We Can Do Hard Things
Couples Therapy: The Tools You Need with Dr. Orna Guralnik (Best Of)
06 Apr 2025
1. What we are really fighting about when we’re fighting about the dishwasher. 2. We can stop asking whether what’s missing is a “want” or a “need” – and the question to ask instead. 3. How to use what most frustrates you about your partner to bring you closer. 4. How to start thinking of our partnerships as our own mini political systems. 5. What to do if your partner won’t go to therapy, or if you’re feeling invisible in your relationship. About Dr. Guralnik: Dr. Orna Guralnik is a psychoanalyst and writer, who serves on the faculty of NYU PostDoc, National Institute for the Psychotherapies, the Stephen Mitchel Center, and the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender & Sexuality. Her writing centers on the intersection of psychoanalysis, dissociation, and cultural studies. She has completed the filming of four seasons of the Docu-series Couples Therapy, airing on Showtime. TW: @DrGuralnik IG: @ornaguralnik To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Full Episode
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Today, we have a very special, to us, to Abby and me, and to a lot of the world, Dr. Orna Guralnik. She is a psychoanalyst and writer who serves on the faculty of NYU Postdoc, National Institute for the Psychotherapies, the Stephen Mitchell Center, and the Editorial Boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies.
in gender and sexuality her writing centers on the intersection of psychoanalysis dissociation and cultural studies she has completed the filming of four seasons of the docu-series couples therapy airing on showtime oh my god that's my favorite i know abby and i watch just wrapped wrapped. We love the show. We love the couples on the show and how they work things out or don't.
And we truly are enamored with you. Yes. And I know that a lot of people have become enamored with you and it's a very interesting phenomenon. And I know that's not what you're most comfortable with. You're there to show the work. True.
Exactly true.
True. Yes. But before we start, I do need to tell you that Abby just found the things that I have Googled about you. Okay. I have Googled, what kind of dog does Orna have? Does Orna take new clients? Where are Orna's sweaters from? Where do I get Orna's scarves? Articles about how Orna listens like that. And how is Orna so calm? I'm speechless. Yeah. Yeah.
The calmness, I would just love to start out with, because it makes me think of this part of, I read in My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Manakem, where he says something like, they think they're coming to me for answers, but they really come to sit with someone who has a settled nervous system. Does that ring any bell with you?
Rings many bells. D.W. Winnicott talked about the containing environment. He talked about it more as sort of the maternal environment, the responsibility of the maternal environment to provide for the fussy infant, where if you provide a containing present environment for someone who's fussy, their nervous system will calm down. They'll have the space to make sense of their own experience.
So in a certain way, I guess you could think of The analyst's role as doing that, that's one of their roles, is to simply provide an environment in which the other person can sort out what's going on with them. My own, what you're calling my calmness, it is the result of many years in analysis myself.
Ah. Oh, that's interesting. The show, it takes these fussy people. We're all fussy. We're fussy as hell. And then they sit and they wait in that little hallway, which is like the purgatory, the fussy purgatory.
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