In 1941, Sławomir Rawicz did the impossible and became the first man to walk out of a Siberian labor camp and survive.

He braved frostbite and wind blindness, surviving on leather and melted snow. He crossed the Gobi Desert in summer heat that cracked his skin and shrank his tongue in his mouth.

And 4,000 miles later, he crossed into British India and … just kept walking. Because that was the only thing left he knew how to do.

He survived because he was willing to question every assumption about where he was and where he needed to go.

I think we are at a moment like this in the arc of human history. Including in the profession of therapy.

Here's what I mean.

Far too often, I see the following problem in therapy: 

You have a client who keeps coming back to the same problem. They fight the same fight with their partner, they’re lonely, they’re resentful, they’re hurt.

You help them make sense of it, process the pain, understand the pattern. And months later, you're hearing roughly the same story with slightly different details.

The Challenge of a Two-Person Problem

When you work with one person in a two-person problem, empathy alone becomes a kind of trap. Because you're essentially looking at the relationship through a window that only opens on one side.

But relationship distress is inherently relational.

It is created by patterns that exist between two people – patterns that are often invisible when you only talk to one partner. 

This is how well-meaning therapy can accidentally make things worse.

Your client leaves sessions feeling more certain, more justified. The other… well, we don’t know what’s going on with the other partner. We only hear the story from an unreliable narrator. 

What Gets Lost When You Rely Mainly on Empathy and Therapeutic Alliance

Even if you’re working with just one partner, you can still use a relational lens. If you don’t, several things tend to happen:

• The narrative becomes more certain. The client’s understanding of the relationship can feel increasingly clear, even when it is incomplete.
• The partner becomes more one-dimensional. Nuance is harder to access. Curiosity about the partner’s internal experience often diminishes.
• The focus stays on individual change. Communication strategies, emotional expression, and boundary-setting become the primary tools, even when the underlying pattern remains unchanged.
• Movement slows. Clients may gain insight, but the relational dynamic itself continues in familiar ways.

The Impact on the Relationship

In some situations, individual therapy can unintentionally intensify polarization. A partner may feel increasingly justified, while the other becomes more defensive or withdrawn.

As one clinician described, the influence of individual therapy can be quite powerful – shaping how one partner shows up in ways that affect the entire system.

Again, this is not about doing something “wrong.” It reflects how much impact a therapist’s perspective can have.

How to Shift Towards Relational Growth With an Individual Client

Step 1: Get curious about the other half of the picture.

• What's actually going on for the person who isn't in the room?
• How is this pattern being built by both people?
• What would this same situation look like described from the other side?
• What is the developmental context of this struggle?

Step 2: Don’t withdraw empathy, but experiment with relying on it slightly less. When you focus on curiosity, you can help your client soften an increasingly airtight story about their relationship.

A Different Way of Understanding Relational Stress

When you see individual complaints through a relational lens, you’ll start to notice important factors:  

• the interactional pattern, not just the individual experience
• the developmental arrest of the relationship
• how symbiotic patterns are maintained
• early attempts at change that may not yet be recognized

When this perspective is introduced, you can move therapy forward. You can create important shifts from certainty to curiosity, from blame to exploration, from repetition to the possibility of change. And ultimately, to hope for a better relationship. 

Looking Ahead

Rawicz survived because he was willing to question every assumption about where he was and where he needed to go. He didn't have a better map. He just stopped trusting the one that was only showing him half the terrain.

That's the shift we're talking about.

Thinking relationally does not require both partners to be in the room. But it does require a different way of listening – one that holds both the individual and the relationship in mind at the same time.

In Part 2, we'll get into the specific ways you can start thinking relationally with individual clients – practical shifts you can make in session, without needing both partners in the room.