Same-sex Marriage Counselling & Civil-Partnership Therapy

Tailored Relationship Therapy:

Dean's approach is all about creating a personalised therapy experience. Employing 25 years of knowledge he facilitates a collaborative process, incorporating your unique needs, ideas, and suggestions. This open, honest communication can lead to effective (re-)solutions.

Employing Your Strengths:

Avoiding a "one-size-fits-all" approach, Dean focuses on building upon your relationship's distinct strengths. Working together, a deeper understanding of your dynamics will become available, which can assist with developing your own effective tools for navigating and transforming challenges and conflicts.

Long-Term (Re-)Solutions:

This is personalised relationship therapy, empowering you to create lasting change. You can walk away with skills, knowledge and application that maintains your healthy relationship for years.

This is not always an easy approach—there'll be work for you to do, which can sometimes be stressful. But our aim is to mature this process into something unique, useful, and lasting to take away, having actively invested in its development.

One of the most common misconceptions about civil-marriage counselling is that the partners will come and describe their symptoms in order for the therapist to prescribe how they should go about dealing with their “illness.” Perhaps there’s even a hope that the therapist will fix the illness on their behalf.

As a result, the partners’ first disappointment may be learning how to manage their perceptions: “why isn’t the therapist fixing our marriage for us?!” or “why isn’t he telling us what to do?”. You can read more about this here: Why Relationship Therapy May Not Work….

(Re-)Solutions you’ve been Seeking

A systemic approach to same-marriage therapy / civil-partnerships can be the solution you’ve been seeking (but didn’t know it yet).

Systemic therapy is a framework that works for both civil-partnerships and same-sex marriages alike that gay men, lesbian women, bisexual marriages and those in the vast LGBT/QIA+ spectrum of gender identity and sexual diversity can make use of. The therapy offers LGBT/QIA+ marriages and civil-partnerships a distinctive way to address issues, move forward, and resolve conflicts with intimacy and/or sexual engagement.

As therapeutic allies, the three of us work together in weekly sessions. We discuss what will be the focus of our work at the outset. Partners coming into therapy  may believe they already understand their issues. When we start talking about things in depth, though, frequently there’s a realisation of deeper, more complex matters around the partners’ problem.

This is where Systemic therapy works well because noticing new material is good . Doing so suggests that the more knowledge we gain (through curiosity), the easier it becomes to break-down behavioural problems into more manageable pieces. Opportunities for change follows.

It might be a new concept to you: the idea that marriage therapy could have three stages.

But if I say: “Beginning, Middle, End” then this idea becomes more familiar.

It can be helpful for a same-sex marriage meeting with a therapist to identify stages, as without any form of a map or structure the process could seem daunting.

Even though marriage therapy builds its structure based upon the distinct needs from your partnership, having some mental markers (such as beginning, middle, end) can provide reassurance to the partners that the process is progressing as the marriage would like.

Lesbian and gay partners in civil-partnerships and marriages make use of the Three Stages of Marital Therapy as follows…  

Think of Therapy being like this:- 

A civil partnership (or marriage) comes to a therapist, and they’re carrying an open box with them. Within the box are many jigsaw puzzle pieces, all mixed up. Each jigsaw piece represents an aspect of the relationship, and the partners believe that all of the pieces are present in the box.

“Blue pieces are for the sky” says one partner.

“Wait… no! Blue pieces are for the sea!!” says the other partner.

An argument begins because, as we all know, a blue piece could be the sky, the sea, or something else. But this couple found that some blue pieces fit together while others do not, and they were trying to argue from the position of being “the partner whose view is the correct one”.

What we can learn is that the couple is arguing about their individual assumptions about blue pieces and how the picture should look based on these assumptions.

Using Two Video Devices

Dean has more than 16 years’ practice in working in LGBT Marriage-Therapy over Internet Video. His first private practice focussed upon gay & lesbian marriages in Long Distance Relationships (e.g. living in different countries).

Dean – along with his client partners – discovered that using one-device per partner (as long-distance partners could only do) was also therapeutically beneficial to those living together. Partners gave feedback saying it gave them a useful sense of “we’re not talking with each other at home” during counselling sessions. Topics too difficult to talk about at home became more accessible due to the use of two video devices. The approach enhanced discussions and the partners’ creativity.

You can attend therapy from your home, your office, your car, or even on a hike using a smartphone, computer or tablet. They all work well.

Flexible Video Arrangements

This is not a set-in-stone requirement; Dean’s distinct approach makes use of hardware already at the partner’s disposal: any mix of Smartphones, tablets, PCs, Macs. So we can be flexible with how we do this.

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