Relationships

Couple Therapy

Individual work and your relationship

Being in love, having a soul mate, experiencing romance and marriage is profound and can be the most significant and beautiful thing in life. Love is the basis of family life. If love goes wrong it is painful!

Yet we get little training in making our relationships work. It is a cruel myth that if we meet the right person we will live happily ever after. Nothing is further from the truth. Relationships have bumps, troubles and struggles. Relationships go through stages. We need to consciously attend on our connection. It is an science and an art, there is always more to learn. This is not a bad thing.

Our relationship difficulties are the catalyst for opening up our emotions, healing old patterns and learning new skills. A relationship crisis is an opportunity for creating a new loving place in your life. You will need help, we all do, love is blind in many ways.

 

Couple Therapy.

The best way to attend to a relationship is to do couple therapy together. I do this face-to-face with couples in my rooms.

Couple Therapy Online

The online method usually suits one partner so much better than the other. If you are a couple who email or text each other it is very therapeutic to receive psychotherapy and coaching as you send those emails. If you are a couple who think you could do that and perhaps need to because of circumstance, let me know.

Only one of you needs to aply in the first instance.

Relationship psychotherapy by email works. Get Started and send me an email if you wish to do relationship psychotherapy online using email.

I am an Imago therapist and a psychodramatist and I have integrated these methods and work in a way that will suit you. Here is a simple dialogue structure you can use now. With my wife Kate I conduct weekends for couples.

 

Individual work and your relationship

In my work I honour the committed relationship you are in. Individual work is often best in addition to couple therapy. Even though the work you do is individual, you are not an island and you come with all your connections, present & past. The most significant of these is a committed love relationship. This means that in psychotherapy you can:

• Learn to step into the shoes of the other - how to express deep empathy.

• Understand projection and how to withdraw it!

• Learn effective communication about feeling, express your truth and have it heard.

• Identify the central experience that is painful in the relationship and exploring its roots.

• Learn alternatives to blame, shame and criticism.

• Learn how to validate your partner so they feel understood.

• Avoid compromise that is crippling.

• Learn to better engage a reluctant partner to do relationship psychotherapy.

• Explore and learn how to heal hurts from the past that impact badly on the relationship.

• Learn to receive love, develp romance, have fun.

• Learn how to find a lasting connection, how to approach commitment.

The main thing: Call on your loving selves, deepest truth, truest yearnings and letting that energy come through.

 

Work with me is totally confidential so feel free to write about your exact concerns. However if you are in a relationship that needs attention (or even if it is fine), consider showing this page to your partner. You may decide on some work together, or you may do individual work here, and it is best if that is open and clear between you. I am convinced that good psychotherapy is good for the relationship and a good relationship heals individuals.

 

Please go to this page to take the next step: Getting Started.

 

Relationship Endings

At the point of a relationship ending there is a time of bargaining. Is it over or not? Individual work can help in that time. On the one hand it might be painful but healthy to end it (this is especially true if there is excessive drug use or violence). On the other hand, and this is very common, it might be a relationship that is in need of therapy and attention. Relationships suffer from deferred maintenance.

The old fashioned idea that you need to sort yourself out (or that your partner needs to sort themselves out) before you can have a healthy relationship is wrong, it assumes individuals are islands, not clusters of connections. It is another cruel myth, sadly perpetuated to this day by many well-meaning people.

If the relationship ends then making a good ending is better than a having a bad one and that too means conscious attention. A good ending bodes well for the future.

In your email to me - tell me about your relationship.

 

I am qualified in the Imago method and it deeply influences my Work onlineand off.

 

 

I look forward to hearing from you! please go to Getting Started Online.