Blog

What are the tasks for couple therapy in the wake of infidelity? How can we help clients to recover from betrayal trauma and move forward together? And what do ‘new monogamy contracts’ have to do with it? Ahead of PESI UK’s Women’s Trauma Summit this week, leading sex therapist and author Tammy Nelson outlines the crisis, integration and vision stages of this work in the light of a cultural shift from morality to transparency.

Sexual issues are often bound up with relationship difficulties, and encouraging conversation can lead to rapid change. Continuing her blog series, psychosexual therapist, supervisor and author Cate Campbell considers some common dynamics that can play out in couples’ sex lives and be addressed in any therapy – including the pursuer-distancer pattern, the role of hormones, the myth of spontaneity and the spiralling impact of simple poor timing.

What particular dilemmas might we encounter, and what unconscious pressures might we experience, when working with individual clients on their relationship difficulties? In the final part of her series, couples therapist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author Anne Power reflects on some common quandaries, including abusive relationships, partners who are critical of the therapy, and a pull towards psycho-education.

How can insights from Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy help individual clients? In the penultimate part of her series, couples therapist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author Anne Power outlines the EFT approach to working with relationship conflict, including regulating relational distress, amplifying attachment meaning and enabling helpful exchange – and explains why the ‘Pursuer-Withdrawer’ dynamic is both so prevalent and so pernicious.

Learning to talk with a partner about sex and intimacy is an important skill, and one we can help clients develop through individual therapy. In the fourth part of her series, couples therapist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author Anne Power explores various challenges and transitions that couples may experience in their sexual lives together – including aging, parenthood, and legacies of child sexual abuse – and shares how she learned as a therapist to broach the topic of sex.

Clients exploring their relationship difficulties in individual therapy are often preoccupied with one of two questions: ‘Is this really the person I married?’ or, ‘Is this truly The One?’ In the third part of her series, couples therapist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author Anne Power observes the various ways in which relationships may begin, including through dating sites – and considers the role of the individual therapist in helping clients work through the fears, doubts, regrets and feelings of loss that can ensue.

When we fall in love, we may be reuniting with undeveloped, feared or even hated parts of the self. In the second instalment of her series about how insights from couple therapy can enrich work with individual clients, couples therapist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author Anne Power looks at developmental and defensive relationship spirals, and shares her concept of ‘the fascinating and the familiar’ as a way to understand what we unconsciously look for in a partner.

How do insights from couple therapy enrich work with individual clients? In her new six-part series, couples therapist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author Anne Power will share what she has learned about couple dynamics and suggest how these understandings and concepts can contribute to individual therapy – starting with the link between attachment strategies and escalating relationship cycles.

One of the legacies of slavery and colonialism is a reluctance to openly discuss colour dynamics, leaving damaging inequalities to resonate down the generations. In the second part of her series, systemic therapist and Ancestral Constellations practitioner Sonya Welch-Moring describes her use of ‘diaspora dollies’ to draw out the stories around skin colour that can whisper through family systems.