Relationships can be difficult to navigate at times and sometimes we can reach a point where our internal resources aren’t sufficient to cope with the challenges that we are facing.

• Are you finding that you are having the same argument over and over or struggling to feel any closeness in the relationship where sex and affection has diminished?
• You may feel that your partner seems unaware or unable to meet your needs, which can lead you to feeling insecure, unloved or ‘not enough’.
• Maybe you try to communicate how you feel but your points get lost in translation, leaving you feeling misunderstood and frustrated.
• Have you gone into a relationship hopeful that it would be more successful than the relationships that you observed growing up and then found that history is repeating itself?
• Has the trust that you had in the relationship diminished due to an affair or do you simply just find it hard to trust your partner because you find being vulnerable difficult?

These are just some of the issues that we can work through together in couples counselling.

APPROACH

At Spring Therapy, I deliver an integrative counselling service where clients can benefit from psychodynamic, solution focused, narrative, person centred and systemic therapies to help address their concerns. To provide clarity on how this looks in practise, I have detailed some helpful insights below.

THE HONEYMOON

Sometimes the traits that we found attractive in each other at the outset can become annoying or hard to tolerate as the years go by. However, understanding those traits and why we were drawn to them in the first place, can often be a good starting point.

YOUR CHILDHOOD

Exploring your childhood relationships with your parents / caregivers and having an insight into the relationship models that you grew up with, and observed, can help us determine the helpful and unhelpful influences on your relationship with your partner today.

When these are identified and understood, couples can start to make choices about which influencing factors and inherited behavioural traits they want to take into their future, and which would be better left in the past.

YOUR COPING MECHANISMS

By looking back, we can also explore the challenges that you both had to face and overcome at a young age and the coping mechanisms that were developed as a result. Sometimes, clients have learnt to cope in different ways and this may be causing conflict within the relationship. However, when we understand their origins and see them more clearly, couples can often find the capacity to be more tolerant of each other. Individually, we can also determine how to dial these coping mechanisms down, when appropriate, to help the relationship grow again.

SPARKLING MOMENTS

Exploring those parts of the relationship that worked well in the past can be just as important as exploring the challenging aspects that led you to seek help from counselling. Taking time to share and focus on your strengths as a unit, no matter how small, provide us with important foundations that already exist within the relationship that we can build on.

For change to happen, we have to start doing something different. Couples counselling at Spring Therapy can be very effective at helping both clients decipher what needs to be different for the relationship to flourish again.

As an experienced relationship counsellor, accredited by Relate and Talk Listen Change, I value the opportunity to support clients on this journey and consider it a privilege to observe the ripple effects that these positive changes can have on clients’ lives and those close to them.