Just because you fell in love and found a way to join your life with someone doesn’t mean it’s going to be smooth sailing. Any partnership is made up of two humans with their own minds, wants and needs — and that means there will always be conflicts, hurdles to overcome and things to talk out.
Healthy communication skills and knowledge about how to fight correctly (yes, there’s a right way to fight with someone you love and a right way to apologize) are hugely beneficial, but a lot of the times you need to bring in a third party — someone who is trained in all the talking and listening that needs to be done, someone who can help you re-learn and re-tool how you navigate your life as an “us” — a couple’s counselor.
But like all kinds of therapy, couple’s counseling can often still have a stigma to it. We’re all very convinced that we were supposed to somehow magically come into this world and into our relationships knowing how to do everything right (which, no, absolutely not — communication skills in relationships aren’t built-in!) and we often feel a level of shame or fear that we are totally failing at life and love because we might need that help. But, rest assured, if you’re attending couple’s counseling or thinking about it, you are not alone and you are not weird or bad at being a partner/lover/spouse.
Per the Gottman Institute “empirically-based couples therapy has demonstrated that couples therapy can create a positive change for 70 percent of couples.” They also note that “only 19% of couples actually seek out some form of couples therapy and only 37 percent of divorced couples worked with a professional prior to signing the papers” and “the average couple waits six years before seeking professional help for marital problems.”
And, as it turns out, a lot of our favorite celebrity couples are really open about their time spent in couple’s therapy — with a number of them sharing in enthusiastic and passionate detail how these sessions helped them save their relationships, get them back from the brink of ending or just learn some preventative communication skills for overcoming the curves life throws their way.
Read on for a few celebrities who have shared their feelings about going to couple’s therapy with their partners. And who knows? Maybe you’ll decide that a session with a good counselor is in the future for you and your partner.
A version of this article was originally published on Aug 2021.
Dax Sheperd & Kristen Bell
Another beloved couple, Sheperd and Bell have had ups and downs navigating careers, kids, addiction and more of the issues that can make any relationship complicated without being public figures. In an interview with Us Weekly, Sheperd shared how couples’ therapy has helped them learn to “coexist” as pair.
“We are opposites and it has taken a tremendous amount of work and therapy for us to coexist,” he said. ““My only fear is that people see us and think, ‘Oh, I just need to find my Kristen Bell.’ That’s not true. You’ll find your Kristen Bell but guess what, now the work starts. [Relationships] are labor intensive. If you want them to last they are labor intensive.”
Neil Patrick Harris & David Burtka
Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka have been together for nearly 20 years, and Burtka recently revealed that their bond has only strengthened thanks to their couples therapy sessions. “We go to couples therapy. Not that there’s anything wrong, but it’s nice to sort of just talk to someone who is a mediator. That’s helped our relationship,” he said to Life & Style.
Barack & Michelle Obama
That’s right, even former First couples go to couples counseling, like Barack and Michelle Obama. Michelle opened up about it on The Tonight Show, “Marriage is hard, even for us. We have a great relationship… I was one of those wives who thought, ‘I’m taking you to marriage counseling so you can be fixed, Barack Obama.’ Because I was like, ‘I’m perfect.’ I was like, ‘Dr. X, please fix him.’ And then, our counselor looked over at me. I was like, ‘What are you looking at? I’m perfect.'”
“But marriage counseling was a turning point for me, understanding that it wasn’t up to my husband to make me happy, that I had to learn how to fill myself up and how to put myself higher on my priority list,” she added.
Kristin Cavallari & Jay Cutler
Kristin Cavallari previously told Steve Harvey, per Us Magazine, that she and quarterback Jay Cutler’s relationship was truly saved by going to therapy. “We’ve come so far being in therapy both individually and together as a couple, that it’s been incredibly beneficial,” she said.
Bryan Cranston & Robin Dearden
Bryan Cranston and Robin Dearden have been together for 30 years, truly as in love as ever. And what’s their secret? The Breaking Bad alum told Rolling Stone that they have a unique rule when it comes to couples therapy. “Our agreement is, if either of us feels like we want to go, the other can’t object,” he said.
Gwyneth Paltrow & Brad Falchuk
Many couples navigated ups and downs of forced-intimacy during the pandemic — and Gweyneth and Brad were no exception. Choosing to film their session with intimacy therapist Michaela Boehm for Goop, the couple talked about struggles with different levels of sexual desire and how to reconnect with their bodies and find intimacy with eachother.
Citing the stress of this particularly cultural moment, Boehm said there are plenty of ways a person can disconnect from their sex drive and instead the body “goes into the survival mode… Food and comfort and sweets … upping of the body fat; are the things most women are reporting they want to do. They don’t want so much pleasure because that feeling of opening to pleasure is, of course, opening to all other sorts of emotions.”
Gabrielle Union & Dwayne Wade
Gabrielle Union and Dwayne Wade have given us some really special glimpses in how they tackle all sorts of issues in their family (particularly how it relates to Gabrielle’s own approach to mental health and her PTSD during the pandemic), but they are the first to say that the #CoupleGoals comments have caught them by surprise.
“People are like ‘goals’; me and D are like, ‘WTF?’ We’ve kind of figured it out now, but I guess maybe we should tweet live from couples’ therapy,” Union told Complex in 2017. “And when you ask us we’re gonna tell you, there’s a process to happy.”
Will Smith & Jada Pinkett Smith
Will and Jada are an iconic couple — known for introducing the concept of an “entanglement” into our mainstream lexicon.
Will Smith has gone on the record sharing how counseling saved their marriage, telling The Sun: “What happens in a marriage once you do counseling, the truth comes out. And you sit across from your wife and you’ve said all of your truth and she has said all of her truth. You look at each other and you can’t imagine you could ever possibly love each other again now the truth is out… When the truth comes out and people have to say who they are and what they think, you get to know who they are.”
”The couple’s own counselor is clearly a fixture in both of their lives and has even appeared on Jada’s Red Table Talk showing off some of the skills she uses with clients.
Paula Patton & Robin Thicke (& April Love Geary)
Ex-spouses and co-parents can benefit from couple’s therapy too — even after you decide to consciously uncouple yourselves. Robin Thicke and Paula Patton (who share a son, Julian) attended therapy together with Thicke’s new fiancee April Love Geary.
“Therapy is not for everybody all the time, but it definitely opens barriers for us, even just to go once or twice. If you’re struggling in your relationship, one visit, one conversation with a third party can change things,” Thicke said about attending therapy with Geary and Patton in an interview with US Weekly. “Couples therapy has been great for me and April, and it’s been great for me and Paula in coparenting. We’ve had a few sessions and it’s really helped for us, so I am a total believer in therapy.”
Pink & Carey Hart
Pink and Carey Hart are huge fans of couple’s therapy and transparency about couple’s therapy.
“Carey and I have been in couple’s counseling almost our entire 17 years we’ve been together. It’s the only reason we’re still together,” Pink said on Today in 2019. “…we come from broken families and we had no model of how are we supposed to keep this family together and live this crazy life? And there’s no model. There’s no book that says, ‘Here’s how to do this.’ So we go to counseling and it works.”
Patrick Dempsey & Jillian Fink
Patrick Dempsey and Jillian Fink had announced their separation in 2015 but eventually called it off and reunited — their secret? Therapy, baby!
It’s always destabilizing when you’re potentially breaking up a family or you have a big section of your life that’s ending,” Dempsey, told PEOPLE about the close brush with divorce. “Our marriage was not something I was prepared to let go of. I didn’t feel like we had done all the work. And we both wanted to do that work. That’s where it started.”
Ali Wong & Justin Hakuta
Despite announcing their split in 2022, Ali Wong and Justin Hakuta really loved going to couples counseling together. Wong and Hakuta, who share two kids together, have shared how becoming parents pushed them toward therapy and encouraged them to build up their communication skills.
“I don’t see how for us we could not go to couple’s therapy within the first two years of having kids,” Wong told Time. “For us it’s been really important, and for other people, if you don’t go to couple’s therapy I hope you have great communication skills. You never know what’s going on in other people’s relationships.”
Busy Philipps & Marc Silverstein
Both Silverstein and Philipps have gone on record about how their time in therapy helped them overcome individual issues, emotional affairs and a large public audience watching their every move.
In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar (in conversation with SK Conversations: New Year, Now You guest Eve Rodsky), the couple opened up about the dynamics that therapy helped them understand and adjust.
“I like being good at stuff,” Silverstein said. “And I didn’t feel like I was good [in the home], so I stayed away… [but through therapy] I realized that deep happiness comes from my family. And once I figured out what I could bring to the table, things changed. I wanted to do more.”
They announced their split in 2022, but they’re both huge advocates for opening discussing your mental health.
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