What you want from your relationship

Most clients in relationship distress can’t articulate what they want with any precision. They can say what they’re upset about. They can list what their partner is doing wrong. They can’t translate the upset into a list of specific wants their partner could potentially deliver on. Without that translation, the work in session keeps circling around symptoms instead of addressing what’s actually missing.

This worksheet runs the translation as a structured exercise. The client lists seven things they want from the relationship and rates each on importance and difficulty. The pairing of those two ratings is what makes the data clinically useful. A high-importance, high-difficulty item is a real conflict zone, the kind of thing that needs negotiation in couples work. A high-importance, low-difficulty item that’s still not happening is more concerning, because the difficulty rating says it shouldn’t be hard, which means either the client is avoiding asking or the partner is showing low investment. Either is the conversation in session.

Use it for couples therapy where each partner fills it in independently and the comparison happens in session. For individual clients in relationship distress where you can only see one side. For premarital work to surface mismatches before the harder period arrives. For clients trying to decide whether to stay in or leave a relationship.

The clinical patterns to read. Clients who can’t list seven things usually need help distinguishing wants from oughts. The list often comes back full of things they think they should want rather than things they actually want. Push for what would matter to them personally even if no one else thought it was important. Clients whose list is dominated by absence-of-bad (“I want him to stop drinking”, “I want her to stop checking my phone”) are reporting that the relationship is in repair territory rather than growth territory. The work shifts to whether the absence-of-bad list can be addressed before any growth wants are added.

A second pattern: clients whose ratings are uniformly high. Everything is a 9 or 10 on importance. Sometimes that’s accurate, more often it’s an unwillingness to prioritise that points at conflict avoidance. Help them rank, even when the ranking feels disloyal.

In my-cbt, the worksheet is one of the bundled system templates. For couples work, assign it to both clients and have each fill it in privately. Read the two submissions side by side in session. For individual clients, the single submission is enough.