Many of my clients come to me feeling hopeless, lost in their relationships, unable to move forward or reconnect with their partners. Whatever difficulties you are experiencing in your relationship, whether you’re dealing with intimacy issues, recovering from an affair, or feeling stuck and unable to move forward, I am here to support you. Together we will explore and cultivate a more meaningful, loving and understanding relationship with yourselves and others.

Couples and relationship therapy is suitable for any couple, heterosexual, same sex, as well as for families, such as mother and daughter.

My role is to remain neutral and provide the right environment for you both to journey together through these difficult times, to facilitate a deeper understanding of yourselves and to improve interactions within your relationship. My aim is to gently yet effectively help you uncover underlaying factors that influence your connections, such as family background and personal behaviour patterns, unravel and reframe your thoughts and feelings, rebuild your self-esteem and confidence and find a way forward.

You’ll get the best results from your counselling if you’re open and honest and say how you’re really feeling. Our relationship is very important and if we are to work effectively together, you should feel safe and be able to take risks by disclosing and discussing sensitive issues. That includes being able to give me honest feedback on how you feel about your counselling and how we’re working together.

I would describe my working style as being respectful and collaborative.  Whilst I am supportive, empathetic, and compassionate, I can also be very direct, interjecting when needed, so it's important to let your feelings be known to me.

Counselling is all about change, changing things that we can and accepting those we cannot. Once you have an awareness and understanding of why things are happening in your life, you have the opportunity to make changes.  For whatever reason you decided to have counselling, positive change will occur when you commit to changing your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.

Counselling is often the first place where disturbing, distressing and perhaps traumatic memories and events are acknowledged. It is important that you are prepared for this. Be honest about the material you feel comfortable working on yet be open enough to trust me.  A good clinician is attuned to their clients’ experiences and knows when to alter the pace and direction of the intervention.

The ending of sessions is important. It is a time to take stock of what has been achieved and look at what is next for both of you. Therefore, it is important that we end well; respectfully reviewing your journey and saying goodbye.

Next steps

Please click                  for information about fees and location

Initial contact 

You can contact me via telephone, email or by using the contact form below. I am often with clients, but I will respond within 24 hours.

Introductory call (telephone or online)

The purpose of this call is for us to get to know each other a little. We can briefly discuss what brings you to couples (family) counselling and how I may approach helping you with this.  Please note: this is not a counselling session.

Should you wish to continue we book the first session. It’s important to find the right counsellor for you both and if we decide you would be better served with an alternative professional, I can provide recommendations or signposting.

Your first session

I will email you a copy of the working agreement and the client take on form in advance of this session.

The take on form is information I am required to collect to keep you both safe and includes, name, address, preferred method of contact, GP details, and medications.

We go through the admin at the start of this session. This includes checking I have the intake form completed in full and signing our working agreement.

To know how best to help you, I need to understand more about you and your current issues, and what you would like to gain from our time together. To do this, we complete the assessment. This in in four parts:

1. The first part is to find out a little more about you both and I will ask you both a few questions about your current relationship, if you have children, what you do for a living, hobbies and friendships.
2. The second part is for you to tell me what you believe your current issues. You will each be invited to talk, uninterrupted about how you feel and what you believe are the key issues.
3. The third part is for you to tell me a little about your families. You will both be asked brief questions about your parents and siblings.
4. The final part is where I summarise my understanding of your issues and propose an approach. Together we agree on some goals and the priorities going forward.

Work between sessions

Whilst we will work together during the sessions and I will share tools and techniques, most of the change will happen at home. I will therefore provide you with tasks and exercise to complete at home. This may be, for example, to practice using the communication tools or to spend a day in each other’s love language.

Subsequent sessions

The approach taken and how we work together will be decided during your first session. This will be unique to you and your individual needs.