Understanding the Deeper Questions Behind Relationship Conflicts
When couples enter therapy, they often arrive in crisis, locked in patterns of conflict that feel impossible to break. As a couples therapist in NYC, I feel deeply for these couples. In my own relationship, when I feel disconnected, in despair, and angry, what I’m really experiencing is a sense of being alone. When we’re lonely in our relationships, our nervous systems go into overdrive, our survival instincts kick in, and things get worse. Every day, I sit with couples in New York City who are desperate to move beyond surface-level disagreements and address the deeper questions fueling their struggles. This is where existential couples therapy NYC offers a different path forward.
Understanding Conflict Through an Existential Lens
Traditional couples therapy typically focuses on building and improving communication skills and developing effective conflict resolution techniques. Of course, these tools can be helpful, don’t get me wrong. However, they overlook something crucial: many relationship concerns stem from fundamental existential questions about freedom and responsibility, isolation and connection, meaning and meaninglessness, and life and death that affect us all.
When your partner criticizes you for not cleaning the kitchen, it’s rarely about your cleaning capacity. The absence of a relationship agreement regarding kitchen cleaning may leave your partner feeling overresponsible and deeply isolated within your partnership. When this loneliness compounds, our survival brains take over, often resorting to rage, contempt, and resentment—paradoxical efforts in pursuit of what we really need: connection.
The Core Existential Themes in Relationship Conflict
Freedom and Responsibility
One of the most common tensions involves the paradox of freedom within commitment. In my NYC couples therapy practice, I constantly hear clients struggle with questions like, “Have I given up too much of myself?” “Am I trapped?” “Can I be truly free while being committed to another person?”
In therapy, we explore how each partner experiences their freedom and choice within the relationship. Rather than viewing commitment as a limitation, I work with couples to see responsibility as a choice—and therefore as a means to pursue growth. Clients can reduce this existential tension by adopting a more active stance that coexists with personal autonomy.
Developmental psychologist Robert Kegan said it best: “When we see that the other’s experience does not make us up, we then have the capacity not to take responsibility for what is now genuinely and for the first time not ours.”
Isolation and Intimacy
Existential philosophy acknowledges that we are fundamentally alone in our subjective experience. It may frighten you to realize that, no matter how close we are to our partner, they cannot fully know or experience our innermost thoughts and feelings, and we theirs. One way couples try to cope with this realization is by digging deeper into the stories they tell themselves about their partner’s flaws and shortcomings. Conflict intensifies when partners feel misunderstood or disconnected from each other. But this understanding of subjective experience can also enhance what makes romance so exciting: mystery, surprise, and curiosity.
When couples can shift out of their own perspective, they’re constantly met with new and surprising parts of their partner. Renowned NYC couples therapist Esther Perel captures this beautifully: “The grand illusion of committed love is that we think our partners are ours. In truth, their separateness is unassailable, and their mystery is forever ungraspable.” Rather than viewing this as a problem to solve, I help couples embrace it as a fundamental truth that can actually deepen their connection.
Meaning-Making in Partnership
As an NYC couples therapist, I’ve sat with countless couples arguing about whether to have another child, where to live, and how to manage their finances. Beneath these major decisions lie questions that terrify us: What makes our life together meaningful? Are we building something that matters? What will we have created when we look back?
Existential psychotherapy pioneer Irvin Yalom wrote that “life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves, when we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves.” In couples work, I see this constantly—partners who’ve lost their sense of shared purpose often find themselves locked into a freeze response, unable to move forward with major decisions and risks that project their relationships forward, out of fear that it will move them backward.
The work isn’t about resolving whether you should move to the suburbs or stay in Brooklyn. It’s about excavating the values underneath that choice. What kind of life are you trying to build? What legacy—not just material, but relational, ethical, emotional—do you want to leave? When couples can name and engage with these more profound questions together, the everyday conflicts often lose their grip.
How Existential Therapy Transforms Conflict
Moving from Blame to Responsibility
Existential therapy emphasizes personal responsibility. Rather than asking “Why does my partner make me so angry?” we explore “How am I choosing to respond to my partner’s behavior?” This shift is decisive. It moves partners from victim positions to empowered agents in their own lives.
This doesn’t mean accepting mistreatment. It means recognizing that even in difficult circumstances, we have a choice in how we react, what we tolerate, and how we present ourselves in our relationships. Sometimes this switch in position helps clients gain the clarity they need to continue mutually improving their connection or parting ways.
Embracing Anxiety and Uncertainty
Many couples seek therapy, hoping to eliminate anxiety and find certainty. Existential therapy takes a different approach. It acknowledges that anxiety is part of living authentically and making meaningful choices.
Psychologist Rollo May understood this when he wrote, “Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom.” I see this in my office constantly—partners who’ve spent years avoiding difficult conversations suddenly find that when they face their anxiety directly, the relationship opens up in unexpected ways. When couples learn to tolerate the anxiety that comes with uncertainty, freedom, and authentic living, they often find that many of their conflicts lose their charge.
Authentic Encounter
Existential therapy prioritizes authenticity between partners. This means showing up as you truly are, without your defense strategies, coping skills, and narratives surrounding who your partner “really” is. It means being vulnerable in its truest sense because it’s not vulnerability if it doesn’t scare you.
Emmy van Deurzen, a pioneer in existential therapy, reminds us that we must face life’s difficulties with courage rather than avoidance. She writes of accepting “the exact experiences that are most apt for learning to live,” even when “they may even seem catastrophic.”
In session, I help couples practice this kind of authenticity. When partners can say “I’m terrified you’ll leave me” instead of “You never prioritize me,” the conversation shifts dramatically. Authentic expression invites authentic response.
Practical Applications in Couples Therapy Sessions
Look, I get it. Existential therapy can sound abstract—full of philosophy and lacking practical tools, especially in an NYC context. Critics point out that its philosophical foundations are difficult to measure with evidence-based methods, and they’re not entirely wrong. But here’s what actually happens in my office:
Exploring Life Narratives
Early in our work together, I ask each partner to tell me their story, and I listen closely to their language—both in their body language and verbal expressions—and the meaning they convey. Are they always the caregiver? Are they never in need? I listen closely to the story they tell themselves, to me, and to their partner, as well as how they tell it. Then I reflect it back to each partner.
This isn’t just storytelling for its own sake. When one partner hears the other describe the weight of parental expectations or the grief of a deferred ambition, something shifts within them. The conflict about “why you work so much” becomes a window into someone grappling with proving their worth. The fight about having another child reveals itself as two people wrestling with their own mortality and legacy.
Values Clarification and Amor Fati
After our initial sessions, I move toward values clarification—helping couples get brutally honest about what actually matters to them, not what they think should matter. Many conflicts arise from unexamined or conflicting values. One partner values security and the other prizes adventure. One defines success as career achievement, while the other measures it in quality time with family. Neither is wrong, but the disconnect creates endless friction.
Through existential exploration, couples identify their core values and examine whether their relationship reflects those values. Are you living the life you believe in, together? And if not, what would it take to get there?
Sometimes this work requires what Nietzsche called amor fati—a love of one’s fate. He wrote, “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.” For couples, this means learning to embrace not just the relationship they wished for, but the one they actually have—with all its limitations, compromises, and unexpected gifts. It means choosing to make something meaningful from what is, rather than mourning what isn’t.
Working With Limits and Finitude
A practice I frequently return to involves what I call “the mortality conversation.” I approach it more gently than that term suggests, though. If you knew you had five years left together, what would change about how you’re spending your time right now? What arguments would suddenly feel trivial? What conversations would become urgent?
This isn’t morbid; it’s clarifying. Couples who’ve been stuck for months in a negative cycle surrounding dirty dishes, parenting responsibilities, and who “never” initiates sex suddenly ask themselves: How do we want to live the time we have? What kind of life are we building together? The answers often surprise them. One couple I worked with discovered that neither of them actually cared about who initiated sex less—they were both just terrified of making the “wrong” choice and disappointing the other. Once they acknowledged the finitude of their time together, they united in prioritizing their sexual relationship and viewing one another as co-sexual partners.
Moving Forward
There is no healthy relationship without conflict. Existential couples therapy offers something more valuable: a framework for engaging with conflict in a meaningful way. As a couples therapist practicing in New York City, I’ve seen how when couples understand the deeper, existential themes driving their struggles, they can address the root causes rather than just the symptoms.
The goal isn’t a conflict-free relationship—that doesn’t exist. A secure, healthy, adult relationship is one where both partners can live authentically, make conscious choices, and create shared meaning while honoring their individual existence.
If you’re seeking couples therapy in NYC and traditional approaches haven’t resonated with you, an existential framework might offer the depth and perspective you’re seeking. The work requires courage and honesty, but the rewards include greater authenticity, deeper intimacy, and a relationship that reflects your most important values.
