The most common case I hear as a non-mono Counsellor

“So… my new partner’s poly, but I’m not.”

Therapists beget patients beget therapists. Think about it. If there are more practitioners then their service becomes cheaper and so more people will seek professional help. And if more people are finding a desire to speak to a therapist then they will pay more, and so it will lure more people into the profession. In the UK currently there’s been a steady growth of professionals (around 20,000 per year) to a number around 200,000 today. The NHS’s psyche workforce growing more than 20% year on year. There are 8,000+ therapists registered with UKCP. BACP has 60,000+ members. The number of NHS patients accessing psyche resources goes up 200,000 every year (10 per new practitioner) to about 2 million today.

Meanwhile in USA, There are 1 million mental health professionals (Psychologists, Therapists, Counsellors, Psychiatrists). We might expect, what with the general population being 4x that of UK, and the number of pros being 4x that of UK, that the number of psych patients is 4x that of UK, but actually it’s much higher. 50 million Americans reach out to mental health professionals annually, 25x that of UK, meaning a professional has not 10 clients but 50!

Take a guess at what people tend to present to a professional therapist with. You’d be right in terms of positioning if not prevalence in the general population. Even if our friends often offer to buy us a drink to talk about these issues, we feel them, or they talk around them and that’s how we know that the most common concern is…:

1) Anxiety — This psychosomatic dread is a symptom brought on by other things, most commonly work or lack there of. Some piecing apart of anxiety will go a long way towards pinpointing and tackling the root causes. Burnout clinically shows up as dysregulation rather than discrete disorders.

2) Depression — Low motivation, anhedonia, self-criticism, low esteem or upset with others’ lack of recognition

3) Relationship problems — Communication breakdowns, Attachment dynamics (pursue–withdraw, insecurity), Conflict, infidelity, and break-up recovery

4) Identity crisis — Increasingly common, especially in younger clients as they are exposed to more and more faces online doing amazing things. Comparison leads to inadequacy. Forum saturation leads to exploration of more and more extreme self-labelling.

5) Trauma — Clients often don’t present with trauma explicitly; it emerges as patterns (avoidance, hypervigilance, relational instability) as a consequence of childhood/adult neglect/ abuse, grief, unresolved loss.

6) Life transitions, decision / future uncertainty, mental pitstops — We are all affected by change, whether self initiated or not. And some people and some changes create excitement around these epochs. But others focus on or inflate the unknowns pessimistically to and extent where change seems perpetually negative.

7) Loneliness — Tied to digital life and human mobility.

8) Addictions and impulsions — OCD, substance abuse, content overuse, wether for escapism or numbing or psychological dependance. Social media’s high churn, quick fix, dopamine focussed nature is a huge catalyst.

Besides the rise in particular complaints mentioned above, general patterns observed by professionals are less stigma leading to broader, earlier presentations (suspicions rather than diagnosable pathologies). Availability of self-aid resources means that clients arrive psychologically literate but experientially stuck.

As for me as a non-mono counsellor… My most common client type is girl-girl partnerships. Sometimes one of a ff partnership will make an enquiry to me to tell me about their partner’s troubling behaviour and sometimes eventually their partner will make it onto the call. That troubling behaviour? Her partner has discovered that being in a relationship doesn’t automatically switch off their attraction to other people. The lustful partner takes this to mean that “I’m poly” and they then inform the partner, effectively blindsiding them into a sloppily worded non-mono coupling, where the faithful is watching on, scared to slow their partner, scared to ask questions, and unable to define themselves or their beloved without someone who has the ‘answer’.

But there’s no answer to this set up. There’s no relationship model anything close to this. The 3 options are as such:

Reneg on any implicit or explicit agreement about being blind to our partner’s activity, and negotiate the conversation again. If it fails then de-escalate to friends or less.

Reneg on any implicit or explicit agreement about being blind to our partner’s activity, and negotiate the conversation again. If an agreement is met, then proceed with care.

Become okay with our partner’s activity and hope that if we were to do the same, as is our right, our partner would be secure enough not to be jealous.

The problem with how this tends to unfold in practice is that the misunderstood and inaccurate “poly” declaration is treated as an identity trump card rather than a negotiation starting point. One partner is effectively saying: “turns out, this is who I am! Therefore the structure must change.” Behold, the collapse of 3 distinct domains into one misdiagnosed, expedited self-discovery:

Desire is trivial — almost everyone in a relationship continues to experience attraction.

Identity is interpretive — my poor clients’ partners organise that desire into a trend-seeking, sloppy narrative of being non-monogamous.

Agreement is procedural — it requires time, language, boundaries, and consent.

When these 3 are fused together, my clients on the receiving end aren’t being invited into a co-authored structure; they’re being handed a conclusion which falls for the trappings that some people are and some people aren’t naturally non-monogamous, rather than some partnerships being and some partnerships not being non-monogamous.

First: legitimise partner’s desire without inflating it. Attraction to others is not, in itself, evidence of incompatibility with monogamy but in line with the everyday challenges of those that swear into it. If we treat it as such, we create unnecessary urgency. The “lustful” partner often benefits from having their experience normalised but also de-exceptionalised. If I don’t have access to the partner then my client will pass on this message covertly or overtly. The galavanting partner must interrogate their motivation to cavort with more precision than “I think I’m poly.” There are usually multiple overlapping drivers: novelty-seeking, skirting of dependency, unresolved resentment, sexual dissatisfaction, identity exploration, or primal curiosity. Non-monogamy can be a legitimate container for some of these, but it can also function as an avoidance strategy. If the existing dyad is brittle, adding more people increases load rather than relieving it.

Second: restore symmetry in the negotiation. My clients here are operating under implicit coercion, because their partners’ framing is: “accept this or risk invalidating the authentic me.” Until that pressure is named and reduced, we don’t have meaningful consent. A useful intervention here is to make explicit that no terms are on the table until both parties can articulate their preferences, voicing their own fears and acknowledging their partner’s. That alone often reveals how premature the shift was.

Third: define the cost profile. People tend to evaluate non-monogamy in terms of upside (freedom, variety, authenticity) while underweighting operational costs (time management, emotional labour, jealousy processing, disclosure protocols). Bringing those into the room in concrete terms — scheduling realities, communication expectations, what happens when someone is distressed at 2am — moves the conversation out of abstraction.

Only after that groundwork do the earlier “three options” become real options rather than reactive positions.

If they renegotiate and fail, de-escalation is not a collapse; it’s an accurate read of incompatibility under clarified conditions. If they renegotiate and succeed, the agreement tends to be narrower and more specific than initially imagined, often with staged experimentation rather than an immediate open structure. And if one partner chooses to tolerate the other’s activity without genuine buy-in, that arrangement is usually time-limited; resentment accumulates unless there is a parallel expansion of agency for both parties.

One additional pattern worth naming. Which partner does the flirting speaks to who has the trouser-wearing authority — who gets to define what this relationship is and what counts as reasonable. The partner who claims “I’m poly” is unintentionally disguising their identity as dominant in their new label. The corrective is to relocate authority back into process: agreements are valid because they are mutually constructed, not because they are justified by one person’s self-concept.

Through guided sessions with me, the sustainable path is discovered. I hear attentive clients use fewer grand declarations and more provisional language: “I think I might want…”, “I’m not sure how I’d feel if…”, “Can we test…”. That’s the point at which actual non-monogamous work can begin, because the partnership, is being explored if not built and trialled rather than imposed.