Sydney Couple and Family
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Sydney Couple & Family is a blog that offers marriage counselling and couples counselling services, as well as family counselling to improve all your relationships. Follow this blog for relationship, family advice and much more.
Sydney Couple and Family
6M ago
Many couples come to see us for things like communication issues or feeling disconnected.
However, we have a lot of couples who seek couples therapy because there has been a trauma in their relationship history.
What constitutes trauma in a couple’s relationship? A common one is a betrayal of some sort. A betrayal might be an affair, visiting prostitutes, gambling, addiction issues, violence, persistent lying in a relationship and so on.
There are also other types of traumas that bring couples in for couple therapy. For example, traumatic births, death of a child or other sig ..read more
Sydney Couple and Family
8M ago
Every single one of us drags our past experiences – good and bad – into our relationships. This is hard enough for all couples. But if you or your partner have a trauma history, the degree of difficulty goes up significantly.
Trauma is usually categorised into acute, chronic and complex. The causes of trauma are varied. The most common type of trauma we deal with at Sydney Couple and Family Specialists is complex trauma caused by traumatic experiences in childhood.
These days, there’s much better awareness about what trauma is and how it can affect someone. For couples it can mean that one or ..read more
Sydney Couple and Family
10M ago
A large number of the couples who come to us for couples counselling are parents who have different – and sometimes conflicting – approaches to parenting their children.
It’s not surprising really. Being on the same parenting page can be challenging for any couple. That’s because when people partner-up, they bring ideas informed from their own family experiences to the relationship. We all have different experiences of being parented. But this is not always obvious or even relevant until the couple has children. I very often hear that people have made the assumption – without really exploring ..read more
Sydney Couple and Family
11M ago
Couples I see in couples counselling often state “improving intimacy” as a goal for their work with me.
There are different types of intimacy and it’s not all just about sex and touching. Intimacy is also about communication and time together.
There are many reasons you might need help with intimacy. There could be trust and attachment issues stemming from past traumas. There might be unresolved resentments in the relationship. Sometimes the demands of children, careers, finances and just existing in Sydney get in the way. Once you add behaviours like looking at phones in bed, working long hou ..read more
Sydney Couple and Family
1y ago
When a person receives a cancer diagnosis it is like a tsunami has hit. One day you wake up and hear news which means life will never be the same again. It’s a shock and it’s surreal.
This article addresses the impacts on a couple, when one of the partners has been diagnosed with cancer.
What are the impacts of a cancer diagnosis on a couple?
People process things differently and on different time frames, which means their emotional responses and needs are different. If you add extremely high emotion, fear, grief, and the disruption of normality, it’s understandable that misunderstandings, co ..read more
Sydney Couple and Family
1y ago
Many couples in the early stages of their relationship push aside value differences, hoping everything will work out, only to find these differences cause big problems down the track.
Differences in values can cause deep resentment between couples and even lead to separation. Many couples say looking back they could see the “orange flags” but ignored them because they were in the throes of love.
Not all differences in values are a deal-breaker. Sometimes partners complement each other with their differences. And sometimes the solution to a difference in values is simply to accept t ..read more
Sydney Couple and Family
1y ago
The terms ‘separation counselling’ and ‘divorce counselling’ describe counselling for couples or individuals who want support while they go through the process of formally ending their relationship. The process is the same, regardless of whether they have been legally married or not.
In my Sydney practice we see a lot of couples who seek separation counselling because there are children involved and they intend to co-parent them. Finance and asset distribution are also common challenges. And we see individuals who want support and guidance before they start the process of divorce or separation ..read more
Sydney Couple and Family
2y ago
The lockdown in Sydney has been challenging for all of us, but especially for couples who
are working and have children and teenagers in the home. I am hearing this in my couple
and family counselling work, and also living it!
Parents have found themselves working (sometimes longer hours than before), supervising
home schooling, cleaning and then trying to come up with different activities to keep their
kids off screens and connected to friends. Many couples tell me they have no time for
themselves individually, let alone as a couple – and certainly very little privacy as the kids
are always t ..read more
Sydney Couple and Family
3y ago
Most relationships are cross-cultural to a degree – two people coming together from different backgrounds, families and environments. For some, differences will be minor and easy to adjust to. For others, who are trying to accommodate major differences in beliefs, values and ideas, it can be difficult.
In my couple and family counselling practice, I often see couples from different backgrounds who struggle to see each other’s perspective and find it difficult to make key life decisions together. Things that initially didn’t seem important when the relationship began can become far m ..read more
Sydney Couple and Family
3y ago
In my Sydney family counselling practice, I see many adult families who are struggling with a difficult parent, sibling or child and are using estrangement to manage their relationships.
There may be very good reasons to distance yourself from your family/a family member and put strict boundaries on the type and frequency of contact with them. However, completely cutting off from a family member – in particular a parent – has long-term ramifications not only for the people directly involved but also for future generations.
Why do cut-offs happen?
Unresolved hurt or con ..read more