I Tried Regain for Couples Therapy for a Month — Here’s How It Went

So having never tried it myself — despite years of individual therapy — I entered the process feeling curious. Would our therapist take sides? Would she agree with my complaints about my partner? How would our sessions differ from our arguments or, ahem, from our unmediated attempts at problem-solving?

I was also curious how couples therapy would differ from individual therapy. How would our therapist distinguish between problems “in the relationship” and personal baggage we were each bringing to the table? To find out, I dragged my partner, who has never had any type of therapy at all, along for a month-long ride of weekly sessions at Regain. Here’s how it went.

Signing up for Regain felt like the Goldilocks of online therapy intake — not so many questions that it became invasive, but also not so few that it was overly generalized either.

It started off by asking if my partner would be joining me, making it clear they are open to people working on their relationships in individual therapy as well as couples therapy. There were basic questions about gender, sexual identity, and relationship dynamics that offered inclusive dropdown lists with many choices, and similar questions about my ideal therapist.

The platform asked if I’d been in therapy before, but they didn’t ask any medical history questions whatsoever. The gist of the questionnaire contained queries about the relationship issues I wanted to address, as well as what qualities I was looking for in a therapist, with dropdown lists I could check off indiscriminately. The questions were vague, but they were a good starting point.

The entire sign up process took less than 10 minutes, and I liked that it could be done alone or with a partner. At the end of their survey, it asks if you would like to invite your partner to join the account. (This invite can be sent at any point later on as well.)

At this point, I was also asked to input my credit card information and was given my final monthly price, which was a monthly recurring payment of $320 (or $80 a week). Unlike some other online therapy companies I’ve tried, Regain only has one all-inclusive subscription plan.

Regain matches you with a therapist — no browsing therapists allowed. Once you’re finished with sign-up, it tells you it will email you once you’ve been matched within 48 hours, but I was matched with a fully licensed therapist with over 13 years experience just hours after signing up.

In this email, I was able to read my therapist’s bio, which listed specialties that aligned with issues I had checked off during sign-up. With her level of experience, she felt like a good fit for me so I went ahead and booked a session for a few days later.

Switching Therapists

If you’re not impressed with your therapist, either right off the bat or at any point in your therapy, there is a dedicated “switch therapists” tab in the app. By clicking on it, you are invited to join the selection process and can scroll pages of available therapist bios to handpick one yourself. However, be careful — once you’ve asked to switch, you’re locked in — you cannot browse other therapists and then back out to stay with your current therapist. (Don’t swipe bios if you’re happy in your relationship, folks. Regain will make you regret it.)

We logged in to our sessions on the website or the app, by clicking the “therapy” tab. A moment later, a call appeared, which we answered to begin our session with our therapist. I had gotten three email reminders about the session: a day, an hour, and two minutes prior to the session.

Our First Session

Our first session went well, with my partner and I attending together over video chat. She asked us each to describe what we felt our issues were, and where we were coming from. She also asked us each to describe our relationship to her, and it was interesting to get the chance to hear my partner describe our relationship to someone outside of it. I learned touching things I don’t think he would ever have thought to say to me in a one-on-one conversation.

Without spending much time gathering information on us, we quickly jumped into the issues we brought to the table. We both left the session feeling like our therapist had understood and supported our perspectives. When we discussed the session afterwards, we were surprised we each felt she’d taken “our side” on a conflict we had described, which helped us see both our perspectives were valid. She also gave us good concrete advice we could put into practice immediately.

Our Second Session

After our second session, our therapist assigned us homework in the shape of a couple worksheets created by BetterHelp (Regain’s parent company).

The first worksheet was to create a list of our favorite things about each other. The second worksheet was on “how to apologize,” which felt wonderfully validating for me: there it was, in black and white, the difference between a “real” apology and an ”I’m sorry you felt” or an “I’m sorry but” apology. Regain was going to help my therapy-novice boyfriend learn the basics. Our therapist also linked to an outside activity she recommended: a worksheet on taking accountability for our own behaviors, and the conflict they caused.

My Third Session

I met with my therapist alone for my third session, as I wanted to talk about recurring patterns I had noticed in myself across several relationships. I wanted clarity on how much of these were “me” issues I could work on alone, and in what contexts it would be healthy or unhealthy to attempt to do so.

We talked about past trauma, and important differences in behavior between my past and current partner. One question she kept asking was, "Could your reactions to your partner’s behavior change enough for you to be happy in this relationship if your partner does not change at all?” It wasn’t a reflection of my partner’s level of commitment to our relationship — rather, a chance to step back and look at the relationship objectively, in terms of my own needs and my partner's capabilities.

Overall, our therapist did a great job balancing listening to both of us with offering her own insights and therapeutic techniques. She also focused much more on positivity than I had expected. Pre-therapy, our attempts at conflict resolution always focused on the details of the conflict itself. With our therapist, we zoomed out and focused much more on what was good about our relationship — whether that was something that already existed, or something we wanted to work toward together. It helped reframe our issues and goals in a positive light, while teaching us important skills to communicate more effectively.

Cancelling Couples Therapy at Regain

Cancelling therapy at Regain is pretty easy: All you have to do is go into the app and request to cancel. Just bear in mind that because you are billed on a monthly subscription, your account won’t officially be cancelled until the end of your billing period.

Regain is the couples therapy branch of Betterhelp, one of the biggest and most well-known names in online therapy — and it lives up to the hype. Many of its therapists (including mine) come from Betterhelp, which is one of the largest databases of vetted, fully certified therapists in the online marketplace. It also borrows supplemental resources, such as homework worksheets, from the Betterhelp platform.

Similarly, their app works as smoothly as you would expect from an industry heavy-hitter. Customer service, available through the app or web dashboard, is slow, but competent – but every time I reached out, my issue was resolved to my satisfaction and I was given free days or weeks of service to help make up for my issues (which were all my own doing). The session connections were all glitch-free — no weird noises or calls dropped. My therapist came on time and prepared for every session, and offered in-depth, timely responses to messages.

This was my first foray into couples therapy, but compared with other individual online therapy outlets I’ve tried, including Brightside and Talkspace, both the therapy and the platform itself were top tier. At Talkspace, sessions are only 30 minutes, which is not really enough time for individual therapy, let alone couples therapy (which Talkspace also offers).

Overall, my experience with Regain was highly positive, and I would recommend it to any couple looking to explore relationship therapy.

I was also surprised to learn that “individual couples therapy” is a very real thing, and people looking to work on their personal level of happiness in a relationship (whether by leaving it or changing their own thoughts and behaviors) — are welcome at Regain.

ReGain is also great for couples who can’t be in the same place for appointments – its chat, audio, and video meeting rooms all have three-way access that allow you and your partner to attend from separate locations.