Understand the patterns that keep showing up in your relationships, with a BACP accredited therapist.
Relationship difficulties are rarely only about the current person. They tend to follow us. You might notice that different relationships run into the same walls, that closeness triggers something in you that you cannot quite name, or that you keep choosing people who cannot give you what you need. Perhaps you are in a relationship that is essentially good and still find yourself pulling away, picking arguments, or feeling strangely detached. Perhaps you have just lost a relationship and are trying to understand what happened.
None of this is a character flaw. The way we do closeness is shaped, first and most powerfully, by our earliest attachments, and those patterns run deep. Understanding them is not about blaming anyone. It is about seeing clearly, so that something different becomes possible.
Individual therapy for relationship difficulties is not couples counselling. I work one-to-one with you on your side of the relational patterns you keep finding yourself in. That includes attachment patterns, the way conflict lands in your body, the old beliefs about closeness and distance that you may not even know you hold, and the unprocessed experiences that keep getting reactivated by people you care about.
The work draws on attachment theory, psychodynamic exploration and where relevant EMDR or parts-informed approaches for specific stuck points. It is slow, honest, and often quite moving. People do change how they do relationships. It just tends to take more than advice.
One of the most useful frames for understanding adult relationship difficulties is attachment theory, which describes the unconscious templates we build for closeness based on our earliest experiences with caregivers. There are four broadly recognised attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganised. Most people lean towards one as their primary pattern, sometimes shifting under stress.
Anxious attachment shows up as monitoring closely, fearing abandonment, and feeling activated when a partner is even briefly unavailable. Avoidant attachment shows up as distance, self-reliance, and a discomfort with too much closeness. Disorganised attachment, often the legacy of frightening or unpredictable early environments, shows up as wanting closeness and fearing it at the same time. Secure attachment, the goal, looks like the ability to be close without losing yourself, and to be alone without panicking.
The good news is that attachment patterns are learned, and what is learned can be unlearned. Therapists call this "earned secure attachment", and it develops through consistent experiences of being met, particularly within the therapeutic relationship itself. For many clients, the steady, attuned, predictable nature of weekly sessions over months or years is in itself part of the corrective work.
Across the relationship difficulties clients bring, certain themes recur. The push-pull dynamic, where you reach for someone and then pull away. The repetition of the same conflict in different relationships. The sense that you have to be small or self-erasing to be loved. The chronic mistrust or testing of partners. The collapse into people-pleasing or the eruption into criticism. The discomfort with conflict that means difficult things are never said.
None of these are about being bad at relationships. They are protective strategies that helped you cope with the relational world you grew up in. Understanding what they were originally protecting you from is often the first step to choosing differently in the present.
We begin by understanding what is happening now: the relationship or pattern that has brought you to therapy, what you have tried, and what you are hoping will shift. From there, we look at the history that shaped the pattern, not to explain it away, but to help you see it from the outside. As you understand it, the pattern loses some of its automatic power.
Individual counselling sessions are 50 minutes and cost £70. Sessions take place online across the UK via a secure video platform. I do not offer couples therapy; this is one-to-one relational work. There is a free 15-minute consultation if you would like to ask questions before booking.
No. I work one-to-one. Individual relationship therapy is different from couples therapy. We focus on your side of the patterns you find yourself in, the attachment dynamics, the family-of-origin shaping, and the personal work that often makes the biggest difference to how relationships unfold for you. Many clients find this kind of individual work more transformative than couples sessions.
The patterns we run in adult relationships are usually rehearsals of patterns from much earlier. The way you were attached to in childhood, what was modelled around you, what you learned to expect from love, all of these shape the unconscious template you bring to adult intimacy. The repetition is not random. It is your system trying to resolve old material in new contexts. Therapy helps you see the template clearly enough to change it.
Absolutely. Some of the most powerful relationship work happens when someone is single. Without the noise of an active relationship to react to, there is more space to look honestly at the patterns themselves. Many clients use the time between relationships to do this work, and arrive in the next relationship genuinely changed.
It depends what we are working on. Short-term work focused on a specific issue often takes three to six months. Longer-term work on attachment and family-of-origin material typically runs over a year or more. We discuss what feels right early on and review together as we go.
Sessions are 50 minutes and cost £70, online via secure video. There is a free 15-minute consultation if you would like to ask questions before booking.
If the same relationship dynamics keep showing up, therapy can help you see them clearly and start doing things differently.
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