Couples & family therapy

Most couples don't come to therapy because they have stopped caring about each other. They come because they have become caught in patterns they no longer know how to change.

You may keep having the same argument, only about different things. One of you may pursue while the other withdraws. You may feel lonely despite living alongside each other, or find that affection, sex and intimacy have gradually disappeared.

Perhaps trust has been damaged by an affair, secrecy or something that has happened between you. Or perhaps nothing dramatic has happened at all - you simply don't feel as close as you once did.

Couples therapy gives you somewhere to understand what is happening between you, rather than simply deciding who is to blame.

Couples often come to us because of:

Communication difficulties • recurring arguments • loss of intimacy • sexual difficulties • affairs and breaches of trust • emotional distance • jealousy • parenting disagreements • major life changes • separation or divorce • feeling unheard or misunderstood • uncertainty about whether to stay together

You do not need to wait until your relationship is at breaking point.

Often the earlier a couple begins to understand the patterns developing between them, the easier those patterns are to change.

Why do we keep having the same argument?

Most recurring relationship conflicts are about more than the thing you appear to be arguing about.

An argument about household responsibilities may also be about feeling unappreciated.

An argument about sex may contain fears about rejection, desirability or closeness.

Silence may look like indifference to one partner while, for the other, it is an attempt to prevent the situation becoming even worse.

Over time, couples can become trapped in a cycle where each person's attempt to protect themselves accidentally triggers the very reaction they fear from the other.

One becomes more demanding because they feel ignored.

The other withdraws because they feel criticised.

The withdrawal makes the first partner feel even less important, so they pursue harder.

Before long, both people are responding to the pattern rather than to each other.

Couples therapy helps us slow this process down and understand what is happening underneath it.

Does couples therapy actually work?

There is good evidence that couples therapy can make a meaningful difference.

A large meta-analysis of 58 studies involving more than 2,000 couples found substantial improvements in relationship satisfaction following couples therapy. Researchers also found improvements in communication, emotional intimacy and the ways partners behaved towards one another, with benefits generally continuing after therapy had ended.

Research suggests that couples may come away from therapy with more than better communication. People describe understanding their relationship differently, recognising their own part in recurring patterns, managing conflict more effectively and finding new ways of connecting with their partner.

Therapy cannot guarantee that a relationship will stay together - and that is not always the right outcome.

Sometimes successful couples therapy means rebuilding a relationship.

Sometimes it means deciding, with greater clarity and less hostility, that a relationship needs to end.

The aim is to help you understand what is happening between you so that your decisions are no longer being driven solely by hurt, fear, resentment or the same repetitive cycle.

What happens in couples therapy?

The therapy room is not a courtroom.

My role is not to decide which of you is right, identify the “difficult” partner or persuade either person to stay in the relationship.

Instead, we look together at the relationship itself.

We explore what happens between you when things go wrong: what each of you feels, what you do to protect yourself, how your partner responds and how that response affects you in return.

We will work with the difficulties happening now while also being curious about what each of you brings into the relationship.

The ways we learn to deal with closeness, disagreement, vulnerability, anger and rejection do not begin with our current partner. They are shaped by previous relationships, our families and our earlier experiences of being cared for, heard and understood.

Sometimes the reaction that feels completely unreasonable to your partner begins to make much more sense once its history is understood.

Understanding this does not remove responsibility for how we behave.

It gives us more choice about what we do next.

Rebuilding communication and connection

Good communication is not simply learning to phrase an argument more politely.

It involves being able to say what is actually happening underneath the anger, defensiveness or silence - and being able to hear something difficult from your partner without immediately needing to attack, withdraw or defend yourself.

Therapy can help you learn to:

recognise the cycle you repeatedly fall into • communicate needs more directly • listen without immediately becoming defensive • understand the emotions beneath conflict • repair after arguments • rebuild emotional and physical intimacy • restore trust after hurt or betrayal • understand each other's perspective without abandoning your own

The goal is not a relationship in which you never disagree.

It is a relationship in which disagreement does not repeatedly destroy your sense of being on the same side.

When trust has been broken

Affairs, secrecy, lying or other breaches of trust can fundamentally change how safe a relationship feels.

The injured partner may find themselves repeatedly returning to what happened, searching for reassurance or struggling to believe anything has really changed. The other partner may feel ashamed, defensive or frustrated that the relationship cannot simply move forward.

There is rarely a useful shortcut through this.

Couples therapy provides a structured space to understand what happened, address its impact, work through difficult emotions and consider whether trust can gradually be rebuilt.

This does not mean forgetting what happened.

It means discovering whether something different can be built afterwards.

What if we don't know whether we want to stay together?

You do not have to arrive at couples therapy already knowing the answer.

Sometimes one partner desperately wants to repair the relationship while the other is uncertain. Sometimes both people are exhausted and no longer know whether what they have can be recovered.

Therapy can provide somewhere to think about those questions without forcing an immediate decision.

The purpose is not to keep every couple together.

It is to help you understand your relationship clearly enough to make decisions about it consciously.

Family therapy

Difficult patterns do not only develop between couples.

Families can also become caught in cycles of misunderstanding, conflict, distance or worry -  particularly during periods of change, loss, separation, illness or difficulties involving a child or young person.

Family therapy provides a space in which different perspectives can be heard without reducing the difficulty to one person being “the problem”.

Together, we can begin to understand the patterns operating within the family and find different ways of communicating, responding and relating to one another.

You don't have to solve this between you before coming to therapy

Many couples delay seeking help because they think they should be able to work things out themselves. But when you are both inside the same pattern, it can be extraordinarily difficult to see it clearly.

You do not need to know exactly what has gone wrong.

You do not need to agree about whose fault it is.

And you do not need to know whether your relationship can be repaired.

That is what we can begin exploring together.