Couples Therapy

Couple Therapy and Marriage Counselling

I offer private sessions for couples who wish to explore their relationship more deeply. These can be 50 or 80 minutes in length, depending on what feels most helpful.

For couples facing more intense or urgent difficulties, I also offer Intensive Therapy, where we meet over two full days. This extended time together allows us to focus closely on your relationship dynamics and to begin shifting the patterns that keep you stuck.

In addition, I run Couples Workshops (see Workshops section), which offer a concentrated introduction to some of the key ideas and practices that support healthy, conscious relationships. These weekends provide a foundation for further work and can be followed by private sessions to support integration and growth.

Couples therapy has ripple effects on other relationships. When you and your partner create a more intentional, emotionally mature way of relating, this inevitably touches your children, families, and communities. For those with children, the quality of the space between you as a couple forms the playground in which they learn what it means to be in relationship.

As Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us: “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

In my work with couples, I draw on:

• Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: exploring unconscious processes, transference, and the deeper meanings of relational patterns.

• Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT): an attachment-based approach, developed by the late Dr Sue Johnson, that helps couples move out of cycles of disconnection and build secure bonds.

• Imago and Encounter-Centred Therapy: relational frameworks that help partners listen to one another with greater openness and empathy.

Together, these approaches allow me to work with both the immediacy of emotions and the underlying histories that shape them, creating the possibility of new ways of being together.

What is Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy?

Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy (PCP) is a specialist form of therapy that helps couples explore the deeper, often unconscious, patterns that shape their relationship. Unlike approaches that focus mainly on communication skills or behaviour, psychoanalytic couple therapy pays close attention to the underlying feelings, fears, and defences that play out between partners — often without either being fully aware of them.

At the heart of this approach is the idea that each partner brings into the couple relationship their earliest experiences of love, care, loss, and conflict. These shape expectations of intimacy, safety, and closeness, and influence how partners respond to one another in moments of tension. Old hurts can be re-enacted in the present relationship, leading to repeated cycles of misunderstanding, withdrawal, or conflict.

Mary Morgan (2019, A Couple State of Mind)

“The couple relationship is a third psychic space. It is not simply the sum of two individuals, but an emotional field with its own dynamics, anxieties and potential for growth.”

Psychoanalytic couple therapy offers a safe and thoughtful space to bring these unconscious dynamics into awareness. By noticing what happens between partners — and also what gets enacted with the therapist — new insight is gained into the couple’s shared emotional life. With time, the couple can develop a deeper understanding of each other, greater emotional intimacy, and a more resilient bond.

How does Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy work?

In psychoanalytic couple therapy, the focus is less on “quick fixes” and more on understanding and working through the couple’s emotional world. This can involve:

• Exploring unconscious processes such as projection, transference, and identification that may drive conflict without awareness.

• Understanding the couple’s “fit” — how each partner’s internal world meets the other’s, and how this contributes to both attraction and difficulty.

• Paying attention to the space between partners, where shared anxieties, longings, and unspoken expectations are played out.

• Working with the therapeutic relationship itself, as a place where patterns of closeness and distance may be re-enacted and understood.

• Allowing time for deeper meanings to emerge, rather than pushing for quick solutions, so that lasting change becomes possible.

Andrew Balfour (2006, Couple Work and the Expansion of the Therapeutic Frame)

“Couple psychotherapy offers a unique opportunity to see enacted, in real time, the unconscious patterns of attachment and defence that partners bring to their relationship.”

This process helps couples recognise not just what they fight about, but why certain issues feel so charged, and what fears or vulnerabilities may lie beneath. Over time, this awareness opens up new possibilities for relating with greater openness, trust, and compassion.

Why choose Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy?

• It is particularly helpful for couples whose difficulties feel repetitive, deep-seated, or resistant to other approaches.

• It provides a space where both the individual and the couple relationship are taken seriously.

• It attends to the emotional and unconscious layers of relating, which often hold the key to transformation.

• The focus is not only on solving present conflicts but on fostering a more authentic and emotionally secure connection for the future.

Stanley Ruszczynski (1993, Psychotherapy with Couples)

“In every couple relationship there is a meeting of two internal worlds. The task of psychoanalytic couple therapy is to explore how each partner’s internal object world shapes the relationship between them. It is within this shared space that conflicts, anxieties, and longings are played out — and where the possibility for new understanding and transformation emerges.”

what is Emotionally-Focused Couples Therapy (EFT)? (not to be confused with another therapy model: EFT – Emotional Freedom Techniques)

Research shows that EFT therapy has a 75% success rate with couples with 86% of couples reporting feeling happier in their relationships. Of importance is that the effects of relationship therapy are long-lasting.

To quote the late Dr Sue Johnson: “EFT is based on 50 years of research into human bonding and 30 years of research from our lab into helping couples connect and thrive. We really don’t have to simply fall in and out of love anymore. We now have a map to the territory called love and we can empower couples by showing them new systematic ways to take control of dances of disconnection and conflict and, even more important, help each other move into the open close embrace that is a secure loving bond.”

Emotionally focused couples therapy, developed by Canadian psychologist, Dr Sue Johnson, is based on 30 years of research conducted on adult love and the process of bonding in couples. EFT Relationship Therapy is based on attachment theory, which states that we need to feel safe in our connections with others and that we are made healthier by emotional contact. EFT has identified differences in how couples relate to each other and how these differences are critical to whether a relationship is successful or has difficulties. This couples counselling approach offers relationship advise that helps couples understand their own emotional responses as well as those of significant people in their lives. The aim of EFT is to iIncrease security, closeness, and connection in couples.

Difficulties develop when couples are unable or do not know how to meet each other’s emotional needs. Conflict follows and the couple get stuck in negative patterns of interaction without knowing how to resolve and repair their relationship.

In EFT couples therapy, the couple begins to understand their own and their partner’s emotional needs and learn to communicate and meet those needs more effectively. They begin to step back from and understand their negative cycle and what factors trigger it, without getting drawn into it repeatedly. Once couples have this understanding, they are able to develop more compassion for their partner. Partners learn how to relate to each other in a more loving and responsive way and are more emotionally connected.

How does EFT couples therapy work?

There are nine stages in the process of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. Each stage involves many layers of deep emotional work:

In Steps 1-4, the focus is on understanding how you interact as a couple and on reducing the level of conflict or distance between you. In this phase of the couples counselling, you begin to understand the attachment distress in your relationship and will learn how to move beyond it to repair the disconnection between you.

In Steps 5-7, you begin to relate with each other in a deeper, more vulnerable way and begin to understand the underlying fears and needs in yourself and your partner. You will also see how your protective coping and defensiveness sabotages your connection.

In Steps 7-9, you begin to consolidate the changes you have made as they become a part of your relationship. You will recognise when you are caught in a negative pattern and will repair more naturally when there is a disconnect between you and your partner. EFT couples therapy is complete when you feel comfortable that you can keep your bond secure and healthy. This can be achieved in 8-20 sessions depending on the couple.

QUOTES by Dr Sue Johnson in
Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships:-

• “The first and foremost instinct of humans is neither sex nor aggression. It is to seek contact and comforting connection.”
• “Distressed partners no longer see each other as their emotional safe haven. Our lover is supposed to be the one person we can count on who will always respond. Instead, unhappy partners feel emotionally deprived, rejected, even abandoned. In that light, couples’ conflicts assume their true meaning: they are frightened protests against eroding connection and a demand for emotional reengagement.”
• “Being the “best you can be” is really only possible when you are deeply connected to another. Splendid isolation is for planets, not people.”
• “The greatest gift a parent has to give a child—and a lover has to give a lover—is emotionally attuned attention and timely responsiveness.”

What is Imago Couples Therapy?

Imago Relationship Therapy (IRT) is a form of relationship therapy developed by Harville Hendrix, PhD, and Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD.  Imago theory rests on the idea that relationship conflict is due to unconscious unmet needs from childhood. Healing from childhood wounding needs to occur in the context of a relationship. In the Imago couples counselling approach, I help couples to uncover the core unconscious motivations they bring to their relationship for resolution. When these hidden hopes, fears and longings are no longer hidden and are communicated in the safety provided in couples’ therapy, partners begin to see each other differently, have greater compassion for each other and begin to take steps to create a new experience of relationship.  Beyond these motivations, is a deeper core problem, called the relationship impasse, which is at the root of the couples’ greatest difficulty. In the course of marriage counseling and couples therapy, this core difficulty dissolves. Through understanding how their childhood affects their relationship, couples then are more able to move beyond their childhood hurts and frustrations which are affecting their relationship and begin to create a healing and conscious bond with each other. They are better able to meet each other’s true needs and experience a healthier and more deeply connected relationship.

How does Imago Relationship Therapy work?

In most troubled relationships, problems tend to become more serious because one or both partners have run out of skills to re-connect with each other.  In Imago Relationship Therapy, the couple are taught skills that are part of a larger step-by-step process that transforms the relationship and results in the individual healing of both partners. Imago Relationship Therapy provides a safe container for change to occur and replaces the behaviours that were not working in the couple’s relationship with new relationship skills that have been proven to help partners transform even the most seemingly “hopeless” situations. The couple learn to become therapeutic with each other, and the therapist becomes less and less needed over time.

Through learning the Imago dialogue, both partners will experience speaking and listening in such a way that validation and empathy occurs.  While lowering one’s emotional defenses can result in repeated suffering in other contexts, it can also lead to the development of a deeply intimate connection in therapy. The Imago dialogue allows each partner to lower their defences and to communicate deeply and with empathy until the process becomes habitual and feels natural.

Conflict, arising from an underlying emotional discontent in the relationship, is expressed outwardly through criticism, anger, dissatisfaction or withdrawal from the relationship. Imago relationship therapy helps a couple explore the root of the emotional hurt or need that underlies this expression of discontent. Both partners, through the experience of Imago couples counselling, will learn to understand the wounded child in themselves and their partner, to communicate disappointments and frustrations in more effective ways, to resolve feelings of extreme anger, to re-romanticise their relationship and to re-vision their relationship so that it becomes a source of safety, healing and contentment for both partners.

• You want different things out of your relationship
• Your partner wants you both to go for couples therapy
• You have the same repetitive arguments or recurring relationship problems
• Your relationship is physically or emotionally abusive 
• You are living parallel lives or are just coping
• You are not talking to each other or are afraid to talk.
• You feel everything would be OK if only your partner would change
• There has been a noticeable shift in your sex life
• You see your partner as your adversary
• You are keeping secrets.
• You are thinking about (or are having) an affair
• You are financially unfaithful
• You feel like you are speaking different languages
• You pretend everything is fine but feel disconnected
• You are contemplating divorce or separation
• You are experiencing a major life transition which is impacting on your relationship
• You want a healthy, more intimate relationship
• You want to improve the intimacy in an already healthy relationship