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Couples Counselling

NEW CLIENT CONSULT

How can couples counselling help?

Every relationship goes through periods of disconnection, conflict or change. Couples counselling offers a space to slow things down, understand what is happening beneath recurring patterns, and learn new ways of reaching one another.

Couples counselling can help you:

Communicate

  • Understand the patterns that keep you stuck in the same arguments
  • Communicate needs, feelings and concerns more clearly
  • Reduce criticism, defensiveness, withdrawal and escalation

Repair

  • Rebuild emotional safety, trust and connection
  • Learn how to repair after conflict rather than letting hurt accumulate
  • Strengthen friendship, affection and intimacy

Move Forwards

  • Understand each partner’s triggers, attachment needs and protective responses
  • Navigate difficult decisions or transitions with greater clarity and respect

What can couples counselling help with?

Couples counselling can support partners facing many different relationship challenges, including:

  • Recurring arguments or communication difficulties
  • Feeling emotionally disconnected, lonely or misunderstood
  • Trust concerns, betrayal or infidelity
  • Differences in needs for closeness, affection, sex or independence
  • Parenting and blended-family challenges
  • Stress related to work, finances, caregiving or major life transitions
  • Conflict related to different communication or coping styles
  • Trauma or past experiences affecting the relationship
  • Rebuilding connection after a difficult period
  • Strengthening an already healthy relationship
  • Deciding whether and how to move forward together

What kind of couples counselling do our therapists provide?

Every couple is different. Our therapists tailor couples counselling to the relationship as a whole while also considering the experiences, needs, histories and nervous systems of each individual within it.

Depending on the couple and what brings you to therapy, our couples therapists may draw from the following approaches…

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Gottman-Based Couples Counselling

Gottman-based couples counselling draws from decades of research on what helps relationships thrive or become distressed. Therapy may focus on changing destructive conflict patterns, strengthening friendship and emotional connection, improving communication, and learning practical ways to manage conflict and repair after hurt.

Terry Real’s Relational Life Therapy (RLT)

Relational Life Therapy, developed by Terry Real, takes an active and direct approach to helping couples recognize the patterns that create distance or conflict. It emphasizes accountability, relational skills, healthy boundaries and learning to respond from a more grounded, connected place rather than repeating protective patterns from the past.

Emotionally Focused Couples Counselling (EFT)

Emotionally Focused Therapy helps couples understand the emotions and attachment needs underneath conflict, withdrawal or disconnection. Rather than seeing one partner as the problem, EFT helps couples recognize the cycle they become caught in and create greater emotional safety, responsiveness and connection.

Trauma-Informed Couples Counselling

Past experiences can shape how we respond to closeness, conflict, vulnerability and perceived rejection. Trauma-informed couples counselling helps partners understand these responses with greater compassion while building safety, regulation and healthier ways of connecting. When appropriate, individual trauma work may also complement couples therapy.

Our Couples Therapists

Rosemary Holt, Registered Psychotherapist at Blue Shores Counselling in Collingwood and Stayner.

Registered Psychotherapist

Bio

Rosemary Holt

Registered Psychotherapist

Bio

Julia Lippert

Christina Malley, Registered Psychotherapist at Blue Shores Counselling in Collingwood and Stayner.
Bio

Christina Malley

Cassandra Kustec, Registered Psychotherapist at Blue Shores Counselling in Collingwood and Stayner.
Bio

Cassandra Kustec

Andrea Foster, Registered Psychotherapist at Blue Shores Counselling in Collingwood and Stayner.
Bio

Andrea Foster

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Couple Therapy

Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT)

Emotion-focused therapy can help you understand and transform the emotional patterns that shape your experiences and relationships. Rather than avoiding emotions, EFT helps you safely explore them so they can become a source of insight and healing.

Research shows that working through emotions in this way can lead to powerful shifts in self-understanding and connection with others.

EFT is particularly helpful for relationship challenges, as well as anxiety, depression, and trauma recovery.

Gottman Couples Therapy

Gottman Couples Therapy is based on over four decades of research into what makes relationships succeed or struggle. This approach can help you strengthen friendship, improve communication, and learn practical tools for navigating conflict in healthy ways in your relationship. You and your partner can learn how to understand each other more deeply and rebuild trust and emotional connection. Many couples find that this work helps them move from feeling stuck or disconnected toward a more supportive and fulfilling partnership.

Polyvagal & Somatic Therapies

Polyvagal theory allows you to understand how your body’s threat and safety systems operate and why certain reactions, such as anxiety, shutdown, or hyper vigilance, can occur.

Understanding the biology of your nervous system patterns can be incredibly empowering.
Through gentle awareness and regulation techniques, clients learn how to release stored stress and restore a sense of safety and balance in the body.

Somatic work can be especially helpful for trauma, chronic stress, anxiety, and emotional overwhelm, helping you feel more grounded, regulated, and connected to yourself. In turn, you can experience more connected, present, and joyfully engaged in life and in your relationships.

You can move out of survival mode and toward greater calm, resilience, and emotional freedom.

Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)

Internal Family Systems (IFS) views the mind as made up of different “parts”: your protective parts, your wounded parts, and your inner wisdom.

Rather than fighting against difficult emotions, IFS helps you understand and heal the parts of you that carry pain, fear, or shame. Through this process, many people

Equine Assisted Psychotherapy

Equine-assisted psychotherapy involves working alongside horses in a therapeutic setting to support emotional growth and healing.

Horses are highly sensitive to human emotions and can provide immediate, honest feedback about how we relate and communicate. This experience can help clients develop self-awareness, confidence, emotional regulation, and trust.

At Blue Shores, we offer highly specialized Equine Assisted Psychotherapy that integrates trauma therapies, including EMDR and DBR in the presence of our horse friends. Many people find that working with horses in this way creates powerful breakthroughs that complement traditional talk therapy.

Play & Sand Tray Therapy

Play and sandtray therapy provides children with ways to express feelings and experiences that may be difficult to put into words.

Through creative play, storytelling, and symbolic expression, children can process emotions, build confidence, and develop healthier coping skills.

These approaches are widely used in child psychology and supported by research in emotional development and trauma treatment. Parents are often included in the process so children feel supported both in and outside of therapy.

Neurofeedback Therapy

Neurofeedback is a brain-based therapy that helps regulate how the brain functions by providing real-time feedback about brainwave activity.

Using specialized technology, you can learn to strengthen healthier brain patterns associated with focus, calmness, and emotional regulation. Research shows neurofeedback can support concerns such as ADHD, anxiety, trauma symptoms, sleep difficulties, and mood regulation.

Over time, this training helps the brain become more balanced and resilient.

Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) Trauma Therapy

Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) is a neuroscience-based therapy that works with the trauma responses that live in the deep areas of the brain.

DBR is both innovative and well-researched, with promising results for relief from PTSD symptoms. It focuses on subtle physiological reactions that occur before conscious emotions and thoughts arise.

DBR therapists help their clients’ nervous system process deeply held trauma and attachment wounds through this gentle therapy and can help clients heal from traumatic injuries (including complex trauma and attachment wounding).

Mindfulness Based Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (MCBT)

Mindfulness-based therapy combines psychological science with mindfulness practices that help you become more present and aware of your inner experience.

Instead of being overwhelmed by thoughts or emotions, you learn how to observe them with curiosity and calm.

Research shows mindfulness can reduce anxiety, stress, depression, and emotional reactivity while increasing resilience and well-being. Through guided exercises and reflection, clients develop the ability to respond to life’s challenges with greater steadiness and clarity.

EMDR Trauma Therapy

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a highly researched trauma therapy that helps the brain process and resolve distressing memories.

When difficult experiences are not fully processed, they can remain “stuck,” continuing to affect emotions, beliefs, and relationships.

EMDR uses structured techniques and bilateral stimulation to help the brain reprocess these memories so they lose their emotional intensity. Many clients find that EMDR helps them move beyond trauma, anxiety, and negative self-beliefs toward a greater sense of safety, freedom and enjoyment of life.