Relationships don’t come with a blueprint. Despite what we’re often told, there isn’t one right way to have a happy, healthy relationship. Everyone creates something unique together, shaped by their personalities, experiences, values and hopes for the future. That’s why I don’t come into relationship therapy with an idea of what your relationship should look like. I’m much more interested in understanding what matters to you.
Whether you’re married, dating, living apart together, in a consensually non-monogamous relationship, questioning whether to stay together, or simply feeling stuck, my role isn’t to take sides or decide who’s right. It’s to help you understand one another more deeply.
It’s rarely about who’s right. When couples first come to therapy, they often arrive carrying the same argument they’ve been having for months, or sometimes years. On the surface, it might be about the washing up, money, sex, parenting or whose turn it is to organise the holiday. But underneath, it’s often about something much more human. Not feeling heard, feeling criticized, feeling lonely, wanting reassurance, wanting to matter, or feeling frightened of losing one another.
My job isn’t to decide who’s right. It’s to slow things down enough that you can both begin to hear what sits underneath the conflict. We’ll be curious together. One of the things I value most in therapy is curiosity; Rather than asking, ‘Who’s to blame?’, I’m much more likely to ask ‘What happens for each of you in that moment?’, ‘What does that argument mean to you?’, ‘What are you both trying to protect?’ or ‘Where did you learn this way of responding to each other?’
Often, when we understand what’s underneath a pattern, new ways of relating begin to emerge naturally. Every relationship is different. I work with couples and partners in monogamous and consensually non-monogamous relationships. I work affirmatively with LGBTQIA+ relationships. I don’t believe there’s one model of a successful relationship. The question I’m interested in isn’t whether your relationship fits somebody else’s expectations. It’s whether it feels like the relationship you want to build.
What I hope relationship therapy offers is a place where you can slow down, hear one another differently, speak more honestly, become curious instead of defensive, understand not only your partner/s, but yourselves. Sometimes that leads to rebuilding a relationship, sometimes it helps people separate with greater understanding and compassion, sometimes it simply helps people stop having the same painful conversation over and over again.
Whatever brings you here, we’ll work together to understand what’s happening between you, without judgement and without assumptions about what the outcome should be. Because this isn’t my relationship, it’s yours.
