I offer a few different ways to work with couples, depending on what issues you are experiencing in your relationship. My work with couples primarily uses Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), which was developed by Dr Sue Johnson. It is a collaborative, structured therapy approach that fosters the development of secure and supportive relationships.
Reparative couples therapy
This type of therapy is for couples where they are committed to working on their relationship and want to break out of the negative patterns they find themselves in. You may have reached breaking point, but want to make sure that you try counselling before you decide it’s not possible for the relationship to continue. My role with you is to be a process consultant – I am here to help you to identify the negative cycles you find yourselves in time and time again and work towards understanding and breaking these negative cycles. EFT seeks to understand what is going on underneath these repetitive cycles and to help you to rebuild supportive and loving bonds within your relationship. EFT aims to help you to develop new ways to understand one other and to better your communication when the needs of the relationship aren’t being met. With an impressive evidence base, EFT works to promote secure, resilient individuals and successful relationships between partners and within families.
How do sessions work?
For the first session, you will jointly attend an assessment session together so that I can hear more about what is currently happening and get a sense of how you relate to one another. Each person will then have one or two separate sessions to explore more about you individually, including the history of your relationships, your upbringing, culture and your current well being. Following this, we will come back together and I can suggest that type of intervention is needed. I may suggest other therapies if I feel they would be more suited to your needs. If you’d like to hear more about EFT, get in touch via email and we can set up a short Zoom meeting to discuss your needs.
Couples sessions are conducted via Zoom and run for 50-55 minutes and work through three phases of treatment. Longer sessions (80 minutes) are available at request.
You may wish to read Hold Me Tight by Sue Johnson which is a great companion guide and introduction to EFT.
Discernment Counselling
Some couples will have reached a place where they’re unsure how they want, or even if they want, to move forward with the relationship. You might have initially been really happy but as things have progressed you’ve become unsure if your life goals, hopes and values align. This is understandably a really tough time for couples and it can be really hard to know how to move forward. Rather than using a couples space to repair wounds and rebuild bonds, what can feel more appropriate is having a space where you come together to think about what you want from the future and discern whether that future is with one another. These discernment sessions are usually time-limited (5 or 6 sessions) and can look different depending on what the issue is. We can use a values-based approach if it’s about figuring out shared life goals. Or if the question is whether you want to continue to be together, the focus can be on making space for where you’re at, perhaps understanding how you came to be in this place as a couple and thinking about whether your paths align moving forward or whether you would like to end the relationship. The aim of these discernment sessions is for you to get to the end having moved out of the stuck place you’re in and with a clearer answer on how you’re moving forward.