Throuple therapy for three people, not a couple plus one.

The first session is mostly about getting the shape of things. Who's with whom, how long each relationship has been going, who lives where, and what made you book now. Your therapist will ask each of you in turn what you'd want to be different. You'll get three answers, not one agreed statement, and they often don't match. That's useful information, not a bad sign.

After that, sessions follow what's live for you. Most of the time all three of you are in the room, because the relationship as a whole is the client. Now and then a single pair needs room of its own. Say the two partners who've been together ten years need to talk about what the throuple has changed for them. That session gets agreed by all three of you beforehand. Nobody finds out about it afterwards.

Fortnightly is a common rhythm to begin with. Weekly makes sense if things are acute, and you can space sessions out once they settle.

How many relationships are in the room depends on the shape of yours. If all three of you are together, that's three pairs (A and B, B and C, A and C) plus the three of you as a whole. If one of you is the hinge, it's two partnerships plus the relationship between the other two, which matters even when it isn't romantic. Each connection has its own history, its own fights, its own way of making up. Two can be strong while one is barely holding, and the weak one leaks into everything.

Things that come up often:

• One partner feels like a third wheel in their own relationship, even though nobody set it up that way.
• Two of you share ten years of history, and the third keeps bumping into rules that were made before they arrived and never renegotiated.
• Triangulation. A complains to B about C, instead of talking to C.
• Rent, pets, whose family gets Christmas. The load lands unevenly and nobody says so.
• Someone wants to open the throuple further, or close it, and the other two aren't there yet.

None of this means the throuple is failing. Nobody hands you a blueprint for three, so most throuples are building one as they go. These are the pressure points that show up while you do.

Our default framework for relationship therapy is Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), developed by psychologist Susan Johnson from attachment theory. The idea is easy to say and harder to do: the fight on the surface is rarely the real fight. An argument about who gets Saturday night is usually a quieter question underneath ("do I still matter to you?"), asked in a way that's easy to miss.

With a couple, EFT maps one cycle: one partner pushes for closeness, the other pulls back, round and round. In a throuple several cycles can run at once, and they feed each other. When B withdraws from A, A may lean harder on C, and now C feels caught in the middle of something they didn't start. A big part of the early work is making that loop visible, so no one person ends up carrying the blame for it.

From there, sessions slow things down enough for each of you to say the vulnerable thing, the fear rather than the complaint, and for the other two to answer it instead of defending. That takes practice, and it helps to have someone steering. EFT doesn't assume a particular relationship structure, which is a large part of why we use it. More on the approach in what is Emotion-Focused Therapy?

Throuple sessions run 75 min and cost $410. There's a $20 surcharge in person at our Carlton office and none for telehealth. We have a concession rate for relationship sessions ($215), though the wait for concession spots is realistically longer. Medicare rebates don't apply to relationship therapy. Full details are on our fees page.

Telehealth works well for throuples who don't all live together, or who live in different cities. One of you can make the enquiry on behalf of all three.

If your relationship has more than three people in it, our polyamory and polycule counselling page covers larger structures.