Couples Therapy
Making sense of what’s happening between you
Relationships can be places of profound connection, intimacy and belonging. They can also be where some of our deepest vulnerabilities become activated. Meaningful relationships are all at once, the most terrifying and the most fulfilling aspects of our human experience.
You may love one another very deeply, yet still find yourselves caught in painful patterns that neither of you seems able to change.
What couples therapy can help with
A space for difficult conversation
Couples often come to therapy because they can no longer have certain conversations without becoming overwhelmed.
Therapy provides a third space in which those conversations can happen differently.
We may begin to notice in real time as familiar cycles begin and to make room for experiences that have previously been difficult to communicate.
It’s my role to listen not only for the content of what is being said, but to the longing, fear, hurt or protective response underneath it, and help you both to give new shape and voice to these unconscious or unacknowledged parts.
Over time, couples may begin to move from statements like:
"You never want me."
towards:
"I feel rejected and frightened when we don't have sex"
Or from:
"You're always putting pressure on me."
towards:
"When I sense demands or expectations, I sometimes shut down."
Rediscovering the erotic self
Long-term relationships can accumulate many identities.
Partners become parents, housemates, carers, financial partners, organisers and companions.
Sometimes the erotic self becomes harder to locate underneath everything else.
Eroticism can require something different from ordinary relational security.
It may involve curiosity, autonomy, novelty, imagination, playfulness, difference and the experience of encountering your partner as a separate person rather than simply as someone with whom you share a life.
This can create an interesting tension.
We need enough security to feel safe enough to be vulnerable, but enough separateness to experience one another as distinct and alive.
Couples therapy can offer a space to explore that tension without assuming that there is something wrong with either person.
When trust has been broken
An affair or betrayal can destabilise a relationship at its foundations.
There may be shock, anger, grief, fear, shame and profound uncertainty about what happens next.
I don't approach infidelity through a simplistic division between a wholly innocent victim and a wholly defined perpetrator.
Understanding the relational context does not remove responsibility for choices that caused harm. It can, however, allow us to explore what happened without reducing either person to a single role.
For some couples, therapy becomes a place to determine whether the relationship can continue.
For others, it becomes a place to understand what happened and what would need to change for the relationship to become viable again.
Where a couple chooses to remain together, we can explore accountability, honesty, trust, intimacy and the possibility of creating something different from what existed before.
Start a fresh dialogue
If you are thinking of beginning couples counselling, just want more information, or would like to book a free introductory call, just fill out this form and I’ll be in touch within a day or two. Alternatively, pop me a message on business whats app -
07834726457