Couples / relationships 

I work with couples seeking to improve their relationship.  You may have hit a crisis and are questioning your partnership, want to address unhealthy patterns that keep surfacing between you, or want to bring richer communication and intimacy into your connection. A particular event or life change may have brought challenge into your world that is impacting how you are together.

As well as working with couples, I also work with relationship difficulties between siblings, friends, work colleagues and between parents and adult children.

My approach to relationship work is framed within the Imago model created by Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt, and underpinned by David Schnarch's concept of 'differentiation' (deepening connection through emotional disentanglement).

Couples / relationship sessions are £85 and are an hour in length.

What to expect

Every relationship is different and your journey will be your own, however sessions often involve:

  • making space to talk through issues that may have become too difficult to raise together (eg parenting, money, illness, life transitions, extended families, betrayals and sex) with a witness who can intervene and keep conversation manageable and contained,

  • learning good communication skills and effective approaches for negotiating conflict and difference,

  • becoming more confident at listening to each other’s feelings and needs without feeling overwhelmed, reactive or overly responsible,

  • understanding how each person’s patterns of reactivity and defensiveness will have formed in early life, in order to be able to respond more supportively to each other’s stress and distress,

  • understanding common difficulties in relationships and learning how to embrace the challenges and growth that relationships bring,

  • working out what is needed to recover from events that have knocked trust out of the relationship, such as affairs and other betrayals,

  • forming new healthy patterns of communication, mutual generosity, respect, support, desire and connection,

  • finding the freedom to have separate identities while feeling understood and connected,

  • and sometimes, where it becomes clear that this is the right way forward, working out how to form a supportive and amicable separation.

    Interested? If you’d like more information I offer a free 20 minute conversation to talk through what you’re looking for and how I work.