Couples Therapy & Relationship Support
Strong relationships aren’t defined by the absence of conflict, but by the capacity to repair, reconnect and find each other again.
Relationships naturally move through moments of connection and disconnection. The aim isn’t to stay perfectly connected all the time, but to develop the capacity to repair and find your way back to each other.
Sometimes what appears on the surface as conflict is connected to something more vulnerable underneath: a need to feel heard, valued, understood, safe, or important to one another. With support, we can slow these moments down and look together at the cycles you find yourselves caught in: what tends to trigger them, how each of you responds, and what might be happening underneath.
Couples therapy is also a place to learn and practise relational skills: communicating more clearly, listening with curiosity, expressing needs more directly, taking responsibility for your impact, navigating differences, and learning how to repair after difficult moments. As these skills develop, there can be more room for choice rather than automatic reaction.
How Couples Therapy Works
1. Initial Couples Session
We begin together, exploring your relationship, what brings you to therapy and what each of you would like support with.
2. Assessment
You’ll each complete a relationship questionnaire, followed by an individual session with me. This helps me develop a fuller understanding of your relationship and each person’s experience.
3. Coming Back Together
We meet again to reflect on the assessment, identify the areas we want to give attention to and establish what you would like to work towards.
4. Ongoing Couples Therapy
From there, sessions focus on your relationship in practice: strengthening connection and friendship, navigating conflict, improving communication, developing relational skills and building greater capacity for repair.
Beyond Anxious and Avoidant
Many people come to therapy carrying the belief that they are “too much,” “too distant,” “too needy,” or somehow difficult to love. Social media relationship discourse often reduces complex relational experiences to labels such as “anxious” or “avoidant,” which can quickly become shaming or pathologising.
While some classifications can help us understand relationship patterns, people are far more complex.
Behind every pattern is a person with a history, a context, and ways of relating that once helped them stay emotionally safe.
These patterns are adaptive responses shaped in relationship, and healing can happen in relationship too. Therapy can help create space to understand these patterns with greater compassion and context, rather than through blame or self-pathologising. Instead of trying to “fix” who you are, therapy supports deeper awareness of how your relational strategies developed, what they may be protecting, and how new ways of relating can emerge through safety, reflection, and genuine connection.
Neurodivergent and mixed-neurotype couples
In my work with neurodivergent and mixed-neurotype couples, I don’t begin with the assumption that one person’s way of relating is the problem and the other person’s way is the norm.
I find the double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) particularly useful here. Difficulties in understanding can arise in both directions when two people experience, communicate and make meaning of the world differently. What looks like a lack of empathy, emotional availability or interest may sometimes reflect differences in how connection is expressed, recognised or received.
I sometimes find it useful to think about these differences similarly to how we might approach cross-cultural relationships. If two people came from different cultures, the aim of therapy would not be to teach one partner to abandon their culture and communicate like the other. Instead, we might become curious about both worlds: What does this mean to you? How do you recognise care? What happens when your partner understands the same behaviour differently?
I approach neurotype differences with similar curiosity. This includes sensory differences. One person may seek more touch, movement, spontaneity or stimulation, while another may need more space, predictability, quiet or time to recover from sensory input. Everyday experiences such as physical affection, background noise, socialising, lighting, or conversation at the end of the day can therefore become relationally significant.
Rather than immediately interpreting these differences as you are rejecting me, you are too sensitive, or you don't care, therapy can create space to understand what is happening for each person and how these differences affect the relationship.
This fits closely with my Gestalt approach, which views experience as relational and contextual rather than locating the difficulty entirely within one person. Sensory experience, bodily responses, environment, communication and the relationship itself can all be part of the field in which contact happens.
Instead of asking Who is communicating correctly? I am interested in What happens between these two people? How does each person experience the interaction? Where do they repeatedly miss one another? What adjustments might support both people without automatically positioning one person's way of being as the standard?
The aim is not to make partners more alike. It is to help them become more able to meet across difference.
Reference
Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887.
About Katia
Katia is a PACFA-registered counsellor with a Master’s in Gestalt Therapy. She has additional training in Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples (EFCT) , Gottman Method, Relational Life Therapy (RLT), approaches that inform her relational practice.