When Love Is There But Intimacy Has Faded | Couples Therapy

When numbness replaces closeness

It rarely arrives as sudden drama. More often, it creeps in quietly; the phones that stay on the table during dinner, the conversations that shrink to logistics, the way bodies curl back‑to‑back in bed, not out of hatred, but out of habit and exhaustion. Love is still here, yet intimacy has thinned to a faint thread.

In those moments, many people secretly wonder;

“Is this just what long‑term love becomes?”
“Do we have to choose between deadness and chaos?”

Underneath those questions is usually a deeper one, “Can we find our way back to each other without destroying what we’ve built?”

What sits underneath “we keep fighting”

On the surface, couples often arrive saying they “argue all the time” or “never argue at all.”
Underneath, something more tender is happening. The nervous system is on high alert, scanning the relationship for threat: Will you leave me? Will you criticise me? Will you disappear into your work, your phone, your thoughts?

So the body does what it has learned to do.
One partner gets louder, sharper, demanding contact. Another shuts down, goes silent or distant, trying to keep the peace inside their own system. The very strategies that once kept them safe now create more distance. Neither is wrong; both are protecting something precious.

When couples begin to see their patterns through this lens—not as proof of failure, but as old survival wisdom now ready to be updated—something softens. The question shifts from “Who is right?” to “How did we get here, and how do we want to live now?”

As you read this, do you recognise yourself more in the one who gets louder, or the one who disappears? Simply noticing that is already a beginning.

The shadow side of love

Long‑term intimacy always includes a shadow—the parts of us we would rather not see: neediness, anger, jealousy, fear, the child who still aches for reassurance. In relationship, these unhealed places get activated again and again.

Carl Jung spoke of these hidden aspects as the “shadow”—parts of ourselves we disown and push away, often in childhood, when our needs for love, safety or understanding went unmet. In a young mind, a simple, painful logic takes hold: “If my needs are not met, it must be because I am too much, not enough, or fundamentally wrong.”

To survive, we exile the vulnerable, needy or angry child within and try to become someone more acceptable. Yet in adult relationships, that exiled child does not disappear. They wait at the gate of our intimacy, desperate to be seen. When a partner’s tone, absence or criticism echoes that old unmet need, the exiled part erupts—not as a rational adult, but as a wounded child crying out through blame, withdrawal or desperation.

These wounds are not only personal. Many couples are also carrying stories that did not start with them—patterns of silence, survival, shutdown or over‑responsibility that stretch back through parents, grandparents and differing cultural norms.

Psychotherapists sometimes call this generational or ancestral trauma; the way unfinished grief, fear and adaptation are passed down as “normal” ways of loving. When partners begin to see that they are not just fighting each other, but also trying to heal what whole lines of family never had space to heal, a different tenderness and sense of shared purpose can emerge—a feeling of “we are breaking a pattern together.”

Inside each of us, there is more than one “voice” at play. There is a part that gets angry and defensive, a part that shuts down and goes numb, and a much younger part that still feels scared, not enough, or too much. These inner figures all want one thing, to protect us from pain and move us to safety.

In couples, it can look like two protective parts talking to each other—the critic and the withdrawer, the controller and the appeaser—while the softer, more vulnerable places inside both people never get to speak when partners begin to recognise these inner roles and talk about them together (“a panicked part of me wants to push you away right now”) rather than from them, the whole atmosphere shifts. There is more room for compassion, accountability and real choice.

I have noticed in the last few years that many couples arrive already using labels, “He’s a narcissist,” “She’s toxic,” “I’m done with his ego.” Sometimes those words fit; sometimes they are a raw way of saying, “I feel unseen, overpowered or erased here.”

What helps is looking at what sits underneath the behaviour. Is there a part that feels entitled, superior, always “right” (what some psychotherapists call grandiosity)? Is there another part that feels small, wrong, never good enough (shame)? Both can show up in the same person, and both can be devastating in a relationship if they are never met with boundaries, truth and care. Terry Real talks about moving from “me versus you” into “we”—standing side by side, facing the problem together, while still insisting on honesty, responsibility and repair.

What changes everything is when both partners learn to bring curiosity to the shadow rather than shame. Instead of “Why are you like this?” the question becomes “What is this feeling protecting? What does it need from us?” That is where intimacy deepens: not in being perfect, but in being more fully human, and more fully together.

A different kind of space for couples

In couples therapy, the focus is not on deciding who is “the problem,” but on creating a safer nervous system between them—a field where they can slow down, listen differently, and meet each other with new eyes.

Ancient eastern wisdom traditions have understood that healing happens through experience, not just words – through breath, ritual, touch, song, movement and the felt presence of another. Modern neuroscience is now giving language for what was intuited and felt, that healing does not happen only because we “talk it through,” but because the nervous system has a new experience that contradicts what it has always expected. In simple terms, the brain is constantly predicting: “If I reach out, I’ll be rejected,” “If I disagree, I’ll be attacked,” “If I show my feelings, I’ll be shamed.”

Within psychotherapy and carefully held Living from The Heart workshops, change begins when those old predictions quietly fail.

A partner who expects rage meets steadiness instead. Someone who braces for criticism is met with curiosity.

The person who apologises for existing is invited to take up a little more space. Each time reality is less dangerous than expected, the system pauses, recalibrates, and learns: “Maybe this is a little safer than I thought.”

Insight and self-awareness can be helpful, but these small, repeated moments of safety landing differently in the body are what really begin to rewrite old relational maps.

This is why the work often includes:

• Learning how to pause when the body goes into fight, flight, or freeze.

• Practising co‑regulation—using breath, touch and presence to settle together.

• Exploring sensual and erotic energy as a place of play and connection, not performance or pressure.

• Using ritual and imagination to mark endings, new beginnings, and the reality of change over time.

Couples are often surprised by how much can shift when they experience each other outside the usual four walls of their conflict—perhaps lying side by side in a guided meditation, or holding hands in silence while paying attention to the breath. Something in the field between them begins to remember: “Oh. It is safe enough to soften here.”

When a couples therapy workshop makes sense

Weekly couples therapy is sometimes exactly what a relationship needs; a steady, contained space to unwind long‑standing patterns slowly. At other times, couples may feel too stuck, too busy, or too overwhelmed to wait months for momentum to build. They might need a space to kickstart, explore deeper, or need an immersion—time away from everyday life to focus only on themselves on a couples intensive where they are the only participants. 

That is why couples intensives or couples weekend workshops can be so powerful. Over two days, partners have the chance to:

• Step out of routine and really see each other again.

• Understand their patterns through the nervous system and attachment, not self‑blame.

• Practise new ways of speaking, listening, and being in each other’s bodies and presence.

• Touch the deeper dimension of their connection—the sense that relationship can be a path of growth, not just another task.

The aim is not to “fix” anyone. It is to create a grounded, supportive space where two people can meet themselves and each other with more honesty, courage and tenderness. Reaching out for that kind of support is not a sign that love has failed; it is often how couples discover an entirely new way of being together.

An invitation to reawaken your relationship

If any part of this story feels familiar—if you recognise the quiet ache of still loving your partner and not quite knowing how to reach them—consider this a gentle nudge that you do not have to navigate it alone. See more for couples intensives.