Couples therapy aims to help couples in relationships work through and improve certain relational difficulties or dynamics that they might be experiencing. There is a preconceived notion that a couple might only engage in couples therapy in moments of crisis or when there a breakdown in the relationship. On the contrary, couples therapy can be an incredible powerful healing space to process a relationship at any stage, whether married or not. This includes navigating relationship difficulties, rebuilding potential breakdowns or to be able to improve communication in order to protect, strengthen, and enhance current relationships.
Couples therapy can have a long lasting and positive impact on each relationship. It can also help you to navigate into a clearer mindset of what you might want your relationship to look like.
Types of Couples Therapy
There are many types of couples therapy including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Gottman Method, and Emotionally Focused Therapy. When working with couples, I maintain my work pluralistically as a Counselling Psychologist, which means that I take into account current context of each individual and collaboratively discuss with you on what works best for you and how I can best support you.
In my work with couples, I lean into a slightly heavier focus within a model known as Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). EFT is an evidence-based model that helps us to build strong and secure connections with those closest and who matter most to us. This is done by having a strong focus on your attachment and bond between the both of you. We will aim to have an in-depth understanding of the many ways you get stuck and how the communication between the both of you may have become conflicted and you end up being upset at each other.
We want to get to know your specific interactions and patterns to understand how to enhance and improve communication and relational patterns. This helps to build a sense of safety and security.
How Our Sessions Might Look Like:
Using a pluralistic approach, sessions in couples therapy might look like this:
Introduction session: We will aim to get to get to know you as a couple and how your relationship looks like at the moment. Within this session, we will also get a little bit of understanding around the problems or difficulties you are currently experiencing in your relationship.
Individual sessions: After an introductory session, I will see each person separately for 1-2 sessions to get to know you a little bit better outside of your relationship. In these sessions, the aim is to find out how you are currently experiencing your relationship. The focus of these individual sessions will still be on your relationship and these individual sessions will look different from the usual individual therapy sessions.
Weekly/fortnightly couples sessions: Within these sessions will be when the work begins. Together, we will explore your past, the present difficulties, any hopes for the future, and to reflect and bring into the space strong feelings and emotions that might arise within you. This is done by inviting any emotions that might be coming up for you to enter into our shared space slowly to uncover things that might not often be said or might be difficult to bring up. The goal is to help make the space safer for each of you to be able to share new ways of communicating and being with each other that would help build up security, allowing you to be heard and met individually and together.
Arrange a couples therapy session:
If you would like to find out more, please do reach out to our admin team (call or WhatsApp +60 12 5089910 or email info@resolve.my) to schedule an initial session. Let them know you’d like a couples therapy session with Dr Wong Sing Yee.
In our first meeting together we can discuss how I can best support you and your relationship.
