Family and Relationship Counselling

You might be here because

• The household has become tense and nobody is naming why
• A parent and an adult child are barely speaking
• Expectations about marriage, duty or career are pulling in opposite directions
• A change — illness, migration, loss, separation — has unsettled everyone
• The same conflict repeats across generations

None of that has to apply exactly. People often arrive unable to name what is wrong, and that is a perfectly good place to start from.

What the work looks like

Family work looks at the pattern rather than the person. Sessions may involve everyone or only some of you, depending on what is workable. Where families hold different expectations across generations or cultures, that is treated as part of the picture rather than something to be explained away — you will not have to translate it first.

Approaches most often used

• Emotion Focused Family Therapy

  EFFT extends the same emotion-focused work to families, and treats parents and caregivers as the people best placed to help — not as the problem to be managed around. It builds practical skill in responding to a family member’s distress, and works directly with the blocks that get in the way of that: fear of making things worse, exhaustion, and self-blame.

  More on EFFT →

• Emotionally Focused Therapy

  EFT is a short-term, structured approach to relationship distress, grounded in attachment theory. It works on the emotional cycle a couple gets caught in — the pursuit and withdrawal underneath a recurring argument — rather than on the content of the argument itself, with the aim of re-establishing a secure bond.

  More on EFT →

• Culturally Sensitive Counselling

  Therapy that does not require you to translate your life before you can talk about it. Culture, faith, migration, and what a family expects of you are treated as context to be understood rather than symptoms to be worked around — and sessions can be held in your own language. Nothing you bring has to be explained from first principles or defended.

  More on Culturally sensitive →

• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

  CBT is a short-term, goal-oriented, practical approach to problem-solving. I use it to change the patterns of thinking or behaviour sitting behind a difficulty, and so change the way you feel. It is used for everything from sleep problems and relationship difficulties to substance use, anxiety and depression.

  More on CBT →

Further reading

• Language and culture

  Why counselling in your first language is different work

  Describing what happened in a second language and actually being understood are not the same task. For many people in Surrey, being able to speak in the language they think and feel in is the difference between the two.

• Before you book

  What actually happens in a first counselling session

  A first session is mostly you talking and me listening, with no obligation to tell the worst of it straight away. Here is what the hour is actually spent on, what I will ask, and what you are free not to answer.