My Approach
I aim to equip couples with the skills to shape and maintain a healthy, fulfilling relationship long after our work together has ended.
Session Structure
Each session lasts 90 minutes, followed by at least 30 minutes (often more, at no additional cost) during which I update a personalised and private "Summary and Reflections" file for each one of you. This Word document is accessible through a secure link within 48 hours of the session. I introduced this in 2023, and clients have found it to be a valuable resource for maintaining continuity and ensuring ongoing progress between sessions.
Hourly rate: £40–£140 per session (or the equivalent in your local currency). After the initial trial session, clients choose an hourly rate within this range that feels sustainable and does not add financial strain. I do not question or renegotiate the rate a client chooses.
I work this way because the length of therapy is inherently unpredictable, and it would be counterproductive for cost itself to become an additional source of discomfort alongside the difficulties already being experienced within your relationship. This approach is grounded in mutual trust, which I see as fundamental to a healthy and effective therapeutic relationship between client and counsellor.
Session-by-Session Guide
While the journey may differ for each couple, the core elements of our work are consistent. I find that jumping straight into resolving conflicts often fails to produce lasting results outside the session. Instead, the initial focus is on developing new capacities to manage and resolve issues effectively. Once these skills are in place, we shift our attention to resolving the specific issues that brought you to counselling, allowing your relationship to evolve into a more rewarding one.
The session outline below will vary both in content and in number depending on the specific issues you bring to counselling. It is provided to give you a sense of how I generally work with clients.
How I work with couples
My work with couples is structured, practical and collaborative. Rather than simply talking through arguments or trying to find quick fixes, we use the difficult moments between you as information. The aim is to understand what happens inside each of you, how those reactions interact between you, and what can help you create a different experience of the relationship.
The first session
The first session focuses on what each of you hopes will be different by the end of the work. I usually ask you to imagine that we have finished working together and to describe what you would hope to say had changed.
These become your Best Hopes. They give the work direction and help us keep checking whether the sessions are moving towards something useful. The first session also gives both of you a direct experience of how I work, so you can decide whether the approach feels right for you as a couple.
Phase 1: Differentiated self-awareness
The first phase helps each partner develop a clearer understanding of what happens inside them during difficult moments in the relationship. Using the Rainbow Map, we look at emotions, styles of thinking, typical thoughts, physical sensations and behaviours.
The purpose is not to decide who is right or wrong. It is to help each of you notice your own internal reactions more precisely, and to understand how those reactions may affect the other person. This can begin to reduce blame and create a more useful shared language for what happens between you.
Phase 2: Resource generation
The development of a more differentiated form of self-awareness creates the foundations for resource generation. Just as importantly, it also helps build the capacity to activate resources when your system moves into more fight-flight or play-dead states.
These resources may include pausing, staying present, softening defensiveness, communicating more clearly, listening differently, regulating your own reactions, or reconnecting with what matters to you as a partner. The focus is practical: helping each of you do something different in the moments where old patterns would usually take over.
Phase 3: The Legacy Pattern Experience
The final phase looks at the deeper patterns each of you may bring into the relationship. These patterns often began as understandable ways of coping, protecting yourself, managing conflict, seeking closeness, avoiding rejection, or staying safe.
In adult relationships, however, these old patterns can become activated in ways that create distance, conflict, shutdown, criticism, pursuit, withdrawal or repeated misunderstanding. The Legacy Pattern Experience helps each of you recognise your own patterns, understand how they affect the relationship, and develop more flexible responses that fit the relationship you want now.
In summary
The work moves from Best Hopes, to clearer self-awareness, to practical resources, and then to deeper pattern change.
For couples, the aim is to help both partners understand what happens inside themselves and between them, so they can move out of repeated reactive cycles and towards a relationship that feels more connected, resilient and alive.
The total number of sessions varies between 15 and 25 sessions. The first 10 sessions usually take place within the first three months, with any further sessions occurring over the following nine months.
