Safe, supportive and professional help to understand unhelpful patterns of thinking, feeling and behaviour, resolving conflicts in your relationship.

What is Couples or Relationship Therapy?

No matter how many you have, relationships are essential for our wellbeing. With partners and friendships, we tend to experience ups and downs as we progress through life.

With partners we sometimes get stuck in a pattern of behaviour, conversations, or feelings and we can avoid, or provoke as an unhelpful way to try and resolve the situation.

When you have reached this stage it is often the point that we either decide to end the relationship or you seek professional support with a therapist or counsellor. Many having experienced therapy then go on to periodically have sessions for specific issues or progressive improvements or to ensure you work well through a challenging context.

What’s important is that a therapist is there for the relationship not taking sides with the individual and they remain uninvested in the outcome of whether you stay together or go your separate ways.

It is the relationship that needs understanding and to be worked on, and facilitating a dialogue to communicate more effectively means there is less room for blame and a reduction in hurt and feeling misunderstood or not met.

Our therapists have a relational dynamics based training and they use a relationship developmental model. They have an awareness of the stages of relationship and where things can stick.

When should we seek therapy?

Regardless of what stage your relationship is at or what the context is, relationship or couples therapy can support deeper listening and understanding.

Many seek therapy when they are experiencing challenges in the relationship, others seek therapy when they are experiencing challenges in their life or broader context.

The challenges can be from non-agreed affairs, to parenting challenges, separation, work challenges like redundancy, promotions, returning to work and simply wanting something different or more in the relationship.

Some issues are:

• I feel ignored and unheard

• I just don’t bother saying what I feel or think because it changes nothing

• She/He/They are jealous and possessive

• We are no longer intimate, they don’t have the same sex drive

• I feel like I am on a hamster wheel, there is no joy

• We never go out together

• We have different view on how to parent our children

• He/She/They won’t commit