Couples Counselling
What is Couples Counselling?
Couples counselling is a supportive and confidential space where partners can strengthen their relationship, improve communication, and work through challenges together. With the guidance of a trained therapist, couples are encouraged to explore patterns, understand each other’s perspectives, and develop healthier ways of relating.
Whether you’re navigating conflict, dealing with a significant life change, rebuilding trust, or simply wanting to deepen your connection, couples counselling offers tools and insights to help you move forward. It’s not about placing blame—it’s about creating understanding, fostering resilience, and supporting partners to build a stronger, more connected relationship.
Couples Counselling
at Home & Family
Home & Family have offered services to Christchurch families since 1898 and is one of New Zealand’s oldest charities. Throughout this time, our work has centred on rebuilding resilience in the face of conflict and hardship, supporting individuals and whānau to create long-lasting, positive change.
While much of our history has focused on safeguarding and strengthening the lives of vulnerable children, our couples counselling service reflects these same enduring principles. By drawing on professional, evidence-based intervention, we support partners to navigate challenges, improve communication, and restore connection.
Couples counselling at Home & Family provides a safe and confidential space where both partners can be heard, understood, and supported. Our therapists work alongside couples to foster insight, reduce conflict, and build the foundations for healthier, more resilient relationships—contributing to stronger outcomes not only for the couple but for the wider family as well.
Couples Counselling
Framework –
‘Our House’
Our House is a bespoke framework that helps couples understand and reshape the emotional patterns that sit beneath conflict, disconnection, and distress. Rooted in Family Systems theory, Culturally Competent Practice, trauma and attachment, Our House supports partners to identify the needs driving their reactions, communicate more openly, and build stronger, more secure emotional bonds.
At Home & Family, we draw on skills from a wide range of knowledge, reflecting our long-standing commitment to fostering resilience, connection, and healthy relationships. Through our process, couples are guided to slow down reactive cycles, explore underlying emotions, and create safer ways of engaging with each other. This allows partners to move from patterns of conflict or withdrawal toward deeper understanding, empathy, and trust.
Our couples intervention typically unfolds across three key stages, with a mix of couple’s sessions and individual sessions. We promote couples counselling as a brief intervention, working over a course of 6 – 10 weeks to support the following stages:
- De-escalation – identifying negative patterns that keep the couple stuck and helping both partners understand the emotions and unmet needs driving these cycles.
- Restructuring interactions – supporting partners to express vulnerability, tune into each other’s emotional signals, and respond in ways that build connection and safety.
- Consolidation – strengthening new patterns of communication and reinforcing the couple’s ability to navigate future challenges together.
While Our House underpins our couples work, Home & Family recognises that every relationship is unique. When helpful, our therapists integrate additional psychological frameworks such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), draw on EFT skills (Emotionally Focused Therapy) or other skills-based interventions to ensure the support offered is responsive to the couple’s wider context and individual needs. This blended approach supports couples where they are at, and allows for flexibility and attention to specific needs within a relationship.
Booking Sessions
Cost: $139 per session. To be paid at the time of booking, this will hold your agreed slot.
You can directly select the practitioner you would like to book a session with.
Client Testimonials
“Yes, [the impact] changed our whānau. We are healing and reflecting on our journey. I think I am being way more compassionate to myself and this has good flow-on effects in my relationship, parenting and career.”
“Don’t wait until you are in crisis point before getting help. We were in trouble for years and from the outside our family probably seemed fine. But we weren’t. It is fine to be vulnerable and there is support available.”
“It clarified why we had problems parenting and being together. It got to grips with our differing values. H&F set up an environment where we both felt listened to and how to be respectful of each other in the space.”
