Marriage, couples & relationship counselling

Whether you'd call it marriage counselling, couples counselling or relationship therapy, the aim is the same, and it's what I do every day as a couples therapist: relationships shape so much of how we feel, and when they're strained, everything else feels harder too. This isn't only about romantic partners. It's family that doesn't understand you, friendships that leave you drained, in-laws, colleagues, or the tricky dance of staying close while staying yourself. Whether you come alone to understand your own patterns or together as a couple, counselling gives these things the space they deserve.

How I help with relationships

If the question has moved from repairing the relationship to whether it continues, divorce counselling deals with that decision directly.

As an integrative therapist I'm trained in a broad range of modalities and choose what fits you. For this work I draw on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), communication and boundary work, and mindfulness-based techniques (MBCT). We look at the patterns you keep landing in, the needs underneath the conflict, and practical ways to relate that feel healthier for everyone.

What relationship strain can look like

You might recognise some of these: the same fight on a loop, walking on eggshells, feeling unheard or taken for granted, difficulty saying no, resentment quietly building, drifting apart, or losing yourself in someone else's needs. If any of that sounds familiar, counselling can help, you don't need things to be at breaking point to want them to be better.

Most relationship problems aren't about not caring enough. They're about never having learned the tools to care well, and those tools can be learned.

The four patterns that predict trouble

Decades of observational research on couples found that what predicts difficulty is not how much a couple argues but how they argue. Four specific patterns carry most of the weight.

Criticism, meaning attacks on the person rather than complaints about the behaviour: you never help, rather than I need help tonight. Contempt, which is criticism delivered from above through sarcasm, eye-rolling or mockery, and is the most corrosive of the four. Defensiveness, which includes counter-attacking and playing the victim, and which reliably escalates. And stonewalling, where one partner shuts down and goes silent, usually because they are physiologically overwhelmed rather than because they do not care.

Most couples recognise themselves within about ten seconds of reading that list. The useful part is that all four are behaviours rather than character traits, which means they can be replaced. Gottman Method work is built directly around doing that, and EFT approaches the same territory from underneath, through the attachment fears driving the pattern.

Coming on your own

A large proportion of the relationship work I do is with one person in the room, and it is not a lesser version of couples therapy.

Sometimes a partner refuses. Sometimes there is no partner and the pattern is the problem: the same kind of person chosen repeatedly, the same point at which things fall apart, the same inability to say what you want until resentment says it for you. Sometimes the relationship in question is a parent, a sibling or an adult child.

Relationships are systems, and changing how one person responds changes what the other is responding to. That is not a consolation prize, it is a mechanism. It also tends to resolve the original question, since some partners join after a few sessions once therapy stops being an abstract threat, and some do not, which is itself information worth having.

What a course of this work looks like

Assessment first, usually including one individual conversation with each partner, then joint work with a shared map of the cycle you get stuck in. Most couples attend somewhere between 8 and 20 sessions, and I will give you an honest estimate rather than leaving it open ended.

If you are still deciding who to work with, including whether that should be me, the questions worth asking any couples therapist are set out separately, along with what this work costs.

When the relationship is not a partner

A good deal of relationship distress has nothing to do with romance. Parents whose approval never quite arrives, siblings replaying a childhood dynamic in their forties, in-laws who are a permanent third party in a marriage, friendships that have become one-sided.

That work is covered in more depth on the family conflict page linked above, and where the pattern is a relationship in which you have lost the ability to tell what you actually think, this piece on how that happens is a useful place to start.

Sessions that fit your life

All sessions are online or by phone, across time zones, convenient whether you attend on your own or connect with a partner from another location. We start with a free 15-minute consultation and go at your pace, in whichever way feels most comfortable for you.