Couples often book in only once things have reached a genuine crisis, and by then both partners are usually hurt, defensive, and at least half-convinced the other person is the problem. ACT gives you a way to work with that without becoming a referee, because it moves the focus from who is right to how each partner wants to behave in the relationship. This article walks through values-based ACT exercises you can use with couples in crisis, from the first values conversation through to the between-session work.
Why ACT Works When a Couple Is in Crisis
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): a semi-structured therapy approach focused on mindfulness, acceptance of difficult thoughts and feelings, and committed action guided by values. It has a strong research base across anxiety, depression, and substance use, and it adapts well to relationship work because it doesn't require anyone to win an argument before things can improve.
That last part is what makes it useful in crisis. A couple in crisis usually arrives with two competing accounts of the relationship, and any approach that starts by working out whose account is more accurate keeps them in the fight. ACT sidesteps the question. Each partner works on the gap between the partner they want to be and the partner they're currently being, and both of those conversations can happen in the same room without anyone being blamed. The exercises below follow the order I'd typically use them, though there's no right or wrong sequence, and most of them can also be set as between-session work.
Reconnecting With the Relationship Story
A couple in crisis has usually been telling a negative story about the relationship for months or years, and that story colours everything, so I like to start by having each partner write out the early relationship instead. The prompts are simple:
- How did you and your partner meet?
- What did you find most attractive about your partner at that time?
- What activities did you most enjoy together in that stage of the relationship?
- What do you miss most about the early days?
- What are your partner's greatest strengths and best personal qualities?
After writing, each partner takes a moment to reflect on the feelings they had towards their partner at that time and whether they can still connect with the care and appreciation in them. The point isn't nostalgia. It reminds both people that the relationship contains more than the current crisis, which makes the harder work ahead easier to commit to.
Clarifying Relationship Values
Values work is the centre of ACT with couples. One exercise I find effective asks each partner to imagine the relationship ten years from now, at a gathering where their partner stands up to give a speech about the last ten years together, and to imagine that speech saying whatever they would most love to hear about their character and their contribution. From there, each partner writes down:
- The personal qualities they want to bring into the relationship.
- The character strengths they want to use or develop.
- How they want to behave and act as a partner.
- What they want to stand for in the relationship.
- The words they'd most love to hear from their partner about who they've been.
A related exercise closes the loop by looking at the values gap. Each partner imagines waking up tomorrow to find their partner has become the perfect "soul mate" with no faults at all, and then answers a question most people don't expect: how would you change? What would you stop, start, and do more of, and how would you treat your partner when they made a mistake? The gap between how each person would ideally behave and how they're behaving now becomes the working agenda for therapy, and it belongs to each partner rather than to the other person's faults.
Identifying What DRAINs the Relationship
In any relationship we can act and think in ways that don't fit who we want to be as a partner, and the DRAIN acronym gives couples a shared, non-blaming language for those patterns. Each partner works through five areas:
- D, Disconnection: getting bored or irritable, no longer listening, going cold, shutting down, or walking away.
- R, Reactivity: reacting impulsively or automatically, like yelling, snapping, criticising, blaming, or storming off.
- A, Avoidance: avoiding the issues or the painful feelings attached to them, including through distraction, alcohol, or substances.
- I, Inside my mind: getting trapped in worry, dwelling, or stewing over everything that's wrong with the partner.
- N, Neglecting values: losing touch with values like being loving, kind, caring, and compassionate.
Each partner completes the exercise twice, once for their own behaviour and once for what they observe in their partner, and comparing the two usually produces the most honest conversation the couple has had in a while. A companion exercise looks at controlling actions, where each partner lists everything they've tried to change about the other person, then honestly assesses whether it worked long-term and what it cost the relationship. Most couples conclude that the campaign to fix each other has been expensive and unsuccessful, and that conclusion does more than any lecture from you could.
Teaching Couples to Respond Instead of React
Crisis-stage couples spend a lot of time reacting, so the skill of responding is worth teaching explicitly. The process has three steps: a situation occurs, the person pauses to check in with themselves, and then they proceed mindfully with a response that reflects their values. The check-in is where the work happens, and these questions guide it:
- What is actually happening right now? What are the facts?
- What emotions am I feeling, and is something other than this situation feeding them?
- Do my emotions fit the facts, or are they bigger than the situation?
- How intense are my emotions right now? Do I need a moment to regulate first?
- Will I be able to respond in line with my values the way I'm currently feeling?
Reflecting on past reactions helps the skill stick. Having a partner describe a recent blow-up, what triggered it, what it cost, and how they'd want to respond next time turns an argument they're ashamed of into practice material. We cover the intake side of this ground, including how to assess a couple's conflict cycle in the first session, in our guide to couples therapy questions for the first session.
Validation and Fair Fighting
Validation: finding the truth in the other person's perspective and acknowledging their thoughts, emotions, and behaviours, without necessarily agreeing with them. For couples in crisis this is often the single most useful communication skill, because invalidation is usually running in both directions by the time they reach you. The practical how-to is straightforward to teach:
- Pay attention, and reflect back what the partner has just said.
- Watch body language and facial expressions, not just words.
- Admit to the valid. If the partner asks for something reasonable, accept it.
- Show understanding with phrases like "it makes sense that you... because...".
Fair fighting gives conflict itself some structure. Each partner first reflects on their current fighting tactics, what they say and do when they want to win, and what their partner does. Then each completes four sentence stems about what should happen when they're having a fight:
- "I'd like my partner to accept me doing this..."
- "I want to stop myself from doing this..."
- "I'm willing to accept my partner doing this..."
- "I want my partner to stop doing this..."
The couple then brings their answers together and agrees on fair fighting rules they'll both adopt in future conflict. Rules the couple wrote themselves get followed far more often than rules a therapist hands over.
Values-Guided Actions Between Sessions
The between-session work is where values become behaviour. Values-guided actions are the small words and gestures that make a partner feel loved, heard, and valued, and couples in crisis have usually stopped doing them entirely. Simple suggestions help restart the habit, across three channels:
- Words: "I appreciate you", "I'm here for you", "thank you for what you do for us", and "I'm sorry".
- Gestures: cooking dinner, organising a date night, sharing the chores, or taking part in the partner's interests.
- Physical: holding hands in public, a hug, sitting together on the couch, or open body language and eye contact when listening.
An appreciation journal rounds this out. Each day for a week, each partner completes prompts like "something I appreciate about them is...", "a way they contributed to my life today was...", and "a positive thing they said or did today was...". It's a simple tool, and it works by shifting attention back to what the partner is doing right after months of tracking what they do wrong. All of these exercises, from the relationship story through to the appreciation journal, are available as structured worksheets in our ACT Worksheets for Couples Therapy, ready to use in session or send home between appointments.
ACT gives couples in crisis a way forward that doesn't depend on settling who was right, and that's usually a relief to both partners. Values clarification, the DRAIN model, responding skills, validation, and fair fighting all pull in the same direction, towards two people each taking responsibility for the partner they want to be. Structured worksheets keep that work going between sessions, which matters, because most of the change has to happen at home rather than in the session itself.
Veronica West is a registered psychologist (BPsychSc(Hons), MPH, MPsych) and the founder of My Thriving Mind, a digital resource library for psychologists, counsellors, and allied mental health professionals. The range covers the ACT Worksheets for Couples Therapy, the wider couples therapy worksheets collection, and the Whole Shop Bundle for clinicians who want the full library of 1,000+ therapy resources in one purchase. If you'd prefer to try before you buy, our free resource library is the simplest place to start.
Browse the ACT Worksheets for Couples Therapy here: https://mythrivingmind.io/products/act-worksheets-for-couples-therapy