Celebrities Who Are Grateful For Couples Therapy

Pink and her husband Carey Hart have been together for over 17 years and she credits therapy for keeping them together. While they’ve admittedly had their low points, therapy has helped them maintain their relationship.

“We come from broken families and we had no model of, ‘How are we supposed to keep this family together?’ And live this crazy life? There’s no model, there’s no book that says, ‘Here’s how to do this!’ So, we go to counseling, and it works. Carey and I have been in couples counseling almost our entire 17 years that we’ve been together. It’s the only reason we’re still together,” Pink said on the Today show.

Kristen Bell says she started couple’s therapy with her husband Dax Shepard early in their relationship so that they could learn where they needed to improve. She says counseling helped them learn their individual pattern of arguing and how to stop it. 

“We have a very healthy marriage and we got there by doing therapy when we needed it, and constantly doing fierce moral inventories. We both take responsibility when we are wrong, and I think it is easy to work with him because I married him, because I enjoy spending time with him and I trust him,” Kristen told People.

Gabrielle Union and her husband Dwayne Wade may appear to be “couple goals” on social media, but she says they still work through issues like any other married couple. In fact, the couple say that they attend couples’ therapy together to work through the process.

“People are like ‘goals’; me and D are like, ‘wtf?’ We’ve kind of figured it out now, but I guess maybe we should tweet live from couples’ therapy. And when you ask us we’re gonna tell you, there’s a process to happy,” Gabrielle said in an interview with Complex.

Barack Obama and his wife have been through a lot in the three decades of their marriage so it only makes sense they would want to talk through things with the help of a therapist. At first, Michelle admits she thought therapy would “fix” her husband and their issues, but she ended up realizing there were ways she could change too — like prioritizing her own happiness.

“Counseling helped me to look at, ‘How do I take control of my own happiness within our marriage?’ But it’s hard, it’s hard. It is hard blending two lives together…And in my view, I took Barack to marital counseling so that they would fix him. And then he started looking over at me. I was like, ‘Why are you talking to me?’ I am perfect. He is the problem,” Michelle said in her Netflix documentary Becoming.

Since Nikki Bella and Artem Chigvintsev welcomed their son, they have made a conscious effort to attend couple’s therapy. Nikki explained that raising a child in the midst of intense work commitments created a struggle for the pair but therapy has helped them become “stronger than ever.”

“We’re actually in a good spot. We were doing a little rocky for a bit…[We] had to get back into therapy. You know, distance is really hard and Artem and I, we were raised in different countries, and that actually does have an effect on a relationship. Now we’re stronger than ever,” she said on The Bellas Podcast. 

Neil Patrick Harris and his husband, David Burtka, always have the nicest things to say about one another but they admit that they do go to couple’s therapy to strengthen their relationship. 

“We go to couples therapy. Not that there’s anything wrong, but it’s nice to sort of just talk to someone who is a mediator. That’s helped our relationship,” David told Life & Style.

Will Smith and his wife Jada’s unique relationship has often made headlines so it should come as no surprise that the couple work through things together with the help of a couple’s therapist. While Will admits it can be scary getting things out in the open, it has been an important part of keeping their relationship moving forward.  

“What happens in a marriage once you do counseling, the truth comes out. And you sit across from your wife and you’ve said all of your truth and she has said all of her truth. It creates a dark moment. But for me it’s the dark before the dawn. When the truth comes out and people have to say who they are and what they think, you get to know who they are. I think that’s the cleansing before you get to the other side that is understanding and moving forward in our relationship,” Will told The Sun.

Busy Philipps hasn’t been shy about discussing the ups and downs of her marriage to Marc Silverstein. In fact, she says that in 2016 she actually asked Marc for a divorce after many years of “feeling alone” in the relationship and turning to another man for emotional support. Instead of walking away, Marc encouraged Busy to go to couple’s therapy with him, where they were able to work things out.

“We were doing well in therapy together too…When I finally came clean about the other dude, he was weirdly understanding about it. He really just wanted me to know that he loved me and was sorry I’d felt so alone for so many years and wanted to support me in whatever I needed. He wanted to be a different partner and a different dad, and he was delivering on that. It’s hard to explain it exactly, but he broke open in a way and totally changed the way he related to everyone, not just me. It wasn’t exactly overnight, but it was happening, and I could recognize the change – everyone we knew could see it,” Busy wrote in her memoir This Will Only Hurt a Little.

In 2015, Patrick Dempsey and his wife Jillian filed for divorce after 15 years of marriage — but he wasn’t ready to give up on things yet. Patrick explained that the idea of “breaking up a family” was “scary” and he wanted to put in work to repair things before they made their split permanent. 

“Our marriage was not something I was prepared to let go of. I didn’t feel like we had done all the work. And we both wanted to do that work. That’s where it started…Jill and I decided it was time to work on our issues and improve. We wanted to be role models for our kids like, okay, if you have differences, you can work them out…You can only do one thing at a time and do it well. I  [learned] to prioritize. Our union has to be the priority. I wasn’t prepared to give up on her and she wasn’t either. We both wanted to fight for it,” Patrick told People. 

Bryan Cranston says that he and his wife Robin go to therapy whenever they need to check in with one another. While he was initially hesitant about the idea of speaking with a counselor, he realized he had to let go all of his prior perceptions of therapy. 

“My wife and I go to a couples therapist. Our agreement is, if either of us feels like we want to go, the other can’t object. For my father’s generation, as he literally said, ‘I’d rather stick needles in my eyes than go to a therapist.’ When I was a kid, if you heard of someone who went to a psychiatrist, it meant they were crazy. That’s the kind of labeling and judgment I was raised with. And I had to get rid of that,” Bryan said in an interview with Rolling Stone.