Contents
- 1 About Private Couple Counselling.
- 2 Counselling Services for Couples.
- 3 Video Counselling from your Home…
- 4 How does it Work?
- 5 Non-Traditional Relationship Counselling.
- 6 What Happens in Couple Counselling?
- 7 Topics Couples Discuss in Counselling.
- 8 Thinking about Separation.
- 9 Is Private Couple Counselling Effective?
- 10 Dean’s Distinct Approach to Couple Counselling.
- 11 Thinking about Divorce.
- 12 About Havant Online CounsellOR
- 13 Couple Counselling Fees.
- 14 Couple Counselling
- 15 Got a Question? Don't Hold Back…
Counselling for a Couple's Relationship.
About Private Couple Counselling.
When your most significant Relationship is in Conflict, and you’re Struggling together.
If so, then you may be surprised to learn how effective working with experienced private couple counsellor: Dean Richardson MNCPS (Accred/Reg) can be for your relationship… together.
You see it can be a massive relief to experience what a different, distinctly private perspective brings to a couple relationship in counselling. Although Dean is a fully qualified and experienced couple counsellor he has one advantage that you both do not… he isn’t involved in your relationship; he is able to assist you both see the wood for the trees.
Using a combined therapeutic approach (systemic / psychodynamic integrated relationship counselling) that has developed over more than 50 years a couple is supported in discovering their own root causes to their problems. Causes they haven’t been able to discover for themselves alone.
Remarkably, Dean avoids taking on the role of a “relationship expert” and, instead, empowers the couple much more effectively in discovering and developing their own resolutions to their ongoing problems.
The couple leave counselling without feeling dependant on Dean for future difficulties.
- Curiosity is encouraged (employing a bucket-load of therapeutic frameworks) – unpacking what’s central within arguments, conflicts and distrust bringing new knowledge to the relationship.
- New Knowledge brings new understanding to the couple.
- New understanding fuels the development of new relationship decisions (eg newer problem resolutions and/or conflict mitigation).
When your relationship is on the path towards struggling to exist and you’d like to bring back the happier, calmer times, Counsellor Dean would be the distinctly local, private couple counsellor (online via Skype & Zoom) for your distinct relationship.
Dean's Experience as a Couple Counsellor.
- Originally trained by Sue Esau (Relate couple counsellor and supervisor - retired) & Chris Vincent (Tavistock Clinic - now private practice, lecturer and author) via Chichester Counselling Services' Post-Graduate Diploma in Counselling Couples (systemic / psychodynamic), 2009-2010.
- 25+ years counselling experience: charities, EAPs, private practice, etc.
- Now exclusively available in private practice Hampshire & Secure Online Video.
Counselling Services for Couples.
No Waiting
NHS and charity counselling services often make you wait until a counsellor is available. Going to a private couple counsellor means you often have your first appointment arranged together for the following week.
Weekly
To be effective, couple counselling sessions are (of a minimum) weekly. Any greater time between sessions may weaken the therapy work. Regular sessions also help with budgeting, arranging baby-sitting, and provides containing sanctuary where your relationship receives focus.
Open Ended
Couples’ lives together are not limited by a fixed amount of time, so neither is couple counselling. We’ll first clearly identify the problems, then you will have a choice: work on the problems alone, or continue to work in counselling during regular sessions.
Suitable for…
Suitable for adult couples in any form of relationship (marital, intimate, friends, family, business, social, neighbours). Couple Counselling helps unstick the stuck – enabling you both to work together again.
Private counselling near me serving the UK Nationwide over Zoom & Skype, plus locations in and around, Havant, Petersfield to Waterlooville, Cosham to Portsmouth & Southsea, Southampton to Chichester, Fareham to Gosport, Hayling Island, Emsworth, Westbourne, Rowland's Castle, local residents anywhere in between and regularly further afield!
Video Counselling from your Home…
Dean has over 25 years experience of working in counselling, incorporating 17 years working via secure video conferencing apps (Zoom, Skype, etc). This means you can meet with Dean without ever having to leave home.
You can work with Dean in counselling remotely from your home, your office, your car (yup - some clients like to drive somewhere secluded for their sessions), or even your hotel room if you're away on business. Some people even like to go on a walk, or sit on a park bench. Provided their privacy is being looked after, Dean has no problems working like this.
Counselling sessions work in the same way as face-to-face sessions, except that you won't have to travel to, nor from, Dean's location.
Like to know more?
How does it Work?
In layman’s terms: Couple Counselling helps unstick the stuck.
Couple Counselling is an effective therapeutic intervention for adult marriages, intimate couples, platonic couples and social couples (e.g. friends, flatmates, neighbours).
Couple Counselling supports both you and your partner together in firstly identifying and then working-through the relationship’s problem(s) – working alongside your counsellor.
With the counsellor’s intervention, together you will actually be creating your own unique therapy, addressing the matters that are unique to your relationship.
Counselling comes to an end not (as you might expect) when all the problems are resolved, but rather when the couple identify that they can make the counsellor redundant. This also means that they may continue to work on current and future problems themselves without growing a dependence upon any therapist.
So, Dean’s approach to couple counselling helps the couple not only address current problems, but also prepares the couple to manage new conflicts in the future.
Couple Counselling with Dean Richardson using effective systemic / psychodynamic therapeutic interventions, without referring to religious or moral rules, encouraging a couple to teach each other how to work their relationship through conflicts in their own unique way.
IMPORTANT: when considering Couple / Marital Counselling via Video Conference (a speciality of Dean's practice) you need to be aware of Dean's approach. You will be using two x video devices (Smartphone, Tablet, PC, MAC, Chromebook etc), and you will situating yourselves in separate rooms. Read more about Dean Richardson's Distinct Approach to Video Counselling for Couples…
Basic Positioning for Couple Counselling:- the couple are situated more towards each other (to promote conversation between themselves ) but within the counsellor’s observation. The counsellor is available for interventions and consultation during the conversations.
This positioning is simulated in Video Counselling for Couples where the couple may use two individual video devices (and the counsellor a third device).
Non-Traditional Relationship Counselling.
Dean’s therapeutic framework for counselling couples allows all kinds of distinctly different relationships to work successfully on their problems…
- Open Relationships
- Polyamorous Relationships
- Kink/BDSM Relationships
- Friends-with-benefits (“fuck buddies”)
- Purely sex
- Affairs
- Parental/child relationships (adults only)
- Sibling relationships (brothers, sisters, twins)
- Flatmates
- Neighbours
- Friends
- Good-on-paper-but…
- Long distance
- Co Dependent / Independent
- Dominating / Submission
- Rebound
- Toxic
- “Trophy”
The systemic & Psychodynamic theoretical models Dean employs at his core avoids a one-size-fits-all therapy (that some try, unsuccessfully, to employ in a kind of manualised manner).
Together, Dean and your relationship work to learn from your particular form of relationship needs without imposing any form of judgement or offering any form of “a normal couple in your situation would…” prescriptive intervention.
In other words, it’s the two of you and Dean together that will hone the therapy into becoming effective for your particular form of relationship.
What Happens in Couple Counselling?
Generally the first few sessions of couple counselling are known as an assessment.
The couple and Dean work together to discover what the relationship needs to focus upon (“the focus”).
The couple might think they know what the problems are, but often they are surprised to learn new facts as we unpack the relationship.
As the focus is discovered in greater detail, some couples remain in counselling for support in working through the focus. Other couples leave counselling to work on the focus themselves. Either option is perfectly good for the couple relationship you both find yourselves in.
A primary aim of Dean Richardson’s couple counselling is:
- to enable the couple to see their relationship with different eyes,
- to listen with new ears,
- to empathise and be informed of your partner’s needs
- to tackle conflicts with a newer approach, informed by new information.
… and to make Dean, as the counsellor, redundant.
Topics Couples Discuss in Counselling.
Without going into the private details of couples Dean has worked with, here are some generalised topics that couples have worked through with Dean in counselling.
- Behaviour outside of the relationship's agreement (such as infidelity, sexual behaviour etc).
- Repeated arguments / unresolved discussions.
- Struggles with one partner's needs being unfulfilled (i.e. the other partner doesn't understand such needs).
- Difficulties with someone outside of the relationship threatening to expose private information about the couple.
- Incompatible needs from a partner (whether sexual, social, intimate or secret).
- Conflicts that are attributed to age differences (for example).
- Difficulties with the couple's family not seeing eye-to-eye with the couple's relationship (e.g. mixed religions, sexuality, race, colour, creed).
- Decisions about the relationship getting stuck (such as decisions that affect the family that the couple cannot agree upon).
- A difficult subject that cannot be brought up by the couple on their own (for example: gender transition, thoughts of separating, confessions).
- Sex or sexuality - difficulties expressing intimate need.
Thinking about Separation.
A couple can regard separation as a way to bring an end to their relationship, moving on from the problems. Couple Counselling, however, can effect a couple eager to identify their relationship problems (including problems they hadn’t previously recognised) and then become empowered to resolve their problems together.
All the couple needs to do is to take a step into couple counselling together to find out.
Couples that separate can reconcile, and couples that reconcile can separate, all perfectly normal during the time they are in counselling. The therapy work helps the couple negotiate through trying times to a final resolution to their relationship needs.
Is Private Couple Counselling Effective?
Dean’s post-graduate diploma in couple counselling employs an integrated systemic & psychodynamic theoretical framework. OK that’s a bit science-y. What this means:-
Likely to be Effective with…
- A couple who is looking for help to develop their own ways of addressing problems unique to their relationship (as opposed to expecting diagnosis and prescription from an “expert”).
- Assisting and empowering a couple in talking about how they both might like to change their relationship together. This is especially good when the couple (and counsellor) can tolerate “not knowing” how the outcome will be; allowing for inspiration and creativity to introduce new not-thought-of-before behaviour into the relationship.
- A couple who both wish to remain together, or who both wish to separate, may find the couple counselling process helpful.
- A couple who see the counsellor as a consultant; a partner in the developing process (as opposed to an expert with all the answers).
- Talking through problems that occurred in the past, but were never resolved to both partner’s satisfaction (eg old wounds).
- Identifying – simplifying – and altering – patterns of behaviour that the couple deem unhelpful to their relationship. Then introducing small, effective changes.
- Working with a problem that the couple have not been able to address together.
- Supporting the couple discuss difficulties in a safe, non-judgemental atmosphere.
- Interrupting the couple when their behaviour gets in the way of (what they would consider to be) progress.
- Assisting the couple introducing checks and measures into their relationship, so that old behaviour can be let go. This process can assist the couple long after counselling has ended.
Unlikely to be Effective with…
- A couple who wants the counsellor to fix their relationship (they have little interest in working the problems themselves).
- One partner who wants the counsellor to change their partner’s behaviour (eg has little interest in taking part in the process themselves).
- A couple where there’s a hidden agenda (whether with one or both partners).
- A couple who have mutually-exclusive agendas (e.g. one partner wants to rescue the relationship, and the other wishes to leave) UNLESS the couple can entertain the idea of compromise, or who may consider discovering a common goal. Without this, the couple are unlikely to be helped by this process.
- When one partner believes they are faultless and that the other partner entirely at fault; will not entertain the thought that they have have had a contribution to the other partner’s behaviour.
- Domestic Violence – unless both partners wish to make changes to violent/aggressive behaviour.
- One partner coming to help the other / has nothing to contribute to the work. Couple counselling involves both partners.
- When one partner was not informed about the other partner wanting to come to couple counselling (eg turns up on the day not knowing why). Both partners must make their own an informed decision about entering couple counselling.
Dean’s Distinct Approach to Couple Counselling.
- Dean's primary client is the couple's relationship (not the two individuals in the relationship). Inexperienced counsellors - or those untrained in relationship work - miss this important aspect when trying to work with a couple.
- Dean's primary aim is to become redundant: the couple can end their counselling work without thinking that they've become dependant on a counsellor; nor feeling they will have to come back for 'top up' sessions in the future.
- The couple stay only for as long as it's helping: meaning they might come to counselling for just a handful of sessions, or may choose to stay longer, until the couple can work on their relationship's needs on their own (again). Dean does not set a compulsory minimum (or maximum) period.
- The couple work with just the one therapist: and Dean practices "neutrality" which means both members of the couple will be understood by a single therapist (no risk of multiple interpretations by multiple therapists in the room). Plus? the common factors that are underlying the couple's relationship problems can be understood and communicated back to them by a single couple counsellor as a single, consistent, understandable whole.
- Dean does not solve the couple's current relationship problems. Dean is not a "Relationship Expert", doesn't promote his services as being so, and doesn't claim to have solutions and answers for the couple. Instead, Dean focuses on assisting the couple to learn and understand their own problems so that they can address and resolve matters using their own solutions.
- The couple develop their own unique approach that can be helpful for years to come. Looking at the relationship's problems as if they are a symptom of a system that has become faulty (say, like a washing machine that works until it comes time to rinse). Understanding? and then amending? the relationship's behavioural-system can help the couple understand what's at the centre of their problems. With understanding, the couple can learn to manage & resolve not only current problems? but future ones too? for themselves.
- Dean involves & immerses the couple in the counselling, rather than operating as a pseudo-advice-giving consultant with-all-the-answers.
- Dean's couple counselling approach integrates effective systemic and psychodynamic approaches. Rather than using whatever is the latest fad in therapy, Dean successfully applies methods that have been tried and tested for a long time (30+ years: systemic, 100+ years: psychodynamic). This helps the couple (through curiosity, hypothesising & modelling) learn what's happening in their relationship and then helps them develop their own 'fault' resolving strategies.
- Unlike some couple therapists who respond to questions with 'answers' (whether such generic answers can actually apply to the couple's specific relationship), Dean empowers the couple into being able to answer their own questions by understanding & resolving their own relationship-conflicts. This helps the couple become independent of the counsellor.
- Boundaries are important: the session is contained within 50 (or 90, optional) minutes, weekly, in a safe room, with the same counsellor. For example, the couple always knows that they can open up (difficult) topics but not fear getting swept up into long arguments? because the session's end time is set.
- Future "top-up" sessions become unnecessary: the couple ends counselling when they don't need the counsellor any longer. Dean doesn't "fix" the relationship for the couple, he assists the couple in learning how to fix their own relationship problems together. Added bonus: the couple uses the same techniques to manage future difficulties. Once the couple feel that they are more capable at addressing their relationship problems together, they can begin to bring couple counselling to a close without having to come back for "top-up" sessions (as if they'd somehow run out!).
Thinking about Divorce.
During my original post-graduate training in Couples Counselling, the tutors asked a question: “Is divorce a solution to a marriage falling apart?” Most students responded: “yes”. Both tutors responded: “No” and “No”.
I had replied “yes” because I thought if two people in a marriage were so unhappy, then of course divorce would be the solution to the couple’s problems. Some 18 months later (when I qualified) I was no longer so sure.
A couple can regard divorce as a way to separate from their marriage and move on from the problems. However, couple counselling can effect a couple eager to identify their marital problems (including problems they hadn’t previously recognised) and then become empowered to resolve their problems together.
All the couple needs to do is to take a step into couple counselling together to find out.
Couples that separate can reconcile, and couples that reconcile can separate, all perfectly normal during the time they are in counselling. The therapy work helps the couple negotiate through trying times to a final resolution to their relationship needs.
About Havant Online CounsellOR
You could choose any counsellor in and around Havant, 'natch!
Yet, when you think that this may be the most personal, private and possibly vulnerable you're going to be with someone professional, you'd probably choose:
- someone you can grow to trust,
- someone who demonstrates highly competent skills, ethics and sensitivity.
- someone who speaks plain English (rather than psychobabble),
- someone who's as happy to use base/swearing language as much (or as little) as you do,
- someone who considers himself a frank, no bullshit counsellor, particularly you when you're in need of an authentic response (rather than an "hmm"),
- someone who would become an equal part of your therapeutic partnership (e.g. doesn't just sit mostly in silence for 50 minutes).
Counsellor Dean Richardson MNCPS (Accred/Reg) - a simply private choice.
Couple Counselling Fees.
Couple Counselling
Counselling for an Adult Relationship- Suitable for individuals
- Suitable for couples
- Suitable for groups
- Payable weekly
- Available in Havant
- Available Skype/Zoom video
- 50 minute session
- 90 minute session (£125.00)
How Counselling Fees Work.
Unlike NHS services (where you have already paid through NI taxation), private counselling will cost you some money.
Couple Counselling sessions are weekly, and last for a standard 50 minutes (with the option to book 90 minute sessions if you both prefer). Although sessions are once a week (except for holidays), you may also attend more than once a week if all three of us think that this would be helpful.
Our sessions will continue one or more of us thinks that we've done enough; then we'll have a conversation about bringing our counselling work to a close.
Fees are payable on the day of our session.
You may pay your counselling fees online (e.g. by a bank transfer, credit/debit card payment or PayPal) or pay in person (cash, cheque [made out to Dean Richardson], credit/debit card).
Restricted Income: If I have spaces available, a lower fee is negotiable should your income make private counselling a struggle to afford. This is not charity (you still must contribute a fee) and it will involve discussing your income and expenditure with the aim to discover a rate that you can afford responsibly. I do not always have any lower-fee spaces available, so please ask when you first get in contact.
Got a Question? Don't Hold Back…
Got a question about Dean Richardson's counselling services in Havant (Hampshire)? Want to make contact, maybe asking about a first appointment? Send Dean a message any time…
