Perhaps your feeling unhappy, or downright miserable in your relationship. Maybe you feel your relationship has just lost its lustre. Or perhaps you’re feeling generally okay about the stability of your marriage but there is an issue or pattern that you are struggling to overcome. Couples counselling can help you to navigate through these situations and make your relationship stronger and more satisfying. Or if you’re not in a healthy relationship, counselling can support you to make hard decisions and perhaps move on from the relationship. Either way, there are many good reasons to try couples counselling and even healthy couples can benefit because couples counselling is not a final, last-ditch attempt to save a relationship – but rather an opportunity for learning and growth to strengthen your relationship.
Couples therapy is a form of psychotherapy applicable to both married partners and non-married partners of any gender or sexual orientation. The duration of therapy depends on the issues being addressed.
Couples are always facing an increasing or evolving number of problems in their relationships.
These could include: sex, intimacy, communication issues, parenting, stress, anger, or infidelity. If you are willing to address these relationship problems, then you are ready for couples therapy. It’s the therapist’s responsibility to set the environment for confidential dialogue, which in turn will enable you to hear each other out and learn effective communication strategies. The exchange will also enable you to hear what your partner is ‘actually saying’. The counsellor can also act as a ‘professional mirror’ that shows you your challenges and how these can be addressed.
Couples counselling should not be seen as an opportunity to place blame solely on one partner but rather an opportunity to learn and grow as an individual, and as a partner in the relationship.
Couples counseling is an investment in your relationship that can improve how you communicate, problem-solve and express yourself in your partnership.
Insight’s Approach to Couples Counselling
Therapy methods are based on several core principles. It is crucial that you and your partner acknowledge your respect for one another. You both need to be able to show and feel empathy for each another, as well as tact and accountability.
Behavioural therapy tends to view human beings and behaviour with the assumption that humans are a product of their sociocultural conditioning and environment, looking at the current problems and the factors influencing them and emphasizes behaviour changes more than the underlying unconscious processes.
Crucible Approach therapy Crucible® Therapy or the Crucible Approach is an integrated therapeutic approach that started out as an integrated treatment for sex, intimacy, and relationship problems. With couples,the therapist will ultimately push them outside of their comfort zone and develop new comfort zones by becoming more emotionally mature.
Emotionally focused therapy is based on observations and experience, which looks at emotions and emotional intelligence, which helps support stronger and more secure relationships by helping better understand how our actions impact others, and how our emotions drive our interaction.
Gottman couples therapy believes that couples need to be able to work on becoming better friends, learn to manage conflict, and create ways to support each other’s hopes for the future. The foundation of Gottman couples therapy is based on Dr. John and Julie Gottman’s 40+ years of clinical experience and research that is based on interventions and exercises that are structured, goal-oriented and scientifically based.
Gottman relationship check up is a questionnaire is composed of 480 questions about friendship, intimacy, emotions, conflict, values, and trust, as well as parenting, housework, finances, individual areas of concern, and more. It’s designed as a tool for use by the therapists at Insight Psychological in a therapeutic setting.
Psychotherapy is a broad term that encompasses numerous styles of therapy and uses verbal or nonverbal communication with a client to help treat psychiatric problems, behavioral issues, personality disorders, and various other types of emotional distress. This form of personal counselling is based on an interpersonal relationship, as opposed to the alternative chemical or physical forms of therapy.
Sex therapy is the treatment of sexual dysfunction and also includes working with concerns about sexual feelings and intimacy, less common alternative sexual practices, kink, gender issues, sexual offending issues, or work on optimizing or exploring new experiences. Sex therapy can also include distressing sexual behaviour, sexual abuse and trauma.
Strategic family therapy is a type of therapy where the therapist is a problem-solver and focuses on finding solutions to client’s challenges.
Structural family therapy involves looking at the structures within the family unit. Changing the underlying structure tends to cause a ripple effect on the family. This therapy analyzes the hierarchical structure, subsystems and boundaries within the family.
Insight is proud to offer a diverse range of therapists that specialize in Couples Therapy. Contact us today to book your appointment.
