By Ari Sotiriou MA PGDip psychodynamic psychotherapist
Two intelligent and capable people can solve remarkably complex problems in their professional lives. They can lead teams, manage uncertainty and make decisions with far-reaching consequences.
Yet when they must decide where to build a shared future, they may become completely stuck.
In my work as a psychodynamic couples therapist, I often meet partners whose lives have developed in different countries or directions. One may be building a career in Tokyo while the other has established a home and professional identity in Berlin. They join the online session from different time zones, appearing in two separate boxes on the screen.
The physical distance is visible. The emotional distance is often harder to describe.
At first, the disagreement appears practical. Which country offers the better opportunity? Whose career should take priority? Who should move, wait or compromise?
However, beneath these questions there is often a more complicated emotional struggle. Each person may be protecting something that feels essential to their identity, security or sense of worth.
The argument is therefore not only about geography. It is about what moving, staying, sacrificing or succeeding has come to mean.
When a Practical Decision Becomes an Emotional Deadlock
Consider a fictional couple whom I will call Mark and Elena. Their circumstances are composite and identifying details have been changed.
Mark has been offered an important professional position in Japan. Elena has spent several years building a successful career and community in Germany. They love one another and genuinely want the relationship to survive.
Yet their conversations about the future repeatedly collapse.
Mark experiences Elena’s hesitation as a lack of faith in him. He believes she should be excited about the opportunity and interprets her uncertainty as emotional withdrawal.
Elena experiences Mark’s enthusiasm as pressure. She fears that joining him would mean giving up her career, independence and the life she has worked hard to establish.
Both believe they are presenting reasonable arguments. Neither feels heard.
As discussions become increasingly defensive, they stop exploring the decision together. Each begins preparing a private case for why their preferred future is the correct one.
The couple gradually shifts from asking, “What might work for us?” to asking, “How can I persuade you?”
This is the beginning of the deadlock.
The accompanying interactive workbook, Moving from “Me” to “Us”, invites each partner to identify what they hope to gain and what they fear losing before trying to negotiate a solution.
The Roles Couples Adopt Under Pressure
When anxiety increases, partners often fall into familiar emotional roles.
One may become the Achiever, responding to uncertainty by working harder and pursuing success more intensely. Achievement can provide temporary reassurance and a sense of control.
Another may become the Caretaker, trying to manage the partner’s anxieties, schedule, practical difficulties and emotional reactions.
At first, caretaking may appear loving and generous. Over time, however, it can create a parent-and-child dynamic.
The caretaker begins to feel overburdened. The other partner may feel controlled, criticised or diminished. Both become resentful.
Other partners cope by becoming the Rebel, making unilateral decisions to protect their autonomy. Some become the Appeaser, agreeing outwardly to avoid conflict while privately feeling angry or trapped. Others move towards a more dependent position, looking to their partner to provide reassurance and direction.
These are not fixed personality types. They are positions people may occupy when a relationship feels unsafe or uncertain.
The first section of the workbook helps readers reflect on which roles appear most often in their own relationship. Recognising a pattern can create a small but important distance from it. Instead of saying, “This is simply who you are,” the couple can begin to say, “This is what happens between us when we become frightened.”
Carrying Feelings for One Another
Melanie Klein’s concept of projective identification can help us understand how these roles develop.
The term describes a process in which a person unconsciously places difficult feelings into someone else and then relates to that person as though those feelings belong mainly to them.
For example, Mark may feel frightened and inadequate in his new professional position but struggle to acknowledge these feelings. Elena then becomes increasingly anxious, responsible and managerial. She begins carrying the uncertainty that Mark cannot comfortably experience himself.
Mark may then perceive Elena as controlling, while Elena experiences him as incapable of managing without her.
Neither has deliberately created this arrangement. Nevertheless, they become locked into it.
The more Elena takes responsibility, the less responsible Mark feels. The more dependent he appears, the more Elena believes she must take charge.
Couples often focus on changing the other person’s behaviour without noticing how both partners help maintain the cycle. Psychodynamic therapy encourages them to become curious about what each person is carrying for the other.
Success and the False Self
Donald Winnicott wrote about the False Self: a highly adapted and capable way of presenting ourselves that can protect a more vulnerable inner self.
Many high-achieving adults have learned to appear resilient, independent and self-sufficient. These qualities may have supported their professional success.
However, intimate relationships expose needs that professional competence cannot remove. We still want to feel valued, supported and emotionally secure.
For someone whose self-worth has become closely connected to achievement, a partner’s hesitation may feel devastating. A practical concern about relocation can be heard as:
“You do not believe in me.”
For a partner who fears losing their independence, compromise may feel less like collaboration and more like disappearance.
Instead of saying, “I am frightened that I will lose myself,” they may make a decision alone. A lease is renewed, an offer is accepted or a deadline is imposed before a meaningful conversation has taken place.
The unilateral decision offers immediate relief from uncertainty. It also removes the partner from the decision-making process.
There can be no genuine “us” when one person decides and the other is simply informed.
From Insight to Behavioural Change
Understanding the emotional origins of a pattern is important, but insight alone is rarely enough.
Couples also need practical ways to behave differently.
For this reason, the workbook combines psychodynamic reflection with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy-informed commitments.
The first is Radical Transparency: sharing an important thought while it is still developing rather than waiting until the decision has effectively been made.
There is a significant difference between saying, “I am considering accepting this position,” and, “I have accepted the position.”
The first statement invites collaboration. The second leaves the partner responding to a completed decision.
The second commitment is No Appeasement. This means refusing to agree to something simply to end an uncomfortable conversation.
Appeasement may create temporary peace, but the unspoken resentment remains. Honest disagreement is often more intimate and constructive than a promise that one partner does not truly mean.
The third commitment is Equal Partnership. Each person agrees to take responsibility for their own emotional regulation while treating both partners’ futures as equally worthy of consideration.
The aim is not to remove dependence from the relationship. Healthy relationships include mutual reliance. The aim is to prevent care from becoming control and vulnerability from becoming helplessness.
Creating a Third Space
When couples are deeply divided, I sometimes ask:
If your relationship were a third person sitting beside you, what would it say it needs from both of you?
This question shifts the discussion.
The couple is no longer required to choose immediately between Mark’s future and Elena’s future. They are invited to consider the needs of the relationship they are creating together.
Perhaps the relationship needs more time.
Perhaps it needs greater honesty.
Perhaps it needs a temporary arrangement rather than a permanent decision.
Perhaps it needs both people to acknowledge the losses involved, even when one option appears more practical.
The workbook includes a dedicated Third Space exercise in which couples reflect together on what their relationship is protecting, what it has been missing and what act of care they could offer it now.
This is not an attempt to avoid the decision. It is a way of creating enough emotional safety to make the decision collaboratively.
Request the Interactive Couples Workbook
If you recognise your relationship in these patterns, you can request the interactive workbook Moving from “Me” to “Us” by completing the form below.
The workbook will help you:
- recognise the emotional roles you adopt under pressure;
- clarify your individual hopes and fears;
- practise radical transparency, non-appeasement and equal partnership;
- listen to each other without immediately defending or fixing;
- identify your shared values and next practical step;
- create a partnership statement you can return to during difficult conversations.
Your responses remain stored locally in your browser and are not transmitted to Online Therapy Clinic. You can copy your reflections, print them or save them as a PDF for your own records or to bring into therapy.
The workbook is intended to support reflection. It does not replace individual or couples therapy.
If these conversations repeatedly lead to withdrawal, resentment, control or emotional exhaustion, psychodynamic couples therapy can provide a safer space in which to understand the deeper fears beneath the disagreement and begin developing new ways of relating.
You can also subscribe using the form at the foot of the blog to receive future clinical articles, reflections and interactive worksheets by email.
Collaboration does not mean avoiding conflict. It means creating enough trust for both people to tell the truth while remaining emotionally present with one another.
That is often the first movement from “me versus you” towards “us.”
Could you kindly let me know how you found me/us?
Photo credit: cotton bro studio / Pexels
Audio narration produced using ElevenLabs voice technology.