What Is Parallel Therapy — And Who Is It For?
If you've spent any time researching couples therapy, you will not come across the term Parallel Therapy. It's not a term that appears in clinical textbooks, and it isn't something that other couples therapists offer.
I want to explain exactly what Parallel Therapy is, who it's for, and why I developed it as a distinct offering alongside the more established forms of couples work I do.
What Parallel Therapy is
Parallel Therapy is a modality I developed for couples for whom sitting together in a room with a therapist has stopped being productive. Not because the couple isn't willing to work, but because the room itself has become too charged for the kind of work that real change requires.
In Parallel Therapy, I work with each partner individually in separate sessions. Each person has their own appointment, their own time, their own direct relationship with me as therapist. But unlike conventional individual therapy, the focus of each person's work is not primarily on them as an individual — it is on how they function in the relationship. Both partners are working toward the same goal, just not simultaneously in the same room.
My role is something like a translator with full knowledge of both person’s “language.” I know each person’s intentions, aspirations and internal obstacles. I can take an insight from one partner's session and introduce it — carefully, at the right moment — into the other partner's work. I can refine my interventions in real time because I have information most individual therapists never have: the experience of each person’s partner.
This requires both partners' explicit, informed consent. Before Parallel Therapy begins, each person consents to my disclosing information from their sessions with the other partner at my clinical discretion, and that I will do so. Transparency is not optional — it is the structural foundation of the approach.
Learn more about how I work with couples — drherwitz.com/couples-therapy
How it differs from regular couples therapy
In traditional couples therapy, both partners are in the room together for the entirety of the session. This is the default model, and for many couples, it works well. The therapist can observe the dynamic in real time — the moment one partner shuts down, the pattern of who escalates and who retreats, the way a specific word or tone changes the temperature in the room.
But this format also has limitations. The very dynamic that is causing the problem is the one that fills the room. Couples in significant distress often can't be vulnerable in front of each other, because vulnerability in front of a partner who has hurt you, disappointed you, or frightened you requires a level of safety that the relationship may not currently have. In joint sessions, many people manage their partner's reactions rather than doing their own work. They self-censor. They brace for impact. They spend their therapeutic energy managing the room rather than examining themselves.
In Parallel Therapy, each partner has a protected space — a session that is theirs alone — and that protection allows for a different kind of honesty. People tell me things in their individual sessions that they cannot say in front of their spouse. And with those things said, and me to translate them into something the partners can hear with less defensiveness, they can start working more like a team and less like adversaries.
How it differs from each person seeing their own separate therapist
This is one of the most common questions I get about this model.
In individual therapy, the goals are numerous. In Parallel Therapy, the goal is laser focused on improving how each person functions in the relationship.
When each partner in a couple has their own separate therapist, each therapist works from a single account of the marriage — their client's version. At most, the two individual therapists occasionally communicate and share a coordinated approach. At least, they have a vague awareness of each other's existence without any meaningful communication or shared clinical picture. Each is working in the dark about what is happening in the other room.
The result is often two individually coherent narratives that have little to do with each other — and that can actually reinforce the fixed positions that are keeping the couple stuck. Each person becomes more articulate in their own story, but no closer to understanding the other's.
In Parallel Therapy, I have access to both stories. I am not simply absorbing two separate narratives — I am actively working with what I know from both in order to help each person move. It is a fundamentally more integrated and systemic approach and that requires holding more clinical complexity.
Related reading: Discernment Counseling for couples at a crossroads — drherwitz.com/discernment-counseling
Who Parallel Therapy is for
Parallel Therapy is not the right starting point for most couples. It is a more intensive and more expensive form of work than standard couples therapy, and it is suited to specific situations.
It tends to be the right fit when:
Joint sessions have become unproductive. The couple is willing to keep trying, but sessions feel flat, stuck, or actively damaging. One or both partners shuts down in the presence of the other in ways that prevent real work.
The marriage/relationship is long-established. The level of accumulated grievance, hurt, or distance is significant. Parallel Therapy offers more room for the individual excavation that long marriages sometimes require.
One or both partners is doing, or has recently done, substantial individual therapy, and the work has revealed something that the relationship needs to absorb — but that the couple doesn't yet have the capacity to do jointly.
The couple has tried conventional couples therapy and found it useful in theory but limited in practice — the sessions were helpful in the room but didn't translate to change outside it.
Parallel Therapy is not a substitute for Discernment Counseling when there is a fundamental question about the future of the marriage. If one partner is seriously considering leaving and the other wants to stay, the first step is to address the decision — and Discernment Counseling is designed for that.
Couples therapy requires a significant investment of time, money, and emotional energy. Before beginning, I always have a direct conversation with both partners to assess their level of commitment to the process of couples therapy.
The structure of Parallel Therapy
In Parallel Therapy, I meet with each partner once or twice weekly in individual sessions.
The individual sessions are focused on the relationship: on what each person is doing or not doing that is contributing to the problems, on what they want from their partner and how they might ask for it differently, on the patterns they bring from earlier in their lives that are playing out now. I am not simply listening and reflecting. I am actively challenging or affirming their perception of their partner’s motives, feelings and thoughts.
I am guiding them as they answer these core questions:
What kind of partner do I want to be?
Why is it important to me to be this kind of partner?
What do I need to learn to be this partner?
What are my internal obstacles to becoming this partner?
What is the price I will have to pay to overcome these obstacles?
What is the price I will pay if I do not overcome these obstacles?
The progress is greatly facilitated by communications from each partner to me between sessions. When they report back to me via email or text, I have an accurate sense of what happens between sessions in real life. I learn each persons’s view of went well or what went wrong in any given interaction. I can use this information in the individual sessions to debrief and consolidate learning. Most importantly, when an interaction goes well, the couple feels satisfaction at having tried out a new skill on their own, because they did. This gives the couple confidence and pride.
How long the process takes depends on the couple and the depth of the work required. There is no fixed timeline, but both partners will know at the outset that this is not a short-term commitment.
If you're wondering whether this is right for you
The best way to assess whether Parallel Therapy is appropriate for your situation is during a 20-30 minute video call in which we can meet, I can learn about your situation and you can ask me any questions. The conversation is confidential, and there is no obligation.
I see clients in person on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and virtually throughout New York, California, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., and Florida.
You can reach me at (212) 327-3624 or contact@drherwitz.com.
