Couples coming for relationship counselling often describe themselves as being at “loggerheads” or in a “stalemate” situation and feel emotionally disconnected from their partners.
Relationship counselling is helpful in getting perspective on this distress. Couples usually attend counselling together and through understanding each other’s responses, they can begin to understand the negative interactional pattern in which they have become entangled.
When each person is able to recognise the way their behaviour prompts a response in the other, the couple can begin to reconnect and strengthen their earlier emotional bond.
In discovering a kinder, more respectful attitude towards one another, couples are then able to manage differences as they arise.
Common issues that Jill works with in couple counselling:
- managing strong emotions – anxiety, stress or anger
- unresolved and escalating fights
- lack of intimacy
- infidelity
- parenting differences
- difficulty relating following a traumatic incident
- grief and loss
- life transitions – birth, death, marriage, separation, a child moving out of the family home