Support for Couples
Relationships go through phases. As we change and evolve, what once worked stops working, and what's needed isn't more effort, but a different kind of attention. Couples therapy creates a supported space to understand what is happening between you, to begin to hear each other differently, and to make more intentional choices about how you want to be together. Couples may want support with:
Recurring conflict and disconnection
Imbalance in the domestic and mental load
Communication that has broken down
Grief, loss, or major life transitions
Trust, infidelity, or betrayalIntimacy and sexual difficulties
Parenting conflict or blended family stress
One or both partners navigating trauma
Feeling more like housemates than partnersConsidering separation or wanting a fresh start
How I work
ASSESSMENT
The assessment is a structured process that takes place across three sessions. This three-part approach allows for a fuller picture - of you as a couple, and of each of you as individuals - before any shared goals or treatment plan are agreed.
The first session brings you together to explore the history of your relationship, what has shifted, and what you each hope for. The individual sessions give each partner space to speak freely about their own experience, history, and needs, without the relational dynamic present. All three sessions inform the feedback and recommendations that follow.
THERAPY SESSIONS
Following assessment, we will discuss findings together and agree a plan for ongoing work. Sessions typically focus on both the dynamic between you and the individual experiences each partner brings to it. The following therapeutic approaches inform the work:
Relational Life Therapy (RLT)
Developed by Terry Real, RLT is a direct, no-nonsense approach that gets beneath defensive patterns to the underlying relational dynamics. It addresses grandiosity, shame, and the impact of patriarchal conditioning on how we show up in intimate relationships, for all genders.
The Gottman Method
Drawing on decades of research into couples, Gottman-informed work builds friendship, shared meaning, and conflict skills. It helps partners understand their patterns, interrupt cycles of escalation and withdrawal, and develop more effective ways of turning toward each other.
DBT-informed skills
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy offers practical tools for managing emotional intensity: a common feature in relational distress. DBT-informed skills teaching supports both partners in developing greater tolerance of distress, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness, and how to track how conflict develops and can be de-escalated.
The Fair Play Method
Developed by Eve Rodsky, Fair Play offers a practical framework for rebalancing the invisible labour that sustains a household and family life. Where domestic inequity is a source of resentment or disconnection, this method brings structure and visibility to the mental load, making implicit expectations explicit and opening up a more equitable negotiation between partners.
All couples work is held within a feminist and intersectional frame, attending to the structural forces: gender, power, culture, class, that shape the private world of a relationship.
ENDING THERAPY
Endings are given the same care as beginnings. As therapy draws to a close, sessions will focus on consolidating what has changed, identifying early warning signs, and thinking together about how to sustain the work beyond the room. Short-term follow-up sessions are available to people I have worked with previously.