Relationship Counselling

One of the more common causes of unhappiness, and one which often brings people into counselling, is relationship difficulties. These take many diverse forms: frequently the problem is difficulty in finding or maintaining long term relationships, but for others it may be a dependence on such relationships. In many cases it is a problem with a particular relationship in which either my client or their partner is unhappy or which seems to be failing.

In my experience a frequent cause of problems within a relationship is the fairy story myth that seems to permeate our culture: i.e. once the prince and princess overcome the obstacles that keep them apart the story ends and they live "happily ever after". The reality is that this is just the start of the story.

Making a relationship work requires a great deal more than just finding the right partner: it involves knowing how to negotiate and to compromise and using communication and conflict resolution skills. It is important to have interests in common and to find ways to accommodate difference. It is often useful to examine each other's respective expectations of the relationship (especially where the couple are from different cultural backgrounds). It helps if partners are realistic about which of their needs they can expect to get met within the relationship and which they need to take elsewhere. Generally speaking it is best if sexual needs fall into the former category, but if there are any hard and fast rules in relationships I have yet to discover them: it is simply that non-monogamous relationships seem to be more difficult to maintain on a long term basis than monogamous ones.

Whether working with individuals or couples I am open to working on either a short term basis, usually with clearly defined goals, or longer term, often with a much more open and flexible agenda. When seeing couples however I quite often aim to keep the number of sessions to 6 or 8 maximum. In this case I focus primarily on helping the couple to improve the way the relationship works and any individual issues or problems that the partners might be bringing to the relationship will then be treated as factors to be acknowledged and managed by the couple. If the individual wants to work on these in more depth I would then recommend one to one work. The length of therapy is something which we would discuss in the first session.

In this note I have been thinking primarily of one to one intimate relationships. This is not to be taken to imply that other less conventional forms of intimacy, (such as, for example, the more fluid networks which are becoming more common and more accepted in London's gay and bisexual communities) are in any way inferior. They simply appear less often in my consulting room.