What is Relational Life Therapy?

Being in close relationship with other people is one of the most challenging aspects of adulthood.

In our jobs, education, hobbies – basically every other area of life – we expect to undertake training and deliberate practice before we can be good at them.

Only relationships (including parenting) appear to be the exception.

We learn how to be in relationship with others from our parents or caregivers. We learn by watching how they are with each other (if that even applies), how they are with us as children, and how they treat themselves.

We create beliefs about how all relationships should be without the consciousness or maturity to know we are doing so.

No relationship is perfect, because no individual is perfect. That’s how even people from relatively healthy family backgrounds still find themselves in strife in their intimate adult relationships.

Moreover, the relationships we observed growing up were those of the previous generation. Every generation has different expectations, different rules, a different cultural milieu to navigate. The arrangements of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations aren’t fit for purpose for our own relationships, so we must negotiate and renegotiate between us.

It’s for this reason that couples find themselves in a therapist’s office. Usually deeply unhappy, after years of clashing and increasing distance.

Couples counsellors are often trained in one or more modalities of treatment. They each take a different tack to identifying and working with the difficulties couples present with in the therapists’ office.

I chose to train and focus my practice on the Relational Life Therapy (RLT) model developed by Terry Real. Terry has been a couples therapist for over 40 years and is the author of Us, The New Rules of Marriage and I Don’t Want To Talk About It, as well as a trainer of couples therapists worldwide.

The reason I was attracted to RLT as a modality is its directness. Often in couples therapy there can be a slow warm-up, as the therapist works to gain rapport and trust with each member of the couple before they can be more upfront about the issues in the relationship as the therapist sees it.

This costs the couple in both time and money. While couples therapy is an investment worth making (and if it gets the results you want, arguably one of the most important investments of your family’s lifetime), no-one wants to spend more of either of those valuable assets in a therapists’ office than they have to.

As an RLT therapist, I hold at the centre of our work an unshakeable belief that that both members of the couple are decent human beings at their core. I have a background in forensic work that holds me in good stead to be able to separate people’s essential goodness from their not-so-good behaviour, as well as their ability to make life-changing progress if they choose to do so.

It’s because of this genuine belief that I am able to speak with true compassion and honesty about what I am seeing as the problematic behaviours in the relationship, and I do this from the first session, rather than waiting weeks or months. I do it out of respect for you and your family, your time and money, and your willingness to open up in front of me in my therapy room.

For more about what’s involved in your first couples therapy session, please see this post.

To start the intake process or for further information, please click here.