He needs to be rattled by her clarity
Couples therapist Tonya Lester on the power of a woman's anger
Last call on the 35% off (FOREVER) sale, which runs through the end of this month. I don’t plan to offer another anytime soon, so if you’ve been on the fence, now is your moment.
Tonya Lester wants you to get mad. Preferably in a big way:
“Women sometimes try to indicate their unhappiness at the margin, hoping that small changes will get them on the right track. Maybe for small problems, that works, but not for big problems.”
Lester, a couples therapist, believes that to break out of longstanding relational patterns, “you have to burn down the existing structure and then rebuild. How you rebuild isn’t as important as starting with—not quite a blank slate, but starting with the idea that we have to rebuild something together, because what has existed isn’t working.”
Lester’s forthcoming book, Push Back, is the rare self-help text that actually reckons with the broader social context each “self” must operate within. And because her primary audience is conflict-averse women, she devotes considerable real estate to gender socialization.
Many women have been socialized to keep the peace at all costs, but Lester believes that instinct actually makes our relationships worse (to say nothing of our own well-being): “Conflict and anger, that’s what causes change. We don’t change if we don’t have that kind of energy behind it.”
I was in the middle of an advance copy of Lester’s book when I read Cindy DiTiberio’s recent post on how couples therapy can harm women, even perpetuating abuse, if the therapist is more attuned to saving the relationship than ensuring the wellbeing of both parties.
Previously, I’d imagined a “good” couples therapist as impartial, giving equal weight to each party’s perspective and asking both to change in equal measure. Now, that struck me as naive. I of all people should know that no couple is an island! And when working with different-gender couples in particular, it would be silly—and, to DiTiberio’s point, potentially harmful—for a therapist to ignore the broader patriarchal context.
So I invited Lester to speak with me about how she avoids the therapeutic equivalent of bothsidesism when working with different-gender couples who struggle with power and/or labor inequality.
Lester agrees that women partnered with men are much more likely to be the party in a “one-down position”—that’s just the reality of life in a patriarchal society. And traditional couples therapy, she admits, isn’t designed to acknowledge that. Instead, “there’s a huge emphasis placed on harmony. And harmony in relationships nearly always requires women to put up and shut up.”
Lester started her training as a couples therapist under the supervision of someone who viewed his role as “trying to protect the relationship,” but she quickly concluded that this was a recipe for “really, really bad couples therapy.” She eventually found her way to Terry Real, arguably one of the most famous contemporary couples therapists, whose therapeutic model takes gender socialization into account.
Real taught Lester that her job is “to go into the therapy room and tell the truth” rather than “advocate for the relationship.” “I consider it my job,” she says, “to help people articulate what they’re feeling, to reflect what I see, to call out dynamics that people might be avoiding, to name the obstacles, and to then see if there’s a pathway through them.”
She starts by asking her clients, ‘What does it feel like for you to be in this relationship right now?’ One of the most common issues that brings different-gender couples to her couch is “gender role frustration,” particularly among couples with young children. Often, they were fairly equal before kids, she notes, but once kids come “that will just completely fall apart.”
How, I asked, does Lester work with couples in this position? Step one – somewhat to my surprise – is “to really help her surface how angry she is.” When women’s anger is confined to “small flare-ups,” it’s easy for him to “just kind of turtle, like put himself under his shell until she’s not angry anymore, and then come up for air, and everything resumes.”
Lester describes her goal as providing “a little bit of an ice bucket, like, ‘Wake up!’” He needs to understand that “this is actually threatening the relationship. Him doing more than his dad does is not even close to solving the problem.”
She talked me through a common scenario, where a couple comes to her when their kids are young:
“I will absolutely say, ‘You have a 1yo and a 3yo, it’s a very hard time of life. But this is such a chance for you to get this right. By the time they’re 10, and she looks up, and she’s kind of got it figured out, she’s been doing everything anyway, she’s working and so isn’t worried about the financial ramifications of leaving—like, you’re kind of working yourself out of a job here. You’ve made yourself highly dispensable.”
For this gambit to work, “he needs to be rattled by how clear she is, rattled by her clarity, and then want to make a change. And this is the hard thing: sometimes he doesn’t actually care enough. He isn’t invested enough. And I think the earlier she can find that out, the better.”
If that sounds like a hard pill to swallow, Lester tries to couple this tough-love approach with deep empathy for both parties: “I care about how he feels…I have a lot of empathy for everybody who comes into the office. I think it’s really hard. It’s really emotional. As someone who loves their wife, they’re not necessarily trying to get away with something.”
Lester has less empathy for the idea that the woman partner’s high standards are the problem:
“It’s a red herring. It’s a misogynistic trope. I don’t buy it that that’s usually the case. It’s like, we’re adults. Two adults should be able to figure out what Eve Rodsky calls the ‘minimum standard of care’ and be able to move forward.1 If her standards really are too high, then we have to look at, well, she must have a lot of anxiety to need to keep things so tight. And certainly we might talk about shifting standards, if two people are going to be doing something instead of one. But almost always, my knee-jerk response is that saying, ‘Well, I won’t do it the way she likes it’ – I don’t buy it. I call bullshit.”
“Some relationships shouldn’t be saved,” Lester continued. “If someone is lying to you, if someone is narcissistic, if someone doesn’t care that you’re in pain, if someone has chance after chance to improve things and they choose not to, then the relationship shouldn’t be saved. The idea that we should go to the mat for every marriage, we have to let that go.”
On the bright side, Lester also believes that “couples therapy with a good therapist can be really, really life-changing and bring you so much closer, and help you be known so much more thoroughly by each other.” Lester’s advice for those contemplating therapy is to interview any potential therapist about what they see as their role. Ideally, she says, you want someone who will help you “create clarity around the issues that have happened and see if there’s a way to move forward that honors both people’s needs.”
And if you feel like you’re not being understood and validated, trust that instinct. “A big red flag is if you say, ‘Well, this happened and I felt really upset,’ and the therapist takes the position of, ‘I don’t think he really meant it that way.’ To me, that’s a couples therapist who’s afraid of conflict.”
Keeping the peace might make for a more pleasant session, but it defeats the purpose: “The whole point is to have a really hard hour, in order to slowly build up to the lives they have outside the therapy room being satisfying and fulfilling for both of them.”
If you’ve tried couples therapy, I’d love to hear about your experience - Leave a comment or send me an email!
Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist, writer, and Psychology Today contributor known for her bold, compassionate approach to helping women reclaim their voices. In her therapy practice and upcoming book Push Back: Live, Love, and Work with Others Without Losing Yourself (New World Library, October 2025), she challenges the myth that women must be easygoing to be lovable—and offers a powerful new path grounded in self-respect and clarity. Tonya lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and St. Paul, MN.
Essentially, the minimum standard of care is the couple’s agreed-upon baseline for completing a task. If you’re in charge of giving the kids dinner, are chicken nuggets sufficient? Etc.
Wow. First of all so glad to be a part of this conversation. And this is such a helpful perspective of what a couple truly needs in the therapy room.
Thank you for this! I resonate so much with this.