Couples Therapy for Gay Men in Croydon

Some couples arrive mid-argument. Others arrive having not properly argued in two years.

You might be here because the same fight keeps happening in different words, and you both know your lines before the other one speaks. Or because one of you had an affair, or something nobody has yet agreed what to call. Or because sex stopped, and not talking about it has become its own subject.

You might be here because nothing is obviously wrong, which is harder to raise than something being wrong. You're pleasant with each other. You're busy. You're good company at a party and strangers by the time you get home.

You might be two years in, serious for the first time, already recognising a pattern you have been in before. Or fifteen years in, wondering whether this is what it is now. Or one of you wants to open the relationship and the other said yes without meaning it. Or one of you uses and the other has stopped asking.

You don't need to have worked out which of these it is, or to have the language for it. Most couples can describe the surface and not much underneath. That is the ordinary place to start, not a sign you have left it too late.

I'm a BACP registered psychodynamic therapist, currently in advanced training at Tavistock Relationships, working with couples in Croydon. Couples therapy here goes after the pattern rather than the latest instance of it, which is why it reaches things that another conversation at home does not.

You each arrived in this relationship with a different sense of what closeness is safe, shaped by how you learned to attach long before you met. So you end up following rules the other one never learned. One reaches and the other withdraws. Or you are both so careful that nothing real gets through.

We look at what each of you is protecting when you turn away. What feels too dangerous to want out loud. What you are each afraid you would find if you stopped managing it and actually looked at one another.

And we won't only talk about it. Whatever happens between you at home will happen here too, in the room, where we can finally see it and work with it instead of managing around it.

You might have been together eighteen months or eighteen years. You might be in open crisis or quietly disappointed. One of you might be certain this is worth doing while the other is coming mainly because you asked, which is a normal way to start and worth saying in the first session rather than sitting on.

You don't need to have diagnosed the problem, and you don't need to agree on what it is. You need to want to understand it, and you need both of you in the room.

We meet in person at my Croydon practice, near East Croydon station and Reeves Corner. Couples come from Croydon, South Croydon, West Croydon, Purley, Wallington, and nearby parts of South London. I don't offer online couples therapy: both of you attend together, in the room, because that's where the relationship can actually be worked with.