Having relationship difficulties is completely normal.

You may be finding it really hard to talk to your partner.

Perhaps you find yourselves in icy withdrawal or unproductive and heated arguments or both.

Your relationship, once perhaps a source of joy, love and meaning, feels like so much hard work, perhaps even painful.

Feelings of loss, sadness, perhaps sometimes despair and hopelessness keep coming up.

You don’t need to be alone in this.

We believe that all relationships deserve support. And a couple counsellor, whose job is to hear beyond the silence or the accusations, can help you discover the love that you may have believed was completely lost.

Support for this is possible and available.

In our group of colleagues, Catarina Teixeira, Julie Leonard and Irena Morgan are able to offer support to couples.

You can read about their approach to couple counselling below.

Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT) is an evidence-based approach to couples therapy that helps partners understand what is happening underneath their conflicts.

At the heart of EFCT is attachment — our fundamental need to feel loved, understood, valued, and emotionally safe with the person who matters most to us. When we feel disconnected or uncertain about our partner’s availability, we can become anxious, critical, withdrawn, defensive, or demanding.

Over time, couples can become caught in repetitive patterns in which one partner pursues, and the other withdraws, or both become defensive and disconnected. EFCT helps couples slow these patterns down, understand the emotions and attachment needs underneath them, and create new ways of responding to each other.

The hopeful message of EFCT is that these patterns can change. Couples are not simply “bad at communicating” — they are often caught in a cycle that neither partner truly wants. By identifying and changing this cycle, couples can begin to experience greater emotional safety, trust, closeness, and connection. Therapy creates space to have the conversations that are difficult to have on your own, helping partners move from feeling alone, misunderstood, or stuck toward feeling more secure and connected in their relationship.

Irena Morgan is a couple counsellor familiar with applying her „Intimacy from the Inside Out“ thinking to couples’ work.

This approach from the bigger Internal Family Systems model explores challenges in relationships through the lens of ‘parts’.

We invite couples to get to know themselves, and each other better – to develop greater intimacy both inside and out.

We explore the dynamics of the ‘dance of parts’ – how communications and actions from ‘parts’ in each partner can trigger unexpected or unwelcome responses from ‘parts’ of the other.

Although such dynamics raise difficulties within the relationship, these can ultimately be understood ‘from the inside’ in a positive light.

In the end we discover more about the life experiences that led to „parts“ forming, about relationship wounds, and past shaping of ourselves to protect vulnerability.

Turning inside ourselves, we respectfully explore how our adapted „parts“ may be colouring what we hear, as well as how we interpret the communications and actions of our partners.

Often, we find that the adaptations that served us well in the past may no longer be serving us in our current relationship and with insight, helpful change can follow.

We can then shift into looking to improve communication, by encouraging partners to speak for ‘parts’ rather than from them.

 This also involves working to improve listening skills, by helping couples recognise where listening may be made difficult by reactive ‘parts’, and learning that we can respond with more choice and skill, and less reactivity.

To build true intimacy between the couple, we also explore the differences between partners, discovering how, in mature and healthy relationships, needs and wants will inevitably be different at times.

We take the view that such differences need to be recognised, understood and spoken for skilfully (celebrated even!), so the relationship stays healthy for both partners over time.

Irena looks forward to hearing from you and getting to know you and all your „parts“.

Feel free just to reach out to ask about availability and we’ll take it from there.

To learn more about Irena click here.

To learn more about the Internal Family Systems approach to therapy, click here.