Navigating non-monogamy in therapy: challenges, wounds, and real-life applications

— what was underneath

“They were all running around in the backyard together, and then he took the other woman into the bedroom and locked her out.”

She came into this relationship already carrying wounds from being cheated on repeatedly in her previous marriage — old beliefs about not being chosen, not being enough. When moments like this happened, they didn’t just sting in the present. They reopened everything. In her wounded place, she reached for control — rules about what he could and couldn’t do — not because she was being unreasonable, but because that was the only way she could make the environment feel safe enough to stay in it.

01

The first session — finding what I could actually do

They came in expecting to resolve everything in one session. He was resistant from the first two minutes — eye rolls, dismissiveness, a low-grade contempt directed at both his wife and at me. She was visibly defeated. I could tell immediately that this was going to be a difficult room to work in.

My question to myself was: what can I actually accomplish here? Not what I would ideally do — but what is possible given who is in this room and where they both are right now?

His position was that she had simply changed her mind about their agreement — that her restrictions were a choice, not a response to injury. I offered some psychoeducation around wounding: when someone has been hurt the way she had been hurt, they don’t restrict because they want to. They restrict because their nervous system is trying to create enough safety to survive. Flexibility requires a baseline of safety. She didn’t have that. He heard it, reluctantly, as a nod. I hoped it planted something.

02

The second session — finding a way in

He returned for a second session still resistant — still skeptical of me, still harsh. I felt it. It throws you off. But you keep going.

The shift came when I tried something different. I said to him: what if her trauma was treated as a third presence in this relationship — something separate from her, something outside of both of them, that they shared the responsibility of dealing with together? Not her problem. Not something she was doing to him. A thing they both needed to face as a unit.

That landed. This is what we call externalization in therapy — separating the problem from the person so that the couple can stand side by side facing it, rather than facing each other across it. When the contempt shifts from the partner to the problem, the room changes.

Once that reframe took hold, both of them knew what came next. She knew: awareness, validation, communication. He understood — perhaps for the first time — that every re-injury was going to set the healing back, and that he had a role in preventing that. He wanted to book the next session immediately. Sometimes you just have to find a way in. That was the way in.

— what this case illustrates

Open relationships present with a wide variety of surface issues — agreements, rules, jealousy, logistics. Almost always, underneath those surface issues is something older: a wound that preceded this relationship, being re-activated by what’s happening inside it.

The rules and restrictions she imposed weren’t the problem. They were a symptom of someone trying to create safety in an environment that had stopped feeling safe. Treating them as the problem — which is how he experienced them — meant misidentifying what actually needed to heal.

There was also a clinical thread I noticed but set aside deliberately: his need for novelty and excitement had a quality that warranted exploration — never feeling satisfied regardless of how much was on offer. That’s worth returning to. But in a room where he wasn’t yet ready to acknowledge that his partner was wounded, there was no path to that conversation. Sometimes the most important clinical decision is knowing what not to say yet.