Online Couple Counselling
There is no degradation in quality when comparing Online Couple Counselling with Couple Counselling within a counselling room. Online Couple Counselling can help you turn your relationships around and build relationships that last the test of time. No matter the type of relationship; Intimate Couples, Married Couples, Business Partners, Separated or Divorced Couples, Siblings, Parent and Child, Friendships… Couple Counselling can help you resolve issues, improve communication and understanding, and develop healthy sustainable relationships.
Online Counselling
When accessing our online counselling you are justified in expecting the best. With Online Counselling there is no degradation in quality in any way whatsoever. In fact, generally, online Counselling has some basic advantages:
- More Choice – Rather than being limited to the Couple Counsellors in your geographic area, online Couple Counselling offers an almost unlimited choice. Providing there are no language barriers and time differences permitting, Online Couple Counselling will allow you to access Skills and Experience that ordinarily you would be able to utilise.
- Better Couple Counsellors – Your local Couple Counsellors may be brilliant, but equally, they may not. Being able to access Couple Counsellors outside of your geographic area, means that you are no longer limited to local quality. You can access high-quality, skilled and experienced counsellors Nationally and Internationally.
- Convenience – Depending on the relative positioning of your Couple Counsellor’s office, travel may be inconvenient. Seeing your Couple Counsellor in the comfort of your home or office removes the need to travel.
- Office Hours – You may wish to see your Couple Counsellor outside of regular office hours. A Couples Counsellor in a different time zone may permit a time shift that will facilitate early or late appointments.
- Expense – If you have children, you can often save the expense of a babysitter or the difficulty in finding one, by arranging online appointments once the children are in bed.
Online Couple Counselling
Specific advantages of Online Couple Counselling:
- Relaxed – Together, in their own environments, couples are more likely to display their genuine behaviour rather than perform to the standard which they think is appropriate to a counselling situation.
- Estranged – Estranged couples living in separate households who may have difficulty being in the same room, who still want to resolve their issues and differences and repair their relationship, can both attend online couple counselling without having to be pushed together in the same room.
- Mediation & Coparenting – Separated or Divorced couples and parents who have fractious relationships can come together in a managed meeting in the safety of their own environments without the risk of having a meeting in person in the same space.
- Safety Management – When it comes to bad behaviour, including aggression, abuse and intimidation, it is easier for a therapist to manage an online meeting. Bad behaviour within Online Couple Counselling can be muted or ejected without debate and without affecting the other party.
Online Couple Counselling Process
Online Couple Counselling is not an ‘open’ unmanaged process, nor is it what you see in the media, cinema or TV, where one person dominates or abuses the other by berating them. Nor, as sometimes portrayed, should the Couple’s Counsellor side with either party or use the opportunity to exorcise their own issues rather than help the couple or punish either client as a proxy for a person from their own life or seek to validate their own choices and position. Nor is it a meeting in which the couple rehash old ideas, repeat and reinforce unhealthy patterns of behaviour, compete with each other for supremacy, blame one another, belittle one another or anything of that sort. Or at least, it should not be that way and we do not permit any of that.
Online Couple Counselling is a professionally managed meeting with purpose, and achievable goals, managed by a skilled, experienced professional. It is a healthy and safe environment for all concerned encouraging, honesty, truth, genuine understanding, effective communication and connection. It is an opportunity to learn from the past, enhance skills, and build something wonderful and sustainable.
The rules and requisites for couple counselling and developing healthy relationships are simple. Here are a few:
Participation – Both parties must be willing to actively participate. Online Couple Counselling is not a spectator sport.
Unhealthy Behaviour – Violence, Aggression, intimidation, bullying, provocation, and gaslighting, are just some of the behaviours that will not be tolerated within the appointment. The improvement of relationships requires good communication, understanding, acceptance and cooperation, therefore, a willingness to move in this direction away from the unhealthy is needed.
Skills – Creating and sustaining healthy relationships is in itself a skill and requires specific skills. By necessity, therefore, part of Online Couple Counselling will generally involve the practical improvement and gaining of skills.
Responsibility – While this may be difficult and seems increasingly unpopular in the modern age, Responsibility is key to improving a relationship. Each person must take responsibility both for themselves, their actions and the relationship. This is not about blame but rather it is about the power to change things. If one has no responsibility then one is merely a child, a puppet or a victim without agency or autonomy. Those without the ability to assert agency or autonomy will have great difficulty in creating and sustaining a healthy relationship.
Needs – A significant part of being in a relationship is to get one’s needs met. However, many people do not know what their own or their spouse’s needs are or how to get them met or meet them. Discovering needs and how to meet them is part of the online couple counselling process.
Reputation – Within all relationships, persons, organisations, and businesses are reputed to be a particular way. Thus, a reputation is the accumulation of beliefs and conclusions drawn concerning the subject of the reputation. Reputation is the way you perceive your spouse, partner, friend, child, parent, colleague, etc. which then predetermines the nature and quality of communication and interactions. Each person must recognise both the reputation that others have concerning them and the reputation that they maintain concerning others. How you are perceived and how you perceive matters.
Competition – While Divorce courts may encourage an adversarial approach, such an approach is antithetical to healthy relationships.
Blame – While responsibility is a requirement, blame is not, either of oneself or the other. Villifying yourself or others is unhealthy and unhelpful. Pushing blame onto others denies your own involvement and power. To change anything you will need power to effect that change. Victimhood is unhealthy. Infantilising the other is also unhealthy.
Truth – Another requisite is that healthy relationships are based on truth and reality and not delusion, deceit and manipulation.
Honesty – Honesty is another trait but it also must be combined with kindness, charity and empathy, otherwise, honesty is just cruelty, an opportunity to say unkind things and justify them by calling them one’s ‘honest truth’.
Personal issues – While personal issues do affect relationships they will not be dealt with in couple counselling. For example and anger or anxiety issue is better dealt with in a separate individual appointment.
Joint Issues – If the same personal issue is suffered by both parties, to some degree there may be some benefit to working together to resolve a degree of it.
Distractions –
Abuse – If either party is abusive, or neglectful and wishes to continue the behaviour and justifies the behaviour, there is little the Online Couple Counsellor can do. The counsellor is not a miracle worker and also has no power to enforce a change.
Notes – TonicTalk counsellors do not take notes of what is said during an appointment. This is so that each party may talk freely without fear that if the relationship fails and they end in court, notes cannot be subpoenaed to be used by one party against the other. TonicTalk counsellors do not involve themselves in court cases. See our Terms and Conditions
It is not for an Online Couple Counsellor to side with either of the parties. The counsellor is there merely to facilitate the improvement of the relationship and not decide who is good or who is bad or who is to blame, etc. We are an impartial service dedicated to helping others.
Online Couple Counselling Catchment Area
Due to time differences, TonicTalk’s Online Couple Counselling is not a world worldwide service. Also, not being a multilingual service limits its reach to English speakers.
Fees for Online Couple Counselling
TonicTalk applies a standardise rate of fees.
Online Couple Counselling Fee: £80 for a 75-minute appointment. Additional time is pro rata.