What Actually Happens Here

I think about a relationship as three things, not two.

There’s you. There’s your partner. And then there’s the thing the two of you built together — the relationship itself, which has its own moods, its own habits, its own way of getting stuck that neither of you fully controls on your own. A lot of couples therapy only really looks at the third thing — communication, connection, “the relationship” — and skips over the fact that two whole, separate nervous systems are running underneath it, each with their own history of what closeness has cost them before.

I want both. I want to understand what’s happening in you, specifically, before we try to fix what’s happening between you. Partly because you actually have control over your own half of this and basically none over theirs, no matter how much you’d like that not to be true. And partly because most “relationship problems” turn out to be two old, private fears meeting each other in the kitchen at 7am and neither of you quite knowing that’s what just happened.

Once that’s visible — once you can both see the actual shape of it, not just how it feels from inside — it stops running you quite so automatically.

Who Tends To End Up Here

Not everyone in a hard patch needs this exact kind of work, but if a few of these sound familiar, it’s probably worth a conversation:

• Same fight, different clothes. You could probably write the script for both parts.
• One of you goes quiet or disappears (physically or otherwise) right when it matters most, and the other one chases, or gives up trying.
• You’ve done the obvious things — date night, a communication podcast, a really earnest conversation on the couch at 11pm — and the pattern’s still there under the new vocabulary.
• You love each other and you’re still lonely inside the relationship, which is a strange and specific kind of pain.
• Something happened — a breach of trust, a betrayal, a slow drift — and you don’t know if repair is even on the table, let alone how to get there.
• One of you wants in close and the other wants room to breathe, and you’ve both stopped being able to say that without it turning into a fight about something else entirely.

        Why This Isn’t Just About Better Communication

Your nervous system doesn’t wait for words. It’s already read your partner’s face, tone, posture, and the half-second pause before they answered — and it’s already decided whether this is safe or not — before either of you has said a full sentence. That’s not a flaw. That’s what nervous systems do, especially with the people we’re most attached to.

Which is a big part of why “just communicate better” so rarely works on its own. You can have all the right words and still end up in the same place, because the thing driving the pattern isn’t really about vocabulary. It’s about what your body already believes will happen next — usually something it learned a long time before this relationship existed.

So when I say I work with the nervous system as much as the conversation, that’s what I mean. Two people, each carrying an old, private prediction about what happens when connection is under strain, meeting each other in real time. Most of what looks like incompatibility is actually just that — two very reasonable, very old strategies, colliding.

How I Actually work

I trained in Relational Life Therapy, which is probably the biggest single influence on how I do this work — it’s direct, it doesn’t tiptoe around power and vulnerability, and it asks both people to take real responsibility for their own side of the dance rather than waiting for the other one to go first. It’s also where I got permission to do something a lot of therapists are trained not to do, which I’ll get to in a second. Underneath all of it sits the same broader framework I bring to everything else in this practice: relational neuroscience, attachment, the body, and a real commitment to making room for every part of what shows up in the room, including the parts that aren’t proud of themselves.

Practically, that tends to look like this. We take one real, specific hard moment — not “we fight a lot,” but an actual Tuesday, an actual sentence, an actual thing that happened — and we go slow. What did you do. What did you think. What did you think they were about to do. It’s tedious on purpose. People get a little frustrated with me for how slowly I do this, which I take as a good sign, because vague is where patterns hide and specific is where they show up.

I also do a fair amount of individual work inside a couples session — sitting with one of you while the other watches. I know that sounds unusual if you haven’t done it before. What I’ve found, over and over, is that something changes when your partner actually witnesses you move through something hard, rather than hearing the summary afterward in the car. It tends to build a kind of trust that talking about the relationship, from the outside, doesn’t really reach.

And here’s the thing I mentioned above. Unlike a lot of couples therapy, I do take sides. On purpose. Not yours over theirs, and not theirs over yours — my client, in the room with a couple, is the relationship itself, and whatever you’re both actually trying to build. So in a given moment, that might mean backing whichever one of you is telling the harder, truer thing right then, even when it’s uncomfortable. That’s not favouritism. It’s how a rupture that’s been sitting there for years actually starts to heal instead of just getting managed one more time. Joining someone in the truth, even briefly, does two things at once: it rebuilds connection, and it holds someone accountable. You genuinely can’t get one without the other.

The Practical Stuff

Session length — usually 50 to 80 minutes. Couples work takes longer than individual sessions; there are two histories to track instead of one.

How often — weekly to start, most of the time, especially if things are active or raw. We’ll often move to fortnightly once there’s more ground underfoot.

How long overall — genuinely depends. Some couples get real movement in 8-12 sessions around one specific pattern. Deeper, longer-standing stuff takes longer, and sometimes works better as periodic longer sessions than a strict weekly hour. I’ll always tell you where I think we are.

Individual sessions alongside this — sometimes useful, especially if one partner’s own history is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the pattern. We’d talk about that together if it seems relevant. I often work with other individual therapists to help hold a couple.

Telehealth — works fine for couples work, and honestly makes it easier for some couples to actually show up consistently.

Medicare — couples counselling itself generally isn’t rebatable, though related individual sessions sometimes are. Ask me directly about your situation rather than guessing from a website.

Fees — $360 for a 50 minute session, more for longer sessions. Get in touch for exact numbers

Common Questions 

What if only one of us wants to come? That’s more common than not, honestly. Sometimes one of you starts alone and the other joins later. Sometimes a single session with just one partner helps clarify what’s actually needed. There’s no one correct order.

Do you take sides? Yes, actually — on purpose, which puts me at odds with how a lot of couples therapists describe their job. My side is the relationship. Always. That means my loyalty isn’t split evenly between you in every single moment — sometimes it means backing whoever’s telling the harder truth right then, even if that’s uncomfortable to sit through. Neutral feels safer, for everyone, therapist included. I’ve just found it mostly keeps couples stuck rather than getting them unstuck. Taking a side, briefly, in service of the relationship, tends to be what actually moves an old rupture toward repair.

We’re not sure we even want to stay together — is this still useful? Yes. Some couples come here to actively rebuild. Some come here to get real clarity about whether to stay or go, without the fog of the same argument on repeat. Both are legitimate reasons to be in this room.

Why do you sometimes work with just one of us while the other watches? Because it’s often faster and truer than reporting on it afterward. Watching your partner actually move through something hard tends to do something that talking about them doing it never quite manages.

Will you just tell us what to do? No. I’ll tell you what I’m noticing, and I’ve got twenty years of pattern recognition behind that noticing, but the decisions are yours. Always. I work in contracting. We negotiate the focus, and I support you to pass, if that is what is needed. I work with you both to find the way that serves you both and your relationship. 

Can this work if there’s been infidelity or a real breach of trust? Yes, and it’s actually a big part of what I do. It usually needs a slower, more structured approach than “just talk it through” — figuring out what actually happened, what it meant, and whether trust can be rebuilt, and how.

Is couples therapy right for us if there’s real fear at home? If there’s active domestic violence, coercive control, or genuine danger, no — not as a starting point. I’d recommend individual therapy for both of you first, until there’s real safety to work from. That’s not a judgment on either of you or the relationship. It’s about what this work asks of people, and it needs actual safety underneath it to be helpful instead of harmful. If you’re not sure whether this applies to you, that’s worth a direct conversation, not a guess from a webpage.

Is this different from your EMDR work, or your individual work? Same underlying approach, different room. If one partner’s own trauma history is clearly driving a lot of the pattern, we might bring EMDR or individual work in alongside the couples sessions. We’d always talk through how that fits before doing it.