Marriage and Crisis: How Couples Therapy Helps You Find What's Already There

Photo by Andrew Southam

Tracy Sondern, LMFT, a couples therapist in Los Angeles reflects on breast cancer, marriage, and what the hardest year of her life taught her about relationships.

When Diagnosis Brings Clarity

This month marks the 25th anniversary of my last cancer treatment. I was diagnosed with breast cancer at 38, and what followed — the lumpectomy, the chemo, the radiation — was also, unexpectedly, one of the most clarifying years of my life.

Before the diagnosis, I had been feeling a vague restlessness. Asking friends with children why they'd had them. Looking at houses upstate. Wondering about Los Angeles. Nothing felt urgent, nothing felt clear. Then came the diagnosis, and it was like a bell went off. Suddenly I knew exactly what I wanted: to move to LA, buy a house, have a child. I became focused on the light at the end of the tunnel — fruit trees, a baby on my hip, a different life waiting for me on the other side of a very hard year.

My husband was blindsided. He loved New York. He loved our apartment in the Village, his studio in Chelsea, our childless and mortgage-free life. He was happy. I had just handed him an impossible choice: lose me, or come along for the ride.

The Asymmetry Inside Every Couple's Crisis

This is the part that interests me most, twenty-five years later — not the illness itself, but what it did to us as a couple.

There's an asymmetry that lives inside every crisis a couple faces together. One person is the patient; one is the caregiver. One is galvanized; one is grieving. We were both scared and coping in our own ways, but before every chemo appointment we'd have breakfast at our favorite restaurant and walk over to the hospital together. He drew baths, made fires, came to every appointment. He took exquisite care of me. And underneath all of it, we were having two completely different experiences of the same year.

That asymmetry isn't a sign that something is wrong. It's just what marriage and crisis look like up close. Two people, one situation, and almost never the same emotional weather.

As a couples therapist in Los Angeles, I see this dynamic often — partners moving through the same hardship on completely different emotional timelines, wondering if the gap between them means something is broken. It usually doesn't.

The Strengths That Were Already There

What got us through wasn't that we were perfectly aligned. It was something quieter — an unspoken rule we'd developed without ever naming it: only one of us gets to be down at a time. There is always one of us available to pull the other back up.

That dynamic didn't appear because I got sick. It was already there. The crisis just made it visible, and made the stakes of it undeniable.

We moved to LA that fall. Our moving day turned out to be September 11th. We bought a house, adopted a son. The life I had seen so clearly from the other side of treatment became real. But none of it would have been possible without something that was already true about us — a trust that he knew I was leading somewhere real, and that I knew I couldn't get there without him. We didn't build that in a crisis. We discovered it in one.

Marriage and crisis have a way of surfacing what's been quietly true all along.

How Couples Therapy Helps You Find What's Holding You Together

Most couples I work with aren't starting from zero. They have strengths — rituals, instincts, ways of showing up for each other — that get buried under the weight of whatever they're facing. A crisis has a way of covering those things over, making it hard to remember what you're actually working with.

The Gottman Method, which anchors my work with couples, is built on exactly this idea — that lasting relationships are grounded in friendship, trust, and a deep knowledge of each other. Crisis doesn't erase those things. But it can make them very hard to see.

Part of what I do is help couples find those strengths again. To name them, reinforce them, and build from them. Because the couples who come through hard things aren't usually the ones who had it easiest going in. They're the ones who found — or were helped to find — what was already holding them together.

Sometimes the hardest moments in a relationship aren't signs that something is broken. They're an invitation to discover what's actually there.

If you're navigating marriage and crisis and wondering what's still solid between you, couples therapy might be the place to find out. [Book a consultation →]