Help for Couples
Imagine feeling like an inspired participant in your relationship again.
Your feelings of hopelessness, isolation and anxiety have become an ever-fading memory.
Being stuck in destructive and repetitive patterns can be exhausting. Once your defences are firmly in place, everything you try seems to get you nowhere. All your energy is going into self- protection.
Sleepless nights, anxiety, fear of the future, despair, feeling powerless, or worse still paralyzed, all take a huge toll on you.
Your hopes and expectations are unmet and what’s more, you’ve lost sight of them altogether.  It’s as if all you can see is what is wrong, or what is lacking, in each other. All you can think of is how much you wish the other would change.
It may be as a result of:
- A sudden traumatic event
- One, or both of you, have had an affair
- Different levels of sexual desire
- No sexual intimacy at all
- Increasingly destructive conflict patterns
- Loss of trust
- A slow, insidious disconnection
- You’ve no idea how to talk to each other anymore
- You don’t like the people you’ve become
The effects of an increasingly distressing relationship can be felt all day, every day. It drains you, worries you, consumes you even. It robs you of your safe haven – the place you want to enjoy returning home to.
Perhaps your situation is not as dramatic as I’ve described above.
Maybe you’ve just fallen into rather a dull routine and you’re longing for more fun, more creativity, more intimacy and better still, more freedom.
You’re older, settled, perhaps a little bit too sensible and comfortable these days. The voices in your heads say, ‘What can you expect after all these years?’
You’re hoping this isn’t all there is to life and love.
I understand both distress and boredom. The aching desire for an end to the negativity and the longing for more, more and yet more.
How can you press the stop button on your seemingly hopeless negative dynamic?
How can you press the start button for something new?
This is how I can help you do both
My interest is in the space between you. We’ll look at the reasons for your disconnection and how the cycle of disappointment, hurting and being hurt is being maintained.
We’ll find out how you can turn the differences you once loved into a gift again.
Rather than looking for blame, we’ll seek your ownership to allow for new choices. It might sound daunting but it’s the beginning of positive participation in your relationship again.
Finding a good balance between autonomy and connection is key to a healthy relationship. So, it’s important for me to help you define yourselves to one another. Most of us don’t tell big lies but many of us don’t always dare to tell the truth either.
It can feel very risky so, I’ll help you learn how to hold yourselves steady in the discomfort. Trusting each other and knowing how to keep yourself safe are essential to rebuilding and maintaining your connection as well as restoring intimacy.
Some of the things we’ll look at together:
- Your vision for your relationship
- Honest self-reflection
- Your personal developmental goals
- Honest and collaborative communication
- Better understanding of each other’s desires and preferences
- Improved sexual intimacy
For many of us, sexual intimacy is a vital and deeply connecting aspect of our intimate relationship.
Being able to talk freely about it is an essential part of couples counselling – if you want it to be.
Sexual intimacy is loaded with meaning, emotion and often shame too.
That’s why it can feel too hard and too risky to talk about it.
- You might be bored and don’t want the sex you’re having anymore
- You may struggle with different expectations and different levels of desire – or no desire at all
- You may be trapped in someone else’s beliefs handed down to you
- Shame or stress may have shut you down
You might be an older couple, struggling with physical changes, and maybe pain too. Adapting to those physical changes is an essential part of our developing sexual journey. There doesn’t have to be an end to the journey. It can be creative and fun for as long as you want.
I’m particularly interested in relational sexuality, in exploring together gently and kindly. As I’ve said before, I like to think in terms of what’s missing rather than what’s wrong. I’ll help you explore the desires and feelings that your mind may have robbed you of.  I’ll help you find ways of feeling safe enough to be free.
With a sex positive attitude, I’ll help you find your no and your yes. We’ll talk together with care and kindness, and above all, curiosity.
So, working with me means
I’ll hold the hope for you until you catch it and make it your own.
Better still will be the energy and lightness you’ll feel when you experience yourselves as the active, positive participants in your relationship.
You’ll create the blueprint for your relationship – and it’ll be fresh and your very own.
You’ll prove that ‘Where’s there’s a will there’s a way,’ turns out to be true. I’ve seen it happen with countless couples I’ve had the privilege of working with.
And I’m a fellow traveller, still on the road with my partner after more than four decades.
My fee for couples is £90 per hour.