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Couples Therapy / Marriage Counselling

People come to see me for couples therapy (marriage counselling means the same thing) for variety of reasons, including: 

• Communication
• Conflict & power struggles
• Violence
• Sexual difficulties
• Extramarital affairs
• Considering marriage
• Considering separation/divorce
• Lack of emotional satisfaction 
• Concerns specific to gay couples

Although people usually come to see me for couples therapy due to difficulties within their relationship, the way that I work with couples provides a wonderful context for each member of the couple to heal and grow as individuals. Indeed, recent research demonstrated that people who are clinically depressed and experience their partner as being critical show greater improvement with couples therapy than with antidepressant medication, and therapy is typically cheaper (British Journal of Psychiatry, 2000, 177: 95-100).  Through the way I work with couples, you can expect to develop a more intimate, satisfying, and fulfilling relationship and to learn some skills that allow your relationship to continue to grow and deepen after counselling has ended. You can also expect to come to feel better about yourself and to experience more satisfaction in your life in general. 

I have formal training in couples therapy and I continue to supervise students working with couples.  I also conducted research on the effectiveness of couples therapy while I was a professor at Simon Fraser University. 

My approach to working with couples has been heavily influenced by the Emotionally Focussed Approach of Greenberg and Johnson, and by the Imago Relationship Therapy of Harville Hendrix.  The difficulties that couples face are inevitably related to emotional difficulties rooted in early family experiences and are maintained by difficulties in communication. In my work with couples I typically spend some time in working on improving communication and promoting better understanding of each other's experience.  I also typically work with people to identify the events or incidents that tend to trigger strong, distressing emotional reactions.  We work with these reactions so that they become less intense and so that each individual is better able to express these feelings constructively.

Some ways of communicating contribute to difficulties in relationships and other ways help us to get out of difficulties.  I have prepared a booklet on communication that I use in the context of my work with couples.  You may view or print a copy of my booklet "A Way of Communicating - Adobe Acrobat" as an Adobe Acrobat file by clicking on this link, or you may download a copy of this booklet as a Microsoft Word document by clicking on this link "A Way of Communicating - Microsoft Word".