Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy

01273 921 355
Online therapy In the press
  • Home
  • Therapy services
    • Fees
    • How psychotherapy works
    • Who is it for?
    • Individual psychotherapy
    • Child therapy
    • Couples counselling and therapy in Brighton
    • Marriage counselling
    • Family therapy and counselling
    • Group psychotherapy
    • Corporate services
    • Leadership coaching and consultancy
    • Clinical supervision for individuals and organisations
    • FAQs
  • Types of therapy
    • Acceptance commitment therapy (ACT)
    • Analytic psychotherapy
    • Body-orientated psychotherapy
    • Private clinical psychology
    • Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)
    • Compassion focused therapy (CFT)
    • Cult Recovery
    • Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT)
    • Therapy for divorce or separation
    • Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR)
    • Existential therapy
    • Group analytic psychotherapy
    • Integrative therapy
    • Interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT)
    • Non-violent resistance (NVR)
    • Family and systemic psychotherapy
    • Schema therapy
    • Transactional analysis (TA)
    • Trauma psychotherapy
  • Types of issues
    • Abuse
    • Addiction counselling Brighton
      • Gambling addiction therapy
      • Porn addiction help
    • Affairs
    • Anger management counselling in Brighton
    • Anxiety
    • Bereavement counselling
    • Cross-cultural issues
    • Depression
    • Family issues
    • LGBT+ issues and therapy
    • Low self-esteem
    • Relationship issues
    • Sexual issues
    • Stress
  • Online therapy
    • Online anger management therapy
    • Online anxiety therapy
    • Online therapy for bereavement
    • Online therapy for depression
    • Online relationship counselling
  • Find my therapist
    • Our practitioners
  • Blog
    • Ageing
    • Attachment
    • Child development
    • Families
    • Gender
    • Groups
    • Loss
    • Mental health
    • Neuroscience
    • Parenting
    • Psychotherapy
    • Relationships
    • Sexuality
    • Sleep
    • Society
    • Spirituality
    • Work
  • About us
    • Sustainability
    • Work with us
    • Press
  • Contact us
    • Contact us – Brighton and Hove practice
    • Contact us – Lewes practice
    • Contact us – online therapy
    • Contact us – press
    • Privacy policy

November 14, 2022 by BHP Leave a Comment

What does Couple Counselling do?

At a fundamental level, couple counselling provides an opportunity for a couple to explore their relationship with a therapist who facilitates the exploration. Couples have said to me that they really value the dedicated time, space and support to talk about feelings and difficulties that don’t feel safe to share with each other elsewhere. What else couple counselling does is more provisional and it’s perhaps helpful to think about what couple counselling can do?

First of all, I’d like to make it clear what, in my opinion, couple counselling doesn’t do. Couple counselling is not about the counsellor determining whether a couple should split up or stay together. Nor is it about the counsellor telling either individual how to behave or taking sides. (There are exceptions to this if one of the partners is coercive or violent.) The more behavioural approaches to couple counselling often provide communication exercises and homework between sessions, humanistic and psychodynamic approaches tend not to do this.

I think a key element of what couple counselling can do, is to give a couple the opportunity to see their relationship from a more objective position, to help a couple step away and see themselves as if looking in from the outside. People are often familiar with repeating patterns in the interactions with their partners. They know which situations end in a row or sulking or tears – “you always …,” “you never …” but they can’t necessarily recognise the dynamic that underpins the patterns. How they both act in a way that means these situations keep playing out in the same way again and again. They know that over time painful feelings have built up, such as hurt and resentment, frustration and fear, disdain and humiliation. These feelings can reach a point where one or both partners question whether they can carry on living like this or would it be better to break up. Then they come to couple counselling.

A couple counsellor can notice and comment on what they see being enacted between the partners in the session. They and the couple can think about how this dynamic can play out in the relationship and the way it impacts how they feel about each other. This close attention from the therapist can make couple counselling challenging, each partner becomes aware that their behaviour is coming under scrutiny. They may be fearful of owning their own behaviour and ashamed about revealing aspects of themselves, aspects that may be protecting them and hiding feelings of weakness, vulnerability or lack of self-worth that probably originate from their past.

A therapist can encourage both partners to be more compassionate with themselves and each other, to let go of the feeling that their partner is a potential threat and they need to defend themselves. A couple can then begin to see their partner as someone who is on their side, who is on the same team but perhaps brings a different perspective.

Hopefully a couple can recognise the dance between them and acknowledge the relationship they have created together is a shared responsibility, both the positive and negative parts. This means that the project of creating a more satisfying relationship, or a constructive separation, can also be shared and is perhaps more possible than they imagined at their first counselling session.

 

Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy is a collective of experienced psychotherapists, psychologists and counsellors working with a range of client groups, including fellow therapists and health professionals. If you would like more information, or an informal discussion please get in touch. Online therapy is available.

Filed Under: Psychotherapy, Relationships Tagged With: couple counselling, couple therapy, couples

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Find your practitioner

loader
Meta Data and Taxonomies Filter

Locations -

  • Brighton
  • Lewes
  • Online
loader
loader
loader
loader
loader

Search for your practitioner by location

Brighton
Lewes

Therapy services +

Therapy services: 

Therapy types

Therapy types: 

Our practitioners

  • Sam Jahara
  • Mark Vahrmeyer
  • Gerry Gilmartin
  • Dr Simon Cassar
  • Claire Barnes
  • David Work
  • Shiraz El Showk
  • Thad Hickman
  • Susanna Petitpierre
  • David Keighley
  • Kirsty Toal
  • Joseph Bailey
  • Lucie Ramet
  • Georgie Leake

Search our blog

Work with us

Find out more….

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Charities we support

One Earth Logo

Hove clinic
49 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 2BE

Lewes clinic
Star Brewery, Studio 22, 1 Castle Ditch Lane, Lewes, BN7 1YJ

Copyright © 2025
Press enquiries
Privacy policy
Resources
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptReject Privacy Policy
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT