PSYCHOTHERAPY

Couples

Relationships within couples require a dynamic balance between feelings of security and of lust, of belonging and autonomy, intimacy and sociability, routine and creativity. The clinic offers to help the couple to resolve conflicts, to discuss traumatic experiences and to change repeated negative emotional cycles. This is achieved through the mitigation of major events and developments, the establishment of new ways to be and act within a couple, the mobilisation of domestic and exterior resources.

Family

Many families come up against challenges such as loss, illness, depression, adaptation to a new culture, immigration and other crucial transitions such as adolescence, separation, divorce, family recomposition/blending, adoption and ‘coming-out’. Employing the models and techniques of systemic-interpersonal psychology and of developmental psychology, the clinic’s work with the family aims to change the interpersonal processes which, in the family’s history, led to the types of behaviour that brought the family to the clinic in the first instance. It is thus a process of establishing a credible alternative to such psychological suffering, to recognise and to re-establish interpersonal relations but also to support their journey towards psychological resilience.

New Couples and Families

The nature of the couples and families varies, particularly in their composition (separation, divorce, recomposition/blending, single parenthood) and in the gender and/or sexual orientation of partners and parents (homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality) Whilst these couples and families face similar challenges to those of traditional families, they also pose their own distinct difficulties:

• «When she’s with her children it’s as if I don’t exist». (A step-father).
• «She’s not my mother; it’s none of her business». (A teenager in a reconstituted/blended family).
• «I don’t know if I’m a good mother anymore, I can’t look after them like I need to now … I can’t balance work and family life anymore… I no longer have a life of my own.». (A mother following a separation).
• «I don’t dare talk to my girlfriend about my bisexuality… I feel like I’m deceiving her…». (A bisexual adult).
• «If my parents knew they’d kick me out of the house». (A young lesbian girl).
• «I’m afraid that I’ll lose my job if I ‘come out’». (A young transsexual).
• «My partner has ‘come out’, but I haven’t. That’s caused problems between us.».
• «We’d really love to be able to walk hand in hand in the street». (A gay couple)
• «It would be so good to be able to show our true selves». (A lesbian couple).
• «He came back from school in tears because they’d started making fun of him again for having two lesbian mothers.». (Son of a lesbian couple).

Within the framework of psychological treatment, we are there to support individuals, couples, families, parents and children in order to help them live through new emotional experiences and choices.