Couples Therapy and Marriage Counselling

Helping couples improve communication and move beyond unhealthy conflict

Your conversations are stuck, tensions are building, and closeness is being eroded. You feel frustrated, unheard, and confused. This tension might flare up quickly and erupt into arguments, or simmer away in extended punishing silences.

You long to reconnect with what brought you together in the first place, and to build something even more meaningful.

Frequent Reasons to Start Couples Counselling

Healthy relationships evolve through natural stages, and couples often get stuck navigating the transition from one stage to the next. This often shows up as:

  • Communication breakdown

  • Frequent and repeated arguments

  • Intimacy issues

  • Distance and isolation

  • Betrayal and infidelity

  • Conflict over finances

One partner might want things to stay as they were, the other may long for something different, but struggle to put these feelings into words, without the other feeling rejected or criticised.

Couples therapy can help you take a step back, identify the patterns, understand the emotional triggers driving them, the significance to each partner, and why a seemingly insignificant issue for one person can be overwhelming for another.

What Couples Counselling Can Offer Your Relationship

Couples therapy is a place to pause and make sense of what is happening between you. Whether you are navigating issues around sex, intimacy, communication, trust, conflict, jealousy, open relationships, or simply a sense of growing apart, therapy helps to uncover what is really going on underneath those struggles.

Our work will look at the deeper emotional patterns and protective strategies that may be keeping you disconnected. We will explore how you communicate, how you respond when you are hurting, and what you each need to feel emotionally safe and understood, as well as exploring some of the needs you may not be able to put words yet.

How I Work with Couples: Creating Connection and Breaking the Old Patterns

My approach to couples therapy and marriage counselling is informed by the Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy model of interlocking Life Scripts: we identify how each person’s early patterns of feeling, thinking, and relating forms a Life Script which can “interlock” with that of their partner, creating a negative feedback loop.

Once identified, we can interrupt this “loop” to create connection rather than distance, and build on what brought you together in the first place. I also use the Bader-Pearson Developmental Model of Couplehood, which assesses relationships in terms of the development stages, providing options for supporting couples when they get stuck transitioning from one stage to the next.

Couples Counselling: A Space to Reconnect and Build Resilience

Couples and Marriage Counselling is a space to reconnect with what first brought you together, and begin to build a relationship that feels stronger, more resilient, and more aligned with who you both are now. Whether you are in crisis, feeling stuck, or wanting to deepen your connection, the work is about identifying your strengths and the unique qualities you bring to the relationship, to support you in creating a bond that is both resilient, meaningful, and mutually supportive.