Couple Therapy
We all want to be loved and cherished and naturally seek close, attachment bonds with one another. However relationships can be difficult, confusing and complicated and can cause enormous emotional pain. Relationship counselling offers the opportunity to explore these difficulties in a safe and supportive setting. It ensures each person's perspective is heard and facilitates exploration and understanding of current difficulties as well as considering the context and history of where they may have originated.
Couple sessions tend to be more structured than individual therapy sessions and aim to:
- Improve communication, empathy and mutual listening skills
- Enhance and deepen understanding of current relating difficulties in the context of each person's individual history
- Develop strategies to manage conflict better
- Re-emphasise the importance of enjoyment and pleasure time within your relationship
- Strengthen and improve overall intimacy
Both partners need to feel equally willing to try couple therapy even if just for an initial session.
I generally see couples on a weekly basis though this may vary according to each individual case.
First sessions last for 1 1/2 hours and subsequent sessions 1 1/4 hours.
I also see people together, usually pairs, who decide it would be helpful to have a safe space to talk about troubling issues that have arisen in their relationship with each other either currently or in the past. These parings can be siblings, members of the same family, parents and their adult children or close friends.
My theoretical approach to working with couples is systemic along with an underpinning of attachment theory and an integrative approach.
Sessions involve both exploration and clarification work alongside structured exercises and homework tasks as appropriate. I also include psycho-education and suggested reading to help people understand more clearly what may be happening between them.
Equally, couples may wish and decide that the best way forward for them is to separate in which case couple therapy offers a safe, supportive setting to go through this process and manage it in as constructive and therapeutic a way as is possible.
Click here for COUPLE TESTIMONIALS
Click here for INFO. ON SESSIONS AND FEES
SEE ARTICLE: Principles of Good Relationships at www.counselling-directory.org.uk/memberarticles/principles-of-good-relationships
