When couples first come to see me for marriage or couples counselling, they often want to know how the process works.
How long will we need counselling? What will we actually do in the sessions? And how will we know when we’re finished?
Over more than 16 years of working with couples, I’ve found that the most effective couples work tends to move through three distinct stages.
This isn’t a method I’ve taken from somebody else’s program or a rigid formula that I apply to every couple. It’s simply the way my approach has developed over many years of working with couples and observing what helps create meaningful, lasting change.
Every relationship is different, so exactly what we work on will vary. But the overall process generally looks something like this.
Stage One: Understanding Your Relationship
The first stage is about understanding what is actually happening in your relationship.
Couples naturally arrive focused on the problems. They might be arguing constantly, barely speaking, struggling with trust, feeling more like housemates than partners, or wondering how a relationship that was once good became so difficult.
Before we can make meaningful changes, I want to understand the relationship.
That means learning about you as individuals and as a couple: how you communicate, what happens when conflict starts, where you become stuck, what each of you needs from the relationship, what has happened over the years, and what each person brings into the relationship from their own experiences and family background.
We’re not simply identifying what you do. We’re trying to understand why you do it.
This is an important part of how I work. When couples understand why the same arguments or reactions keep occurring, their behaviour often starts to make much more sense. Instead of simply seeing their partner as difficult, uncaring, critical or withdrawn, they can begin to understand the pattern the two of them have become caught in.
But this stage isn’t just about talking and gathering information.
We’ll also start introducing practical tools quite early. If you’re having damaging arguments, for example, we may need to put some boundaries around conflict straight away. If communication is breaking down, there may be something different I want you to practise at home.
My aim is for you to start experiencing some change from the beginning rather than waiting weeks before we do anything practical.
Stage Two: Learning New Ways of Being Together
Once we understand the relationship more clearly, we can actively work on the areas we’ve identified as needing attention.
This is usually the most practical and active stage of couples counselling and the longest part of counselling.
What we work on will depend entirely on the couple. It might include communication, managing conflict differently, rebuilding trust, increasing emotional or physical intimacy, understanding each other’s needs, strengthening friendship, making time for the relationship, changing long-established patterns, or learning how to hear each other without immediately becoming defensive.
This is where I teach a lot of tools. I’m quite an interactive counsellor. I don’t expect couples to come in each week, talk about what went wrong and then go home and repeat exactly the same thing for another seven days.
I’ll stop you. I’ll ask questions. I’ll explain what I think is happening. We may unpack an interaction together and look at where it went off track. I’ll teach you another way of approaching it and give you things to practise between sessions. We use issues that arose during the time between sessions to learn new skills.
The work that happens between appointments is particularly important.
Ultimately, I’m not there when you’re tired on Tuesday night and an argument starts. I’m not there when one of you misinterprets something the other person says. And I’m not going to be sitting beside you years from now when life becomes stressful.
So the real goal is for the two of you to become increasingly capable of managing your own relationship.
And this is usually the stage where couples start feeling considerably better. It’s a relief for many couples.
Stage Three: Building a High-Performing Relationship
The final stage is about moving beyond simply fixing what’s wrong and learning how to maintain a strong relationship for yourselves.
It’s also the stage couples are most likely to skip and it is frustrating to see couples stop prioritising their relationship at this stage.
I actually explain this in the very first session. I tell couples that there will probably come a point when they’re feeling much better, counselling no longer feels urgent, and other things in life start taking priority.
That’s completely understandable. But it’s also exactly the point at which it’s easy to stop before we’ve finished the work. And even though I warn couples about this from the beginning, it still happens.
By this stage, the crisis may have passed. You’re arguing less. You’re communicating better. You feel closer. Home feels calmer. The very problems that motivated you to start marriage counselling aren’t demanding your attention anymore.
That’s a good thing.
But relief is not necessarily the same thing as lasting change.
The Personal Trainer Comparison
I often compare this stage of couples counselling to working with a personal trainer.
Imagine you decide to get fit because you’re unhappy with how you feel. You start training regularly, lose a little weight, become fitter and start feeling much better.
Then life gets busy. Because you’re feeling better, training doesn’t seem quite as important anymore. Other things take priority and you stop with the personal trainer and exercise on your own but not as regularly. You start by using the skills they have taught you but eventually those fade.
A year later, you may find yourself less fit than you were when you started.
Relationships can work in much the same way.
Once the immediate distress has gone, the relationship naturally stops feeling like such a priority. But if you’ve learned enough to settle the immediate problems without fully consolidating the changes, old habits can gradually creep back in. Often it happens so slowly that neither person notices.
This is also one of the reasons positive changes don’t always last.
A couple may have made significant progress and genuinely feel much better, but feeling better can make it easy to step away before the new ways of relating have become well established.
The old patterns developed over years, and while they can change, lasting change takes some consolidation. Stage Three is about making sure the improvements you’ve worked hard to achieve don’t simply fade as normal life takes over again.
This habit forming stage is incredibly important for creating lasting change.
Counselling Should Become Less Frequent
Importantly, completing this final stage doesn’t mean continuing frequent counselling.
Quite the opposite. As a couple progresses, I deliberately start spacing sessions further apart.
You may initially have been coming weekly or fortnightly, but by this stage appointments might be monthly or even six weeks apart. That space is valuable. It gives you time to live your normal lives, use the tools without me, encounter the inevitable bumps along the way and see how well you can manage them yourselves.
When we meet again, we can look at what worked, where you became stuck and whether there’s anything else we need to strengthen. The third stage is really about testing and consolidating what you’ve learned.
Can you recognise the early warning signs that you’re slipping back into an old pattern?
Can you communicate differently when something difficult happens?
Can you repair things when they go wrong?
Do you both know how to reconnect when life gets busy and the relationship starts slipping down the priority list?
At this point, you’re no longer simply trying to have fewer problems.
You’re learning how to look after your relationship well without needing a counsellor to do it with you.
We continue spacing things out until eventually we reach the point where all three of us can confidently say: we’re done. That is an amazing moment for me too!
My Goal Is to Work Myself Out of a Job
That’s ultimately what I want for every couple I work with.
I don’t want couples dependent on counselling indefinitely. In fact, one of the nicest parts of my work is reaching the point where we sit together and agree that there really isn’t anything else we need to work on.
It doesn’t mean you’ll never argue again. Healthy couples still disagree. It doesn’t mean life won’t throw difficult things at you. And it certainly doesn’t mean you can never come back.
Some couples choose to return occasionally for a tune-up. Others come back if they hit a particularly difficult period or something significant happens in their lives.
The difference is that you now know how to look after your own relationship.
You understand your patterns. You recognise when you’re starting to slip into them. You know how to communicate differently, how to repair things when they go wrong, and how to reconnect when life starts pulling you apart. And these skills are now a habit you lean into immediately.
For me, that’s successful couples counselling. My goal isn’t to have you coming to see me for years.
My job is to work myself out of a job. And it genuinely feels good when I do.
Marriage & Couples Counselling in Baulkham Hills
I provide practical, interactive marriage and couples counselling in Baulkham Hills, working with couples from Castle Hill, Norwest, Kellyville and throughout the Hills District.
My approach focuses not only on understanding what’s going wrong in your relationship, but on understanding why it’s happening and giving you practical tools to create lasting change.
If your relationship has become stuck in conflict, distance or repeated patterns that you haven’t been able to change yourselves, you can learn more about my approach to marriage and couples counselling or book an appointment online.
Book a couples counselling appointment online with Affinity Counselling.
As always, here if you need.
Marriage and couples counselling in the Hills District.