Sadly, Typical Couples Therapy Often Fails.

Typical couples therapy - or couples with with a non-specialise - can miss the mark, while Relational Life Therapy helps partners truly connect.

How A Different Approach Can Move You Forward

If you’ve ever sat in a couples therapy session thinking, "Are we just talking in circles?", you’re not alone. Many couples come to me after months — sometimes years — of therapy that felt like a dead end.

You’re both showing up, you’re saying the “right” things but nothing actually changes.

Often, the issue isn’t your commitment. It’s the approach and perhaps even the limitsof the expertise of the therapist.

The Limits of Generic Couples Therapy

Firstly, traditional or generic couples therapy can sometimes take a neutral, non-directive stance. The therapist might reflect what’s happening, create a safe space, and help you talk things through. And while that can offer relief in the short term, it often doesn’t shift the deeper relational dynamics that cause ongoing conflict.

What many couples need is not just space to talk — they need specific, skilled intervention that disrupts unhelpful patterns and introduces new relational habits.

Secondly, while many skilled individual therapists occasionally see couples, the truth is that working with two people in a relational system is a completely different skillset. Without specialist training in couples dynamics, especially from a model like Relational Life Therapy, even the most well-meaning therapist can inadvertently reinforce stuck patterns or miss crucial power imbalances. It’s understandable that many couples’ first foray is to speak with a trusted individual therapist, perhaps a therapist one of the partners has worked with in the past.

Yet, couples therapy isn’t just “individual therapy times two” or adding extra time to a session to give a bit more time for clients to vent in front of each other. It requires a therapist who knows how to navigate conflict in real time, hold both partners accountable with compassion, and guide the relationship pattern itself (in RLT we call this ‘The More The More’) as the client. Without that expertise, sessions can become circular, surface-level, or unintentionally imbalanced, leaving couples feeling more frustrated than supported.

That’s where Relational Life Therapy (RLT) comes in.

RLT: Clear, Active, and Transformative

Developed by Terry Real, Relational Life Therapy isn’t about sitting back and hoping for insight and time to do the heavy lifting. It’s about a trained therapist actively engaging with both partners, naming the power dynamics at play, many times teaching new skills and guiding each person toward more connected, respectful ways of relating.

As a trained RLT therapist, I’m not neutral when someone is being emotionally harmful or dismissive. I’ll lovingly call it out. I’ll help each partner understand the why underneath their behaviour. We work with what’s happening in the moment, not just what happened in the past.

Specialised Couples Therapy Makes a Difference

As well as specialist couples training, couples therapy work also requires training in relational systems, emotional regulation, communication repair, and in my case, an integration of trauma therapies such as IFS (Internal Family Systems) and Brainspotting when needed.

If you’ve been spinning your wheels in therapy that feels polite and kind but ineffective, it might be time for a different approach. One that gets under the surface, names what’s not working, and supports you in building the relationship you both long for.

You don’t have to stay stuck. Contact me here to arrange a free 20-minute consult.