Couples Therapy in Croydon

I am a specialist relationship therapist working psychodynamically with couples in Croydon. This isn't about communication techniques or learning to argue better. It's about understanding what's actually happening between you.

The problem usually isn't that you don't communicate. It's that you each brought a different instruction manual to this relationship - written in childhood, in houses with different atmospheres, different dangers, different ways of surviving. You're following rules the other person never learned.

So you end up in this dance. One of you pursues, the other withdraws. Or you're both so careful with each other that nothing real gets through. Or you fight about money when it's really about power, about sex when it's really about worth, about whose family to visit when it's really about who gets to matter.

In our sessions, we look at what's underneath all that. Not just what you're arguing about, but what makes these particular arguments feel so annihilating. What each of you is trying to say that the other can't seem to hear. What you're both afraid of that you haven't named yet.

We won't just talk about your relationship - we'll watch it happen in the room. The dynamics that destroy you at home will show up here too, where we can actually see them and work with them.

Couples who are properly tired. Not "we need a weekend away" tired but "I don't know if we can keep doing this" tired.

Maybe you're great in a crisis but terrible at Tuesday evening. Maybe you haven't touched each other properly in months. Or years. Maybe one of you had an affair and you're both trying to rebuild but don't know how. Maybe the same argument keeps happening in different words and you're both exhausted from it.

You don't need to know what's wrong. You just need to know that what you're doing isn't working anymore.