Couples Therapy & Marriage Guidance Counselling

You have made a commitment to another person, you decided to be together hoping that the person you have chosen will add to your life and that it will be ‘better than without’.

And now it seems that the opposite is the case.

What was meant to make your life easier, more colourful, and more interesting, now seems to be a bit of a burden, a struggle, something that actually saps the colour out of your life.

In your relationship

Do you feel you have lost connection and understanding with each other?
- it feels like no matter where we start, we always end up with the same ‘CD’, playing the same argument….
Do you feel like you are losing your sense of self?
- I am turning into someone I neither like nor recognise…and I can’t be bothered to do anything about it…
Are you struggling with intimacy?
- We don’t know how to talk about sex, let alone enjoy it..
- Since we started trying for a baby our sex life turned into a military operation…
Are you trying to get over some traumatic event that your relationship went through?
- There is no trust between us after an affair, the addiction…
- We don’t know how to talk about illness, miscarriage, not being able to have children
Are you going through the relationship breakup and struggling to communicate over important matters?
- I don’t want ever to see them again and don’t trust them to be with the children
- I don’t want to be held hostage financially and abused under the guise of childcare needs..

As a couple do you feel like you are in a ‘battle’?

We often see relationships as battlefields – me against the other, within the space, trying to win, prove who is right. We are worried that if we stop fighting we may lose something – independence, pride, perhaps sense of self even… we are told all the time – you have to assert yourself, fight for your truth..

Only, when it comes to intimate relationships it doesn’t seem to work that well. The more we care about the issue, the more each party fights to maintain their view. We either don’t get to any solution, or we end up feeling defeated. Even if we feel we ‘won’ – the other party is not happy, so the victory is a bit sour …

Couple therapy with Anna offers you a different way of looking at your relationship.

Imagine a plant.

Imagine that this is your relationship that you and your partner cultivated.

What is it like?

Old and strong, albeit crooked, or young and vulnerable?

Are leaves green and alive, or droopy, sad and dusty?

Did you plant the seed knowing what plant you wanted and how to take care of it, or did it just grow becoming this random creature that takes space saps the light? You don’t like it, you want to do something but since you don’t know how you worry you may kill it…..

Once you have an understanding of a relationship as a separate entity, which is seen as having its own needs in separation from you and your partner, you will be more able to look at the problems as joint challenges, not as threats to your personal safety.

It may happen that this process will reveal the necessity for each of the partners to look at their personal emotional landscape:

Am I lacking in self-confidence and feel threatened by criticism? Does it end in ‘character assassination’ of my partner?
Am I relying on my partner to fulfill my need for self-esteem and self-worth? Does it always feel that ‘they are not enough’
Am I having expectations of myself as ideal partner, parent? Does it feel always like ‘I am not enough’
Am I willing to let go of my sense of control and being ‘right’ for the sake of better growth of our ‘Relationship Plant’?

By understanding the needs and fears of the other party you will be able to find a way of communicating, with them, which will be heard and understood by them.

By understanding your own needs and fears you will be able to ‘say what you mean and mean what you say’.

You will learn about conflict resolution, and how to prevent a miscommunication developing into a conflict.

“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distance continues to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters