Many couples arrive at therapy not in crisis, but in quiet exhaustion. The arguments have become circular. The silences have grown longer. You still share a home, perhaps a family, a life — yet something between you feels distant in a way that’s hard to name.

If that sounds familiar, you are not alone. And you haven’t left it too late.

Brighton and Hove is a city that has long understood the human need for restoration. From its origins as the ancient fishing settlement of Brighthelmstone — recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 — to its reinvention as a Georgian health resort where the Prince Regent came to recover and be transformed, this stretch of East Sussex coastline has always been a place where people come to feel better.¹ That tradition continues today, expressed now through the growing number of couples who seek professional support to repair what daily life has quietly eroded.

What Brings Couples to Therapy in Brighton and Hove?

Brighton and Hove is one of the most distinctive cities in the UK. Approximately 10.7% of residents over 18 identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual — the highest proportion anywhere in the country.¹ It is home to artists, academics, professionals who commute daily to London, young families, retirees, and everyone in between. The city’s diversity is one of its great strengths. It also means that the pressures couples face here are varied and sometimes particular to this place.

Long commutes into the city from Brighton Station, the creative industries’ “always-on” culture, the high cost of housing, the juggle of parenting in a fast-moving urban environment — these are not small things. They accumulate. And when the relationship becomes the one place where those pressures get released, the connection between partners can quietly thin.

Some couples come to therapy following a specific event: a period of infidelity, a significant loss, the upheaval of becoming parents, or the disorientation of retirement. Others come because nothing dramatic has happened — but something has shifted, and they cannot quite get back to where they were.

Both are valid reasons. Both deserve unhurried attention.

Does Couples Therapy Actually Work?

This is a reasonable question, and it deserves a direct answer.

The evidence base for couples therapy has grown substantially in recent years. A 2022 study comparing video-based couples therapy with face-to-face sessions found that participants in both settings showed comparable improvements in relationship satisfaction, communication quality, and emotional connection.³ The outcomes were, statistically, indistinguishable.

What determines whether therapy works is less about the setting and more about the quality of the relationship between the therapist and the couple — what researchers call the “therapeutic alliance.” When that bond is strong, couples make meaningful progress. The format, in-person or online, matters far less than the skill and sensitivity of the practitioner.³

A separate review published in BMC Psychology in 2025 found that structured digital therapeutic approaches produced significant reductions in psychological distress.³ Data from ReachLink’s virtual counselling practice suggests that around 70% of couples report positive outcomes from remote sessions.⁸

These are not marginal results. For couples who are willing to engage, therapy offers a genuine possibility of change.

The Four Patterns That Quietly Damage Relationships

Relationship researchers at the Gottman Institute have identified four behavioural patterns that, when left unchecked, predict relationship breakdown with striking accuracy.⁵¹ Understanding them can help couples recognise what is happening between them before those patterns become entrenched.

Most couples will recognise at least one of these. Many will recognise all four at different times. That recognition is not cause for alarm — it is the beginning of something more useful.

Online Couples Therapy: What Changes, and What Doesn’t

Since the pandemic, online therapy has moved from an emergency measure to an established and well-evidenced option. For couples in Brighton and Hove, it has particular practical value.

Consider the couple living near Brighton Marina — one of Europe’s largest artificial marinas — who both work long hours and share childcare responsibilities.²¹ Finding a babysitter, travelling across the city, and sitting in a waiting room before even beginning a session can feel like a logistical mountain. For that couple, online therapy is not a compromise. It is what makes therapy possible at all.

Therapists who work online also gain something that is often overlooked: a window into the couple’s actual world. Observing how two people interact in their own home, noticing the dynamic that emerges when they are on familiar ground, provides real information that a clinical office sometimes sanitises away.³ The “home advantage” — being in a space where you feel safe — can also reduce the guardedness that many people feel when sitting across from a therapist for the first time.

For couples dealing with social anxiety, agoraphobia, or trauma responses that make external environments difficult, online therapy can lower the threshold for seeking help meaningfully. The research reflects this: structured digital interventions show comparable outcomes to in-person work across a wide range of presenting concerns.³

What does not change online is the quality of attention, the ethical framework, or the confidentiality of the work. The process is the same. The boundaries are the same. The practitioner brings the same expertise.

The Hove Counselling Practice: Integrative Couples Therapy in Brighton and Hove

The Hove Counselling Practice offers both in-person and online couples therapy, serving Brighton, Hove, and the wider East Sussex area including Lewes, Haywards Heath, Worthing, and beyond.²⁵

The practice’s lead therapist, Claire Sainsbury, is an MBACP Accredited member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy — one of the UK’s primary professional bodies for therapeutic practice.²⁶ Her clinical training includes a Master’s Degree in Counselling and Psychotherapy Practice, an Advanced Postgraduate Diploma in Integrative Counselling and Therapy, and a degree in Psychology.²⁶

Claire is also an Accredited Certified Advanced EFT Practitioner — certified in Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT Tapping) — alongside specialist training in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and complex trauma.²⁷ She holds additional qualifications as a Master Practitioner in Eating Disorders (NCFED) and has specialist expertise in substance misuse and gambling addiction.²⁷

This breadth of training matters in practice. Couples rarely arrive with a single, cleanly defined issue. One partner may carry unprocessed trauma. Another may be struggling with anxiety that is showing up as irritability or withdrawal. An integrative approach means the therapy can meet what is actually present, rather than fitting the couple into a fixed method.

Couples therapy sessions at The Hove Counselling Practice are priced at £110 per session. Individual sessions are available at £90.²⁵

EFT Tapping in Couples Work: A Brief Explanation

Claire’s certification in Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT Tapping) is worth understanding, because it is often confused with another approach that shares the same acronym.

EFT Tapping is a body-based method that combines elements of cognitive therapy with gentle tapping on specific acupressure points — points used in acupuncture for over 2,000 years.³² The premise is that emotional distress is stored in the body, not just the mind, and that tapping on these points while focusing on a difficult feeling or memory can calm the nervous system’s stress response.³² Clinical studies suggest it produces a 41% reduction in anxiety after as little as nine minutes of use, and an anxiety improvement rate of 90% compared to 63% for traditional CBT alone.³⁷

This is distinct from Emotionally Focused Therapy (sometimes abbreviated EFCT), a separate psychotherapy model developed by Dr. Sue Johnson in the 1980s, which uses guided conversation to help couples identify and shift negative interaction cycles rooted in attachment needs.³⁰

In practice at The Hove Counselling Practice, EFT Tapping serves a specific function: helping partners manage the intense physiological flooding — the racing heart, the tightening chest, the shutdown — that can derail productive conversation during emotionally charged sessions.³² When the nervous system is dysregulated, meaningful dialogue becomes almost impossible. EFT Tapping offers a practical way to bring that level of activation down, so that real conversation can happen.

When Trust Has Been Broken

Infidelity — whether physical, emotional, or through sustained deception — changes something in a relationship that does not simply reset with time or goodwill alone.

Many couples in this position find themselves caught between two powerful and contradictory pulls: the desire to repair, and the difficulty of imagining how repair is even possible. Both responses make complete sense.

What the evidence suggests is that professional support in the early weeks after discovery makes a measurable difference. Without support, relationships affected by infidelity survive at a rate of around 15.6%. With structured therapeutic intervention, that figure rises to above 60%.⁵²

This is serious work. It moves through recognisable stages — acknowledging what happened fully, rebuilding a sense of emotional attunement, and, over time, re-establishing a foundation of safety.⁵² None of those stages can be rushed. A skilled therapist holds the space for both partners without taking sides, and without pressing for outcomes before either person is ready.

Attachment Patterns and Why They Matter

Many of the recurring difficulties couples experience — the pursuer and the withdrawer, the one who escalates and the one who shuts down — are not personality flaws. They are attachment patterns, often formed long before the relationship began.

Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and expanded by researchers including Dr. Sue Johnson, proposes that humans are wired to seek emotional security from those closest to them.⁴⁰ When that security feels threatened — through distance, criticism, or repeated misattunement — partners respond in predictable ways. One moves toward, often with increasing urgency. The other moves away, often with increasing withdrawal. Each person’s response amplifies the other’s fear.

Seeing this pattern clearly — not as a character problem, but as a relational dynamic — is often the moment things begin to shift. Couples who can observe what they are doing together, rather than simply experiencing it, gain a kind of perspective that makes change possible.

Brighton and Hove as a Backdrop to Relationship Life

It is worth pausing on what it actually means to build a relationship in this particular city.

The Royal Pavilion, with its extraordinary Indo-Saracenic architecture commissioned by the Prince Regent in the early nineteenth century, is more than a tourist landmark.¹⁶ It is a symbol of what this city has always offered: the possibility of becoming something different from what you started as. The building itself was transformed repeatedly — from a modest marine pavilion to one of the most distinctive royal residences in the world.¹⁸

Brighton Palace Pier, opened in 1899 and still drawing visitors to its Victorian pleasures, speaks to another quality of the city: its commitment to shared joy, to experience, to the lightness that can exist alongside complexity.¹ The Lanes, those 17th-century alleyways winding through the heart of the city, offer a different kind of metaphor — intimate, layered, sometimes disorienting, requiring patience to find your way through.²²

Couples who live here, whether near the leisure amenities of Hove Lagoon, the seafront community of Brighton Marina, or the quieter residential streets of BN3, share a backdrop that is simultaneously stimulating and pressured.²³ The city asks a lot of people. It also offers much. The trick is finding space within all of that for the relationship itself.

Preparing for Online Sessions: Practical Considerations

For couples considering online therapy with The Hove Counselling Practice, a few practical steps can help sessions feel more settled:

• Choose a private space where you will not be overheard or interrupted.⁶¹ If you share a home with children or others, it can help to plan sessions during nap times or when the house is quieter.
• Use headphones to improve sound quality and maintain confidentiality.⁹
• Test your connection in advance. Have a backup option — a phone call or alternative platform — agreed with your therapist before you begin.⁹
• Allow time afterwards. Sessions can bring up a great deal. Building in even thirty minutes before returning to work or daily responsibilities gives you space to settle.⁶¹
• Turn off notifications for the duration of the session. Sixty minutes of undivided attention is worth protecting.⁶¹

What Clients Say

Clients of The Hove Counselling Practice describe the experience with a directness that says more than any summary could. One couple, who came to therapy at what they described as “the last chance saloon,” said afterwards that Claire “helped us to save our marriage.”⁴⁶ Another noted that “each session it felt like we had both learnt a lot about each other and some practical techniques to support what we had discussed.”⁴⁶

Reviews on Google and independent directories highlight Claire’s ability to create warmth and safety — including in sessions held via Zoom — and describe her approach as professional without being distant, caring without being sentimental.²⁸

A Space to Begin

If you have read this far, something here has likely spoken to your situation. That recognition matters.

You do not have to have reached a crisis point to seek support. Many couples who find therapy most useful arrive not at a breaking point, but at a moment of quiet honesty with themselves: that things could be better, and that trying to get there alone has stopped working.

The Hove Counselling Practice offers a confidential space — in person in Brighton and Hove, or online across East Sussex and beyond — where that conversation can begin.

To get in touch, visit thehovecounsellingpractice.co.uk/contact or call 07947 073298.

References

1. Brighton — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton
2. Effectiveness of Remote Marriage Counselling and Couple Therapy — TalktoAngel. https://www.talktoangel.com/blog/effectiveness-of-remote-marriage-counselling-and-couple-therapy
3. Virtual Couples Therapy: Benefits, Effectiveness, and Options — ReachLink. https://reachlink.com/advice/counseling/virtual-couples-therapy-benefits-effectiveness-options/
4. Is Online Marriage Counseling Effective — Pivotal Counseling. https://www.pivotalcounseling.com/blog/online-marriage-counseling-effectiveness
5. Royal Pavilion — Brighton & Hove Museums. https://brightonmuseums.org.uk/visit/royal-pavilion-garden/our-history/
6. The Royal Pavilion, Brighton — Anglotopia. https://anglotopia.net/columns/great-british-buildings/great-british-buildings-the-royal-pavilion-brighton/
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11. Claire Sainsbury — EFT International. https://eftinternational.org/eft-practitioner/claires/
12. Claire Sainsbury — Counselling Directory. https://www.counselling-directory.org.uk/counsellors/claire-sainsbury
13. Claire Sainsbury — BACP. https://www.bacp.co.uk/therapists/91081/claire-sainsbury/
14. Emotionally Focused Therapy — Empire Psychotherapy. https://www.empirepsych.ca/counselling/emotionally-focused-therapy/
15. Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) or Tapping — The Hove Counselling Practice. https://thehovecounsellingpractice.co.uk/emotional-freedom-technique-eft-or-tapping/
16. Clinical EFT Improves Multiple Physiological Markers of Health — PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6381429/
17. EFT or Emotionally Focused Therapy — Jupiter Community Counseling. https://jupitercommunitycounseling.com/eft-or-emotionally-focused-therapy/
18. Couples Therapy Brighton and Hove — The Hove Counselling Practice. https://thehovecounsellingpractice.co.uk/couples-therapy-brighton-and-hove-brighton-relationship-counselling/
19. Gottman Method vs Emotionally Focused Therapy — Seattle Therapy and Counseling. https://www.seattletherapyandcounseling.com/blog/gottman-method-vs-emotionally-focused-therapy
20. Lewes Couples Counselling — The Hove Counselling Practice. https://thehovecounsellingpractice.co.uk/lewes-couples-counselling/
21. Effective Couples Therapy — Imago Relationship Blogs. https://blog.imagorelationshipswork.com/effective-couples-therapy-not-what-you-think
22. Online Therapy and Psychotherapy in Brighton, Hove and Lewes — Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy. https://www.brightonandhovepsychotherapy.com/online-therapy/