Counselling services
Couples Therapy
Repair your relationship with couples counselling.
What is Couples Therapy?
Couples therapy is a practice through which a couples therapist and a couple work together to create a desired change for a relationship.
Couples/marriage therapy is often helpful when couples are struggling or experiencing relationship problems or strain and aren’t sure if they can save the relationship — or want to end it and get a divorce with dignity. It can also be a useful first step if the couple is experiencing a crisis, such as the loss of a child, a job, or an affair.
Couples attend therapy to build skills that can help them strengthen and improve communication and deal with life transitions and various issues, including:
- Conflict
- Trust issues
- Sexual and intimacy pain, anxiety or issues
- Financial issues
- Co-parenting children
- Extended family issues
The Difference Between Healthy and Unhealthy Relationships
Healthy relationships:
- Have experiences that allow a couple to maintain a strong friendship
- Deal with issues and concerns in a productive way resulting in more peace
- Support the hopes and dreams of each partner
- Hold the ingredients of trust—including speaking gently to each other and having:
- Boundaries
- Reliability
- Responsibility
- Accountability
- Integrity
- Generosity
- Non-judgment
Unhealthy relationships:
- Are not equal and reciprocal
- Hold no goodwill towards the other people
- Ignore the needs of the other person
- Are overrun with criticism, stress, grief, anxiety, hatred, defensiveness, inconsistency, non-reliability, and boundary violations
- Often include gaslighting
Signs You Should Seek Couples Therapy
- Your partner asks you to come to therapy
- You and your partner are fighting or having disagreements more often than spending time together
- You find yourself thinking of another person
- Your friends and/or family comment on how much you fight
- You’ve thought about therapy for some time but have been putting it off
- You have a deep sense that you’re in trouble and need help with your relationship issues
Is Couples Therapy Right for You?
Have you found yourself wondering, is couples therapy right for me? Consider some of the following questions to determine whether you might be a good candidate for counselling.
- Do the problems persist, even with your efforts to change the situation?
- Are you motivated to make your relationships better?
- Does your partner want to attend (or is willing to try) relationship/marriage therapy?
- Do you have the space and time to commit to attending relationship counselling, either in person or online therapy via video call?
- Have you investigated the Gottman method and feel that it’s a good fit for you?
- Have you looked at the profile of your counsellor and feel that they are the right fit for you?
Get the Help You Need to Rebuild Your Relationship
- Pain
- Constantly fighting
- Feeling as if you can’t relate to them
- Stress
- Feeling disconnected from your partner
- Or you’re struggling to recover from infidelity
Our Approach to Couples Therapy in Calgary
The Gottman Method
- Becoming better friends
- Learning to manage conflict
- Creating support and dreams for yourselves and your coupling
01. Build love maps.
02. Share fondness and admiration.
03. Turn towards.
04. Have a positive perspective.
05. Manage conflict.
06. Make life dreams come true.
07. Create shared meaning.
We’ll use the Gottman-based approach and technique that works to help you achieve long-term happiness. First, you’ll attend a session as a couple for a couple’s interview. Then, you’ll each attend separately for individual therapy. This helps your relationship therapist assess your dynamic together, but also allows them to understand both sides of your experience as a couple and evaluate necessary relationship problems or concerns.
EMDR Therapy and Couples EMDR Therapy
- Attachment trauma
- PTSD or excessive worry as a result of infidelity
- Walking away—and not returning to discuss the situation
- Yelling
- Emotional dysregulation and anger
- Sexual shutdown or physical touch triggers
- Anxiety disorders
- Depression
Get the Help You Need to Rebuild Your Relationship
Frequently Asked Questions
To help you better understand couples counselling, here are some of our most-asked questions (and answers) about the process.
Yes. Counselling services are considered psychotherapy. Each counsellor at Can’t We Just Get Along Counselling is a trained and licensed therapist, third-party providers will accept their credentials to cover the fees.
We recommend contacting your insurance provider to confirm how much your benefit plan covers.
Since the needs of each couple vary, it’s difficult to give an exact timeline. With that being said, couples who are working on building communication skills typically attend counselling every two weeks for about three months. Issues, concerns, and pain of a great need, such as infidelity, tend to take longer.
Any change—even good change—can sometimes cause secondary losses and gains. Therapeutic interventions and treatment will produce positive and negative side effects.
Some couples report improvement after simply making the counselling appointment. This is a phenomenon called “pre-counselling change,” whereby just knowing that you’re going to counselling can improve things. Other couples report positive changes after the first session.
Negative side effects from counselling can include experiencing uncomfortable feelings and emotions as you talk about the issues concerning you. Your counsellor will be there to assist you and is trained in various strategies to address these side effects.
After treatment, almost 90% of clients say they’ve seen progress in their emotional health and nearly two-thirds report improvement in their overall physical health. Over 75% of those receiving relationship/marriage counselling or family counselling report an improvement in their relationships.
When a child is identified as a stressor in relationships, parents report that their child’s behaviour improved in 73.7% of cases. Outcomes show that parents get along with other children better and children’s school performance increases.
Yes. System theory asserts that one person can change a system. Sometimes, one partner going to counselling will motivate the other to attend as they begin to see positive and effective changes. If your partner never attends, you know you’ve done all you can on your side of the fence.
Sometimes, you won’t know if your marriage can be fixed unless you try. Couples therapy—including using the Gottman method—is so helpful.
If you’re unsure what to do with your marriage, considering a divorce/separation, or want to assess the strengths and weaknesses of your relationship, we recommend that you complete an online assessment from the Gottman Institute. This clinical research tool consists of 337 questions and your answers are completely confidential and fully compliant with HIPAA. Here’s how it works:
- Accept the email invitation—your relationship therapist will do the Enhanced Gottman Relationship Checkup
- Create a private profile
- Complete the questionnaire
- Get your results
Your couples therapist will contact and discuss the results with you and suggest a treatment plan for improving and strengthening your relationship based on your scores and the analysis of your relationship in hopes of creating a more fulfilling life for you and your partner.
