When you still love each other and it still isn't working
Specialist relationship counselling with a BACP Accredited counsellor. Ninety-minute sessions, fortnightly, for couples who are tired of having the same conversation.
What couples bring me
Different presenting problems. Usually the same underlying work: find the pattern, change it together.
Communication
How you talk to each other when it actually matters, and what happens when that stops working. Not communication skills in the abstract. The specific way the two of you go wrong, at eleven at night, in your own kitchen.
Boundaries
What each of you lets in and what you let out. This is the frame underneath everything else, and most couples have never once discussed it directly. When boundaries are clear, a great deal of the arguing simply stops.
Parenting
Raising children together without losing the relationship underneath it. Different instincts, different childhoods, and a couple who have not had an uninterrupted conversation since 2019.
Neurodiversity
ADHD and autism in a relationship, diagnosed or suspected, in one of you or both. So much of what gets read as not caring is actually a difference in wiring, and naming that correctly changes what is possible.
Warmth, closeness and sex
Finding your way back to affection and to actually liking each other. Couples talk about sex last and worry about it first. It is not an awkward add on to this work, it is often the whole point of it.
Play
All adults need to play. Most couples I see have quietly stopped, usually without noticing, and a relationship with no play in it becomes an administrative arrangement. Getting that back is as much of the work as anything difficult.
I'm Luke Brownlee-Williams
I'm a BACP Accredited counsellor and clinical supervisor, and I have spent my career working with relationships, both as a therapist and as the person other therapists bring their difficult cases to.
I trained specifically in couples work at The Gestalt Centre in London. Relationship counselling is its own discipline, with its own training, and it is the one I chose.
I have also been married for ten years, I grew up in a single parent family, and I know from the inside what it takes to make step parenting work. None of that is what qualifies me, the training does. But it does mean that very little of what couples bring me is abstract.
You won't be handed to an associate. You'll see me.
More about meLuke Brownlee-Williams
- BACP Accredited counsellor
- Clinical supervisor to other therapists
- Specialist couples training, The Gestalt Centre, London
- The relationship is the client, not either of you
- Clifton, Stroud and online
Ninety minutes. Fortnightly. No sides taken.
A clear framework, not endless talking, and not a referee's whistle either.
Minutes, not fifty
An hour isn't enough for two people. By the time you've both said what happened, it's gone. The longer session is what lets us get past the incident and into the pattern underneath it.
Days between sessions
The work happens between sessions, not in them. You need time to catch yourselves doing the thing we named. That noticing is where change actually starts.
Sides taken
I'm not there to decide who's right. The relationship is my client, and both of you need to believe that or neither of you will be honest with me.
Almost every couple is caught in a cycle: one partner steps back, which makes the other push harder, which makes the first step back further, and round it goes. Most couples can feel it and can't name it. Naming it is where it starts to loosen.
Two ways in. Most couples take the first.
The Foundation Package
Four 90-minute sessions with a clear beginning and end.
- Together. Map the landscape, find the pattern
- One of you. Space to think without managing anyone
- The other of you. Same time, same attention
- Together. Name the cycle, agree what changes
Ongoing sessions
Book as you go, usually fortnightly. Continue after the package, or start here if you would rather.
- No package required, no minimum commitment
- Some couples come for six sessions. Some for a year.
- Stop and come back later if life changes
- Clifton, Stroud or online
Start with a free 30-minute callNo charge and no obligation. Tell me what is going on and decide whether I am the right person.
Book the callDifferent presenting problems. Usually the same underlying work.
Find the pattern. Change it together.
The hardest part is the first phone call
Thirty minutes, free, no obligation. You tell me what's been happening and we work out together whether I'm the right person for it. Either partner can make the call.
Book a free 30-minute call