Couples Counselling, Relationship Counselling, Marriage Counselling

• I’ve been a couple, marriage and family counsellor and therapist for over ten years, specializing in helping couples and individuals with a wide range of difficulties, especially with relationships and conflict management skills.
• In the past I contracted to Relationship Services Aotearoa, where I trained in EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy). Recently I have received regular training with Jeff Saunders, Integrative Relationship Therapy (IRT) which brings together a range of couples’ modalities and is very effective
• I completed my counselling training at the Christchurch polytechnic in 2010 and have trained in transformational breath-work.
• The IRT model also helps couples appreciate how their relating style will affect their children and teaches them how to relate optimally with everyone in the family.
• EFT and IRT are very powerful experiential models in which couples gain insight into how they’re interacting, how attachment styles can cause differences which lead to conflict, how their interactive cycle is affected by facets of these attachment styles, how repressed emotion must be expressed constructively and how structured communication can heal rifts, even deep-seated ones.
• The role of empowerment is a key component of IRT, and the dynamics of power are rarely seen or understood in relationships but play a big part.
• When couples present to me, I help them escape difficult interactive patterns by training them to see how attachment patterning, empowerment or disempowerment styles, reactive emotional patterns originating from long ago, and improved communication can enable them to escape the Conflict Cycle they usually get trapped in.
• At times, infidelity rocks the relationship boat and can be especially distressing, for one or both partners. About 25% of my work is in helping couples heal from issues of broken trust.
• 10-15 sessions are usually necessary, often spread out over several months. Normally the first 4 to 6 sessions are required to help couples de-escalate the tensions and arguments that keep them stuck. Of course, counselling duration is very dependent on how engrained the problems are and how willing each party is to work on creating a new life together – one where their dynamics are consciously created rather than unconsciously destructive. Some couples check in every month or so just to fine-tune their family dynamics!
• My Office is Located upstairs in Avebury House, 9 Eveleyn Couzins Avenue, Richmond. Christchurch