Great Couples Counselling in Cumberland, BC. Therapy to heal relationships.

Couples counselling tends to focus on relationship issues between the couple. Types of issues range from enhancing relationships, seeking deeper connection, improving communications, preparing for marriage or living together, areas of disagreement, values, expectations, infidelity, pregnancy issues, family related issues, and joint decision making. My person-centered approach and solution focused therapy tends to be effective for most couples. The benefits to the couple can be wide ranging and include enhanced communications, greater intimacy and higher relationship satisfaction.

Loving, successful relationships need to be carefully and skillfully nurtured in the following five areas: Emotional, Intellectual, Spiritual, Sexual, Financial. Couples who are ready to do ongoing work on their relationships are richly rewarded with a loving, meaningful and joyful life together. Committed relationships that have the possibility of morphing into long term relationships benefit greatly by being guided by the Gottman research on relationships as well as Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). Premarital Counselling prepares a couple for a new stage in their relationship by identifying potential areas of conflict and strength and developing tools to create a strong foundation.

If you're looking to improve your relationship, we'd work together to create a supportive environment for discussion, allowing each of you to share your perspective and experience. With important conversations and empathetic questions, there's opportunity to truly see each other and to collaborate to resolve the issues rather than engaging in blame. Together, we'd uncover experiences that promote mutual understanding, empathy and appreciation. Through this process you'll gain insights, develop new ways of communicating, strengthen your connection and establish a more fulfilling and harmonious relationship.

Over time relationships can break down. Stressors enter our lives is communication becomes difficult. Loving couples get into a "blame game" of criticism, contempt and disdain; Respect goes out the window and in the end, the relationship "killer", resentment and all that it brings. If resentment begins to creep into your relationship, seek help. An experienced and trained counsellor can help guide you around the resentment "minefield", move communication to a healthy and more empathic place so that resentment turns into resolution.

The first step with my approach to couples therapy is for us to establish rapport as you inform me of the problem that has brought you to therapy. I use a Choice Theory approach which includes defining more closely what each of you want for yourselves as individuals and the relationship as a whole. From there, we get to work on rebuilding trust in the relationship by enhancing communication skills so each of you feel listened to, heard, and respected. Then we can build on trust to establish the changes needed to restore the happiness that brought you together in the first place.

Are you and your partner stuck in unsolvable arguments? Does one of you tend to ‘demand’ more while the other shuts down and withdraws? Are you feeling less connected and actually adding stress to each other’s lives instead of reducing it? While frustrating, these are perfectly normal patterns of partnership and there is hope. I would be glad to help you untangle the knots, learning to team up together instead of entering battles over who is right. In doing so, we will unpack past traumas and patterns of behaviour, learning to better communicate and to be safely vulnerable in a way that stands your relationship on solid ground.

We are proud to offer couples/relationship counselling as we all know that relationships can be both incredibly rewarding and tremendously difficult all at the same time. We believe that trust and safety create a solid foundation from which a relationship can grow. Through both the Gottman method and Emotionally-Focused Couples Therapy we are confident that we can support the growth of healthy, secure attachments characterized by healthy attunement and respect.