Trying to make it work. Olivia Plath and Ethan Plath have been open about their less than perfect marriage and on the Tuesday, September 21, episode of Welcome to Plathville, their candidness continues when she heads to therapy.
“Growing up in a very religious world, there’s so much stigma surrounding therapy,” Olivia, 23, says in Us Weekly‘s exclusive sneak peek. “You know, ‘You should just pray more or read your bible more’ or ‘It’s not a real thing.’ But there comes a time in your life when you’re an adult and you come to say, ‘I choose to recognize that I need help and it doesn’t make me weaker for it.'”
The reality star enters her therapy session in Tallahassee, Florida, and notes that in their last session, they talked about the many things she and Ethan, also 23, have been working on, including compromising and communication. However, they’ve made no progress and she admits that communication has been a struggle.
“I know part of it’s my fault because I don’t see him very often and I don’t really feel valued that he doesn’t want to move or start something new, so when he comes home in the door, like, my immediate reaction is, ‘Alright, we have to talk, things are bad.’ I feel like I’m nagging him,” the photographer explains. “To avoid that, he grabs a beer, runs outside and works on his car so he doesn’t have to be around me because all I want to do is talk about those things and he doesn’t want to.”
After explaining that she feels at fault for pushing “him away,” Olivia explains that they’re tough on each other in many ways.
“I would say I’m more critical of him than he is of me but it’s a different kind of criticism,” the blogger explains. “He has a really hard time with me changing. The one underlying thing he says is I’m not the person he married and if he had known I was going to be like this, he wouldn’t have married me.”
During her confessional, Olivia goes on to say that she was “hurt” by Ethan’s comment but “isn’t gonna apologize for changing as a person.”
She added, “I feel like changing is growth.”
The couple, who tied the knot in 2018, opened up exclusively to Us in August about the ups and downs in their relationship.
“I felt like so many of the things that we dealt with, were both of us speaking out of childhood trauma,” she told Us, noting that he wanted to go do couple’s therapy instead. “And I thought that if we both went privately, like, personally to therapy, we could deal with all of our own stuff on our own and have more tools [for] coming back and communicating together. But obviously, that was my ideal and that was something Ethan wasn’t comfortable with. So my compromise was just, like, ‘OK, we’ll go to couples therapy.’”
The pair added that they “almost had to hit rock bottom” to start working through their struggles.
“It really sucked hitting rock bottom. When we started the season, pretty much, like, everything [was] not going well at all and kind of came to a head within the first few weeks,” she told Us at the time. “It also means that as uncomfortable as the first few episodes and scenes are going to be, it gets a lot better. It gets worse before it gets better. … We’re in a much better place now.”
Her husband then added, “The only good thing about rock bottom is [that] it’s only up from there.”
Welcome to Plathville airs on TLC Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET.
