Couple’s Counselling
In couple’s counselling, partners improve communication, decrease conflict, and repair past hurts or betrayals by learning how to …be more connected and responsive to each other without compromising themselves or their values.
About Couples Counselling
There are many reasons that couples seek help for their relationship. As a trained and credentialed couples counsellor, Sara sees couples who struggle with:
- communication difficulties
- repetitive conflict and fights that rarely resolve
- disrespect, criticism, and defensiveness
- loneliness that comes when there is distance between their partner and themselves
- diminished intimacy
- betrayal
- infidelity
- parenting differences
- addictions or other ineffective habits that worry you and your partner
Sara’s hope is that each couple walks away with the relationship of their dreams, with connection and passion and the sense that as a team, their partner has truly “got their back”. Research tells us that emotionally fulfilling relationship are a core human need and a key to mental and physical health.
In Sara’s experience, individuals typically don’t enter a relationship with the intention to hurt one another or to create difficulties for themselves or partners. For better or for worse, we enter relationships with habits and thought patterns developed from our past relationships and experiences. These can be positive such as loving, kind or caring gestures OR patterns that create disconnection (poor communication strategies, reactivity, distancing, criticisms, or defensiveness).
Regardless, most clients enter therapy already hard at work, doing the best they can to get what they yearn for.
What to Expect
Couples sessions are structured to allow partners to learn how their exchanges and messages to each other are creating discord. They are introduced to a relationship map that helps them quickly understand how they are being experienced by their partner and what changes will be required to create healthier patterns. By working this way, couples can quickly replace ineffective, conflictual and circular discussions with healthy and loving conversations.
Further sessions help clients replace negative behaviours with healthy and loving ones and enhance intimacy and connection. Clients, also, come to understand how their early relationships and experiences have created a template for their intimate relationships.
Couples learn the brain science behind their responses — for example, how reactive physiological response can sabotage relationships.
In counselling sessions, couples address head-on the (very) points of disagreement that cause them distress at home. The difference is that Sara manages the session by interrupting unhealthy interactions, stopping the descent into the unsuccessful-but-familiar patterns of engagement. As couples practice different ways of interacting with each other that look and feel very different from before, the therapy room becomes a haven of safety and security. Over time, couples learn to emulate that experience at home.
Couples start to tolerate and appreciate each other’s differences. They grow to listen to each other’s views with kindness and curiosity and as they understand that conflict between them is “growth trying to happen”. In the difference of their partner, they discover a world of possibilities and the belief that each can not only live with these differences but appreciate and value them.