Relationship Intensives  vary from couple to couple, as they are tailored to the relationship issues you are experiencing. Extensive assessment to gauge your unique couple needs are utilised and create a ‘blueprint’ for our therapy map and treatment goals. Depending on the extent of the couple conflict and relational issues, some of the areas you can choose to cover in your immersion are:

• Diffusing and understanding your conflict 
• Understanding your conflict style and where it comes from
• Understanding your adult-attachment style nuances
• Strengthening friendship, admiration and deepening connection
• Building the couple’s relationship resilience through understanding your own and each other’s position in conflict and values
• Creating shared meaning by consciously designing your relationship
• Improving passion and romance

Relationship Intesives are suitable for:

• Couples who want a condensed and highly focused, individualised and  nuanced approach to their relationship issues.
• Couples keen to deepen their relationship intimacy quickly and concisely, to finally understand each other, learn a shared relationship language and keep the tools to continue their connection at home after the immersion
• Couples who want to kick-start their longer-term therapy by initiating therapy with thorough assessment, treatment planning and conflict de-escalation and relationship stabilisation
• Couples who feel they are ‘too busy’ for weekly counselling sessions
• Couples who are experiencing significant relationship distress

How is a Relationship Intensive different to traditional couples therapy?

This 3 day immersion is a dynamic alternative to traditional weekly sessions. It’s a condensed and focused approach to relationship counselling that will provide you with the time you need to address specific issues and get your relationship back on track quickly. 

In this powerful approach to relieving couple distress, you and your partner will meet privately with a highly educated and experienced therapist for three consecutive days and engage in intensive couples therapy and move through your challenges quickly to repair and rebuild your relationship.

What to expect

You will have the time to deeply rewire targeted struggles and challenges of the relationship that simply cannot occur in the traditional styles of couples therapy. There is time to process past unhealed emotional injuries, and space to understand how these injuries have impacted the partners, the relationship and you get to process through to resolution of the targeted issues or conflicts. There is space to learn and integrate the communication skills to help you have more productive conversations. There’s time to redesign and rebuild your relationship to be more satisfying, connecting and help you to understand and reduce anxious and avoidant tendencies.

Hollie will provide a warm and safe environment for both partners. You are treated with dignity and respect, without judgment, throughout the process. Couples who have experienced this form of therapy usually describe it as transformative.

Benefits of intesive couples therapy

Relationship Intensive Therapy is combined with EMDR and offers practical benefits as well. It’s a good fit for couples who want a more immersive experience of therapy and for couples whose schedules do not allow for them to go to weekly therapy sessions. 

During your immersion, you work together with Hollie to learn new skills to:

• Transform inevitable relationship conflicts so you can build solid bridges between the two of you
• Deepen your understanding of one another
• Repair old hurts and resentments
• Understand what keeps you stuck in conflict cycles
• Unearth the values and life purpose you share
• Strengthen your friendship
• Spice up your intimacy

Preperation is required

Prior to your immersion, you will each be emailed a Gottman Connect questionnaire for each of you to complete. This questionnaire help us to understand both your individual histories and the history of your relationship as well as some of the main issues that have developed over time and bring you to couples therapy now.  It also helps us fast track your therapy. 

Based on all of this information, along with your responses to our comprehensive relationship questionnaires, we conduct an analysis of your interaction patterns, strengths and challenges. These findings will be shared with you so that we can collaboratively identify your specific outcome relationship/ couple goals for your relationship.

Assessment Process

The Intensive requires the thorough assessment process to be completed before commencement. This is three face to face assessment sessions:

• one face to face 90 minute couple session to outline the issues and goals followed by one 1-1 individual session each to outline your relationship needs and goals prior
• OR online assessment + individual assessments to be completed external to the three days of Relationship Therapy.

Your commitment to rebuild is key

Couples who have engaged in this process have reported that in the three day block of work, they were able to process their most specific pressing unresolved cyclical disagreement that kept them feeling unheard and distant from themselves and each other. They gained a deep sense of understanding and connection with each other which results in a renewed sense of commitment, closeness and hope for designing their relationship future to be more satisfying and intimate together. 

Once you have made a decision to engage in intensive therapy, it is very important that you try to “call a truce” on the on-going issues in your relationship for the time being.  Relationship Intensive Therapy is a commitment to rebuild your relationship and the process begins right now.  Whatever issues you are currently struggling with will be addressed accordance to your couple goals over our three days together in a way that allows both of you to feel heard, understood and validated.  Effectively, what this means is that for the next few weeks until we get started you can ‘shelve’ your problems knowing that they will be addressed then, and now is an opportunity for you to have a break from working on those concerns and instead focus on what you would like to build once we have effectively dealt with them together.

Investment

The including costs are the Gottman Connect and three intensive days working on your relationship in a safe, calm, nurturing and private environment with the full attention of one of our highly trained and experienced clinicians, a toolkit full of resources and information to take home that assists you to continue to deepen your emotional connection and master the skills for constructively managing conflict and keeping conscious connected relationship as a priority for you both. 

Relationship Intensive Therapy is NOT suitable for:

• Couples where there is domestic violence in the relationship (including physical, sexual, emotional, financial violence and power and control patterns)
• If one or both partners have serious mental health issues (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, BPD). This may not include conditions that have been successfully treated in the past.
• If there is an undisclosed affair or an ongoing affair that the partner is not willing to cease connection and contact with.
• If either partner is currently experiencing suicidal or self-harming thoughts.
• If one or both people in the couple have an active, current drug or alcohol addiction

 T&Cs, Fees for sessions & Cancellation Policy is available here.

Relationship Retreat Counselling Intensive (3 day immersion):

• Gottman Relationship Check-Up Assessment, Attachment Origins Questionnaire and Relational Philosophy an initial couple session + an individual session each (fee separate to Relationship Retreat 3 day intensive price) to be completed around four weeks prior to Relationship Retreat session.
• Delicious morning tea cakes from local cafe
• Relational Origins EMDR; Parts Clinical Resource Therapy, + Gottman Therapy tailored program
• Relationship Retreat Intensive Sessions: Held over three days $5400.00 inc GST (non-refundable deposit payment of $2700.00 required to hold your dates. Weekend Retreat $5800.00 inc GST. All travel and accommodation costs are the responsibility of the client)
• T+C’s via link above and on fees page