Couples Therapy
I provide relationship therapy through scheduled video appointments with couples anywhere in Australia (except the Blue Mountains region of NSW). My approach is informed by training in evidence-supported approaches to couples therapy, including Level 3 Training in Gottman Method Couples Therapy and an Externship in Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples. In addition, I draw on my broader experience as a clinical psychologist to understand each partner's experience, strengths, difficulties, and values. I often use tools from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Solutions-Focused Brief Therapy to help partners filter out the noise of unhelpful narratives and align with a shared understanding of 'what really matters to you, me, and us.'
Every relationship is unique, and each partner's perspective and experience of the relationship is unique also. In our first meeting I talk with both partners together to understand, first of all, what you are struggling with in your relationship and what you are seeking to gain from therapy now. Through this conversation I seek also to discover your similarities and differences, the highs and lows of your shared history, your hopes and fears about your future together, and the situational stresses that most impact your relationship now.
At the end of this first session, I send each of you a link to separately complete a comprehensive, empirically validated online questionnaire (the Gottman Relationship Check-Up). Your questionnaire responses complement and guide my conversations with you, providing a time-efficient summary of your views of the relationship and the many challenges that partners often face, and helping me to identify important issues that you might not know how to raise when you are talking together. After reviewing your responses, I then meet once with each of you individually, so that I can gain some understanding of who you are and how I can best help you. When the three of us meet together again, I summarise my evolving understanding of your different and shared needs, the patterns of interaction that seem to stand in your way, and the directions I think would be most helpful to explore in therapy. Once we agree on which conversations are most needed to move forwards, then we begin. As much as the 'assessment phase' that we have now completed helps me to build the understanding needed to conduct safe and effective therapy with you, I also use these conversations to encourage each of you to reflect on what you most appreciate in your partner, and how you yourself might better show up in your relationship. Thus often by the time that the 'treatment phase' begins, people report that the mood of the relationship has already improved, and much more seems possible again.
During therapy, I aim to facilitate three-way conversations that help both partners move forwards together with insight, connection, and freedom. I spend time before your sessions anticipating which directions might be helpful to meet your goals for therapy. Yet because relationships are dynamic and so much life happens between sessions, I arrive prepared to be surprised. At the beginning of each session we reflect on your progress with therapy goals and set a broad agenda for the hour. I keep this agenda in focus while directing (and at times interrupting) you to guide conversation down more promising and less well-travelled avenues, while steering you away from unhelpful patterns of communication that get in the way of your relationship.
Many of my clients know only too well how they should and would like to respond to their partners, but in the heat of the moment, automatic thoughts trigger emotional reactions and patterns of behaviour that turn each partner against, or away from the other, leaving both feeling alone and powerless to change the story playing out between them. Couples Therapy is your opportunity to slow down and together reach a more empathically balanced understanding of your experiences and needs as partners. Often by revisiting regrettable incidents from your past together, we can heal the relationship and learn to relate with more respect, kindness and self-awareness moving forwards.
Throughout this process, as a psychologist I maintain safe, transparent professional boundaries. I only start therapy with a couple if I have not previously engaged in therapy with either partner before. And after completing the assessment phase, I only see and communicate with you together, as a couple. I am optimistic, challenging, respectful, and pro-relationship -- and I stay in my lane. I don't diagnose individual partners in the context of couples therapy, and as long as no one's safety is endangered) I will not suggest that to you or your partner that you should separate.