Couples & Marriage Therapy
What Does Couple’s Psychotherapy Look Like?
Couples therapy provides a space for partners to navigate challenges, improve communication, and deepen their connection. At the Centre for Psychodynamic Insights, our approach further explores how past experiences, attachment patterns, and unconscious dynamics influence the relationship. This page will outline the types of couples therapy available, what sessions typically involve, how often they occur, and the approaches used.
What Can I Expect At This Clinic?
Psychodynamic couples therapy at the Centre For Psychodynamic Insights addresses the underlying emotional patterns and unconscious beliefs that shape relationship dynamics. Many of our reactions to conflict, intimacy, and communication stem from early life experiences and learned behaviours in relationships. Unresolved emotions and past traumatic experiences can unconsciously influence how partners interact, often leading to recurring conflicts or disconnection. Through therapy, our psychotherapists help bring these patterns to awareness, allowing partners to recognize their emotional triggers, express themselves more openly, and develop healthier ways of relating to each other.
What Can Couples and Marriage Therapy Explore?
Constant Conflict
Trust & Jealousy
Communication Difficulties
Life Transitions
Difficulties with In-Laws
Anger, Outbursts, & Violence
Parenting Differences
Resentment
Unmet Expectations
Betrayal, Affairs, & Cheating
Mental Health Challenges
Cultural & Religious Differences
Financial Stressors
Work-Life Balance
Difficulties with Intimacy & Sex
What Are The Frequency Of Sessions?
Psychodynamic couples psychotherapy is typically held 1 to 2 times a week to provide a consistent and supportive space for partners to explore underlying emotional dynamics, unconscious patterns, and conflicts. This frequency allows couples to process insights between sessions and maintains continuity in the therapeutic work.
What Therapies Do We Use in Couples Therapy?
Bowenian Family Systems Therapy
This systemic approach focuses on understanding how family dynamics and intergenerational patterns influence a couple's relationship. This approach highlights concepts like differentiation of self—the ability to balance emotional closeness and personal autonomy—and explores how unresolved family issues can show up within their dynamics. Exploring these patterns can help partners understand their emotional cutoffs, triangulation, and inherited anxieties, leading to healthier communication, emotional regulation, and setting stronger boundaries.
Object Relations Therapy
This therapeutic approach emphasizes how early attachment experiences and internalized relationships impact current dynamics between partners. It explores how each partner may unconsciously project unmet needs, fears, or past emotional wounds onto the other, leading to recurring conflicts or emotional disconnection.
Psychodynamic Attachment-Based Therapy
This approach focuses on how attachment styles formed in early life shape emotional needs, vulnerabilities, and patterns of connection within adult romantic relationships. This approach helps partners understand how insecure attachment patterns—such as avoidance, anxiety, or ambivalence—can lead to misunderstandings or emotional distance.
Emotion-Focused Therapy
This therapeutic approach focuses on the role of emotions as central to relationship patterns and emotional connection. This approach helps partners identify, explore, and express deep-seated emotions that often remain hidden beneath surface conflicts and allows couples to break negative cycles of interaction and create stronger, more secure emotional bonds. Through this process, the therapist guides partners in recognizing how past attachment experiences influence current relationship dynamics, helping them shift from reactive behaviours to more empathetic and supportive interactions.
Adlerian Therapy
Adlerian couple’s therapy emphasizes how early experiences, core beliefs, and social dynamics shape relationship patterns. It explores each partner’s private logic, or unique interpretations of experiences, which can lead to conflicts when they clash. By having a sense of shared purpose and using encouragement to highlight strengths rather than weaknesses, it can help couples shift from blame to mutual understanding and allows couples to uncover unconscious influences to develop a more conscious, collaborative, and emotionally connected relationship.