Couples Counselling in Guelph, Ontario
Counselling for couples working through conflict
If you’re like most couples who call us, you’ve already tried to fix things. You’re caught in a pattern that keeps itself going, and the argument you keep having is an old one, even when the topic is new. Lately you may have wondered whether this is just “how things are now.”
It doesn't have to be. Couples counselling is therapy for the two of you, to talk about the things that neither of you can seem to fix on your own. Most couples who feel stuck have been trying hard the whole time. Our job is to slow things down with you, so the two of you can see the pattern while it’s happening.
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Couples who come here often tell us about:
Small arguments that keep turning into the same big one
Distance that crept in while both of you were busy
Trust after it’s been broken
Wanting different amounts of time together
A loss of intimacy, or a worry that it’s disappearing
Anyone who’s building a life together can do this kind of work. You don’t need to be married. We work with couples of every gender and orientation, and it doesn’t matter whether you’ve been together two years or twenty.
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We draw from Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and The Gottman Method.
The first session focuses on understanding you as a couple, finding out about your challenges, and learning your goals for couples work. After that, we branch out into individual sessions where we focus on each of you independently. Here, the focus is on both of your unique histories and what you bring into the relationship. From there, we'll come back together to work on your goals.
We'll talk with both of you, and we won't pick sides. But we will be direct and interrupt gently now and then, to point at something that just happened between the two of you in the therapy room.
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Plenty of couples come without a crisis. Some come because they’ve grown apart, and others because they want something better than “fine.” You don’t have to arrive convinced that this will work. As long as you’re both willing to show up, we can work with that.
Questions about couples counselling in Guelph
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You can start on your own and work on your side of the relationship. Sometimes that’s what gets things moving. If your partner joins later, we’ll figure out together how to bring them in.
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You don’t have to be sure before you start counselling. Some couples come to fix things, and some come because they’re trying to decide whether or not they want to stay.
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Most couples who show up are worried about this, because people usually wait a long time before they call. If you’ve been at it for a while and you’re wondering whether it’s worth trying, call and ask us.
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Yes, because when one partner has anxiety, both partners live with it.
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Trauma like that can come up when it shapes how the two of you interact with each other now. We’ll follow it only as far as you want to go. Our trauma therapy page explains more about how we work.
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The approach we use most with couples is Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). It was built for couples, and looks at the patterns between you instead of focusing on who’s right and who’s wrong in an argument. We also draw from The Gottman Method, which is a more skills-based approach to couples work. It focuses on increasing intimacy, managing conflict, and removing negative communication patterns.
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Sessions are 50 minutes. We book the full hour, and the last ten minutes are for the practical stuff, like payment and booking your next session.
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Yes. We typically start with the usual 50 minutes, but some couples prefer more time. We can discuss options as we go.
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Our Guelph therapy office is at 15 Surrey Street West, and we run sessions over video anywhere in Ontario or Alberta.
