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, London.