Relationship Counselling

The main objective of relationship and couples therapy is to find out more about yourself and your partner, while also understanding the interactions between the two of you. This new knowledge is then used to break old, ineffective patterns and help build and develop healthier interactions.

Some key things to think about before your first session:

• What kind of person do you want to be?
• What kind of life do you want to build with your partner?
• What are your own individual barriers stopping you from building this life?
• What goals do you want to achieve in Relationship or Couples Counselling?

When thinking about the goals of relationship or couples counselling, try and keep the focus on yourself rather than making goals for your partner, for example:

• The focus should be on what you want to change about you rather than your partner
• Focusing on how you can improve your responses to situations
• Letting go of your own assumptions about your partner or a situation

One of the hardest things for individuals is to come to the conclusion that both partners are needing to change and come to a healthy compromise rather than talking about how your partner is the problem and how they need to change to fix the issues presented.

The first session in relationship or couples counselling would be a free 20-minute consultation where we observe your relationship dynamics and we will give you some information on my background and how we work as a counsellor. We will then explore what has brought you to counselling and what you are looking to get out of it. The sessions following this will be to unpack the story at hand on the relationship dynamics and working on the goals that were presented. We may ask for an individual session with each partner at certain points in therapy to get a deeper understanding of the dynamics of the relationship.