We don’t often think of couples therapy as something that can take place with only one person. But sometimes, it begins that way — when one partner is willing to do the emotional work, and the other is not. This was the case with Emma (a composite and anonymised account), a 25-year-old woman who sought help on a digital therapy platform after months of feeling rejected and invisible in her intimate relationship.
Emma had left behind a successful legal career in her home country to be with her partner, a man ten years older whom she met while travelling. Once in his city, she realised her qualifications weren’t recognised and had to take up work in luxury retail to support herself. She was adjusting not only to a new country but to the disorientation of professional dislocation.
What hurt most, however, was not the job or the adjustment. It was the way her partner seemed to disappear sexually the moment their relationship became emotionally close. He had a long history of casual sex — hundreds of brief encounters — but now, in a relationship with someone he loved, he found himself blocked. Emma, by contrast, felt deeply bonded to him and couldn’t understand why he was no longer interested in her in the same way.
She had stumbled upon the idea of the Madonna–Whore complex, first described by Freud and later elaborated by psychoanalysts such as Stoller and Chasseguet-Smirgel. Freud observed that certain men, often unconsciously, split their perception of women into two fixed categories: the ‘Madonna’ — loved, idealised, but desexualised; and the ‘Whore’ — desired, but degraded and unloved. For these men, sexual desire and emotional intimacy exist in two separate compartments. One precludes the other.
Emma believed this described her partner’s dynamic perfectly. And in the therapy room — although he never attended — he was ever-present. Session after session, Emma tried to understand him. Why had he changed? Why didn’t he desire her anymore? Was there something wrong with her?
Only at the end of each session would she mention how painful it was to feel constantly rejected — how deeply it cut into her confidence, her sense of self-worth, her femininity. I gently observed this timing to her: that we spent most of the session speaking about him, and only right at the end would we hear her voice about her own experience. She noticed this pattern, too.
It was a moment that invited a shift — away from trying to solve her partner, and toward exploring her own internal world.
From a British Psychoanalytic perspective, this movement from external complaint to internal enquiry is central to meaningful change. Melanie Klein spoke of the depressive position — the painful but maturing state of mind in which the other is recognised as a whole, complex person, and not merely a figure onto whom we project unmet needs. For Emma, this meant gradually tolerating the idea that her partner’s withdrawal might not be about her — and that even if it was, she could still claim her own narrative, her own centre of gravity.
We also began to explore the part of her that felt she had to earn love by being impressive — intelligent, beautiful, successful. She had, in many ways, become the ‘Madonna’ her partner could no longer desire. But this role left her exhausted and unseen. Winnicott’s idea of the false self was useful here: a self that forms in response to external demands, polished and pleasing but ultimately alienated from the authentic, feeling self beneath.
Over time, Emma began to shift the focus of the work from trying to change her partner to trying to understand herself. She could grieve the erotic and emotional disconnection, and think about what it awakened in her — not just in the here-and-now, but in her early emotional life. Where had she learned that love meant self-sacrifice? That being desired was conditional?
This was, and remains, a couples therapy with one participant. But it is also an individual therapy that holds a relationship at its centre — a space where Emma can speak, think, and feel her way through a complex and painful bind. Whether or not her partner ever joins, Emma is no longer entirely alone in this work.
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If anything in this post feels familiar—if you’re caught in cycles of self-criticism, anxiety, or conflict—you don’t have to work through it alone.
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Ari Sotiriou
Online Therapy for Individuals and Couples
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