Build the Connection You’re Craving

In our first session, we’ll spend a few minutes going over the informed consent form, and then most of our time will be focused on getting to know your relationship. I’ll invite each of you to share what hasn’t been feeling good in your connection, and where you’re feeling stuck. Sometimes it’s helpful to explore a specific moment—like a conflict or a time when one (or both) of you felt really disconnected. I’ll support you in sharing your perspective, and together we’ll start identifying the patterns that are keeping you in that stuck place. From there, we’ll begin to make a plan for moving forward.

In our first session, we’ll talk a bit about the story of your relationship and what’s been feeling off or difficult lately. One of the main goals early on is to identify the negative cycle that shows up between you—those repeating patterns that leave both of you feeling frustrated or disconnected.

After the first one or two sessions together, I’ll usually meet with each of you individually. These individual sessions help us understand what’s happening for you personally in the relationship dynamic. We’ll explore how your past experiences, including your family history, shape how you show up in your relationship now.

From there, we’ll come back together and focus on shifting those negative patterns, building better communication, and applying those new ways of connecting to real-life challenges.

Emotionally-Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT) is a research-backed approach that helps couples build stronger, more secure emotional bonds. At the heart of EFCT is the idea that our emotions deeply shape how we relate to the people we love. When we feel emotionally safe, we’re more able to open up, be vulnerable, and respond to each other with care. EFCT helps you recognize unhelpful patterns, express your deeper needs and fears, and learn how to respond to one another with empathy and understanding. It’s not a quick-fix approach—it’s about healing disconnection at its core and creating lasting, meaningful change.

It can be really frustrating when you want help for your relationship but your partner isn’t ready or willing. If you're trying to start that conversation, you might find this article about how to talk to your partner about going to couples counselling helpful. And if your partner still isn’t on board, you absolutely have the option to come on your own. Working on your side of the dynamic can still bring meaningful change to your relationship.

In the beginning, it’s usually helpful to come more frequently—about every 1–2 weeks. That way, we can build some momentum and you can get a real sense of whether your counsellor is a good fit. If your schedule doesn’t allow for that right now, it might be worth waiting until you can book in more consistently. You can also check out this article on how often to come to counselling for more guidance.

If we’ve only just started working together (around three sessions or less), then we can have a conversation about whether it makes sense to shift into couples work. But if we’ve been working together longer-term, I’ll usually suggest that you and your partner work with a different counsellor for couples therapy.

That’s because once we’ve developed a strong individual relationship, I may (even unintentionally) be more aligned with your perspective—and that doesn’t create a level playing field for your partner. In couples counselling, the relationship itself is my client, and my job is to support the bond between the two of you. I always want to do what’s most fair and helpful for your relationship.