Resources for Couples
To Watch, Listen & Read With Your Partner
Films, a couple of TV series, a podcast, and two books we sometimes point clients toward — not as therapy, but as good company alongside it.
Book a first session →To Watch — Films
Three films that hold up to a clinical eye, for very different reasons.
Marriage Story
A stage director and an actress try to divorce with some grace, and watch that intention dissolve once lawyers, two coasts, and a custody schedule get involved. What makes it useful clinically is how honestly it shows escalation: neither Charlie nor Nicole starts out cruel, but the adversarial process itself pulls them toward positions they never meant to take. For couples in our own divorce support work, it's a fair, if painful, preview of what separating without a structured process can look like. Many couples find it easier to watch separately first, then talk about it in session.
Scenes from a Marriage
Bergman built this as six television episodes, later cut into a film, following one marriage from its comfortable surface to its dismantling and its long, complicated aftermath. Almost the entire thing is two people talking, which is exactly why therapists still recommend it — it slows conflict down to a pace real sessions actually move at. There's also a well-regarded 2021 HBO miniseries remake, starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, worth knowing about, though we're recommending the original here. If EFT names a couple's negative cycle, this film is close to watching one in real time, before anyone has language for what's happening.
Ordinary People
After one son drowns in a sailing accident and the surviving son attempts suicide, this family discovers that surviving a tragedy together is not the same as healing from it. Beth, the mother, cannot reach her surviving son emotionally, and the film is unflinching about how her own defenses — control, composure, avoidance — leave Conrad more alone in his grief than he should be. Conrad's sessions with his psychiatrist are a rare, well-observed depiction of individual therapy actually working: not a single breakthrough, but a slow loosening of guilt that was never really his to carry. It's a useful film for understanding how grief can fracture a family along fault lines that were already there.
To Watch — Series
Two series that take the actual mechanics of therapy seriously.
Couples Therapy
Real couples, in real ongoing therapy, with psychoanalyst Dr. Orna Guralnik — not actors, not a format built around conflict for its own sake. What's genuinely useful about it clinically is the pacing: real couples work is slow, repetitive, and often unglamorous, and this series doesn't speed that up for entertainment. Dr. Guralnik's approach is more psychodynamic than prescriptive — she helps couples notice what they're each bringing into the room from somewhere older than the relationship. Watching it alongside your own therapy can normalize how unfinished and non-linear real progress usually looks.
In Treatment
Each episode is a single therapy session, in real time, between therapist Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) and one of his patients — and then, once a week, Paul's own session with his supervisor. That structure is the whole point: it shows that therapists are not blank, all-knowing observers, but people with their own histories and blind spots who need supervision themselves to do the work well. The original series (2008–2010) is based on the acclaimed Israeli show BeTipul, and a 2021 revival season put Uzo Aduba in the therapist's chair. For anyone curious what individual psychotherapy actually looks like session to session, this is closer to the truth than most dramatizations.
To Listen
A real, ongoing series of couples sessions, if you'd like to listen in.
Where Should We Begin?
Each episode is a single, real couples-therapy session with Esther Perel and an anonymized couple who agreed to be recorded, with names and identifying details changed. There's no script and no actors — you're listening to an actual clinical hour, with real hesitations and difficult moments left in. It's a genuinely useful way to hear a wide range of relationship struggles handled with care, and many listeners recognize pieces of their own relationship in an episode about a completely different problem. Couples sometimes use a specific episode as a way to open a conversation about something they've struggled to bring up directly.
To Read
Two books many of our couples end up reading alongside therapy.
Mating in Captivity
Perel's central question is why domestic safety and erotic desire so often seem to work against each other — why the security that makes a relationship feel like home can be the same thing that makes it feel less exciting. She argues that desire needs a degree of otherness and unpredictability that pure closeness and total transparency can quietly erode. It pairs well with the clinical work we do on our own low-desire and sexless-relationship page — Perel's framing of desire as responsive rather than automatic lines up closely with how we think about it in session. Some couples read a chapter at a time and discuss it together, rather than treating it as a single sitting.
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
This is the most practical, least theoretical book on this list — built directly from Gottman's decades of research observing real couples, including his well-known ability to predict divorce from watching a single conversation. It introduces concepts many couples find immediately useful once named: the "Four Horsemen" that predict relationship breakdown, and the idea of a "love map" — how well you actually know your partner's inner world. It's a natural complement to the Gottman Method work we do in session, and the exercises are concrete enough to actually try between sessions. If you only read one book on this list, this is the one most couples say they got the most usable material from.
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