We offer support to couples, relationships and marriages of all genders, sexual orientations, faith backgrounds, and ethnicities.
Our counselors are skilled in addressing all types of conflict in couples therapy to bring a healthy resolution. Some of these include healing from infidelity, sexual issues, lack of intimacy, loneliness and isolation within the relationship, communication issues, and more.
We want to assure you that you don’t need to give up hope on having a positive, passionate and intimate relationship with your partner.
By working through the issues that have resulted in years of pain and hurt, and learning healthier communication patterns, intimacy and closeness can be made possible again. Learn more
Here at Couples Counselling Calgary, we offer a diverse range of counselling services available in the Calgary area or online. If you’d like help improving your relationship through couples counselling, please contact us today.
Our team of couples counsellors are fully-trained, registered psychologists. We have worked with individuals and couples to improve relationships of all kinds for over 20 years. It has been our immense privilege to witness relationships between couples come to life again as trust is restored, hurts are forgiven, and healthy patterns are established.
At Couples Counselling Calgary, we believe in the power of commitment to a relationship. Committed relationships are not meant to be boring, lifeless, or stagnant, but rather, deeply fulfilling, nurturing, and supportive to both parties. The goal of couples counselling is to get your relationship back to a place where it is free to thrive, sustaining permanent bonds that will provide both partners with a satisfying and enduring relationship.
We also understand that faith can play a big role for many couples in their relationships. If you are seeking couples counselling from a Christian or faith-based perspective, we’d be happy to incorporate that aspect into your sessions with us. We welcome you to contact us for more information.
The team of registered psychologists at Couples Counselling Calgary use a wide variety of therapeutic techniques and skills, including:
Integrated Therapy: Integrated therapy is the process of intentionally drawing upon a variety of therapeutic tools and approaches to meet each client's needs. It is the opposite of a one-approach-fits-all perspective. By selecting elements from various schools of psychotherapy, your counsellor is able to create a therapy that is relevant to your unique needs as a couple.
Emotion-focused Therapy: Emotion-Focused Therapy is a therapeutic approach that affirms the crucial role of emotions in forming identity, attachment, bonding, decision-making, and more. It has become a foundation of nearly all couples counseling and has a very high success rate. EFT is an incredibly effective therapy to increase emotional awareness and help individuals and couples learn to feel, express, regulate and share their emotions.
Systems Theory: Systems therapy is very relevant to couples counselling. This therapeutic approach views the organism from a holistic perspective and seeks to treat the issues accordingly. In couples counselling, the system we are addressing is the intimate relationship between two persons (and each individual's totality within that relationship). Through the top-down lens of systems theory, we work with couples to restore the well-being of the relationship as a whole, instead of focusing on just a particular set of behaviours.
Couples Counselling Calgary offers therapy services that are available to everyone - including but not limited to those who:
It is helpful to understand some of the traits that are necessary to achieve success through couples counselling. The following example demonstrates a common scenario among those who come to see us at Couples Counselling Calgary and portrays the kind of couple that will make good candidates for therapy:
A couple who has been together for eight to ten years comes to see us for help because their relationship is in trouble. They may have one or more children. Often such a couple is currently or previously separated, or on the brink of separating. They are dealing with issues of communication and intimacy and are often no longer having sex. Each partner can see the value of the other individual, but they have almost lost hope that they can make the relationship work.
Typically, one or both partners has made an effort in the past to improve things - they’ve read a few books on communication and intimacy or they’ve talked to friends or taken a course. They have often tried couples counselling in the past with one or more therapists to heal the relationship, but have been unsuccessful. Issues such as communication breakdown and unresolved conflicts have continued, and they are tired of a distant, sexless, emotionally disengaged pattern of relating to each other.
Simply put, they want their relationship to change.
One of the common themes we address at Couples Counselling Calgary is intimacy in the relationship. A couple may still love each other, but they need to establish or re-establish an intimate connection with one another.
That’s where couples counselling comes in.
The first step in working towards intimacy in the relationship is for couples to understand the difference between love and intimacy. For example, intimacy means allowing oneself to be deeply known by another person so that your deepest needs can be met, while love has more to do with commitment and affection. We can feel many feelings of positive affection and regard for the other person and at the same time be experiencing a lack of intimacy. Without intimacy, an individual will not feel known and truly seen in the relationship and their partner will not be able to meet their needs.
Not surprisingly, couples counselling is sought out by couples who long to experience intimacy with their partner. They are tired of a lonely, solitary relationship and each partner wants to be part of the solution in seeing emotional intimacy and sexual intimacy restored. They know that the growing level of bitterness they feel is due to a lack of intimacy and they want and need this to change. They have a goal of experiencing wholeness in their relationship and are ready to do the work needed to resolve conflict and achieve healing in the relationship.
Maybe you identify with this couple - you’re feeling desperate for intimacy and feeling invisible in your relationship and you’re ready to put in the work of couples counselling so your relationship can heal. If that’s you, you can consider yourself an ideal candidate for couples therapy.
Please feel free to contact us at Couples Counselling Calgary to book a session or to learn more about our wide range of services. Our team of registered psychologists serve as couples counsellors in the Southern Alberta area. In addition to our physical location on the prairies, we offer many other forms of support that can be accessed remotely through our online counselling services.
Please contact Couples Counselling Calgary today to learn more about how we can support you and your relationship through our proven counselling services.