Many couples in Brighton and Hove reach a point where something between them has quietly shifted. The conversations get shorter. The evenings feel separate even when you’re in the same room. You’re both working hard, paying a lot just to live here, and somewhere along the way, the two of you have drifted.

That experience is more common here than most people realise — and it makes complete sense given the pressures this city places on relationships.

This isn’t a crisis piece. It’s an honest look at what’s happening for couples in Brighton and Hove right now, why those pressures are real, and how online couples therapy has become a genuinely effective way to reconnect — on your terms, in your own time, from wherever you are.

The Pressure Brighton Places on Relationships

Brighton and Hove is one of the most beautiful, progressive, and culturally alive cities in the UK. It also happens to be one of the most financially demanding places to build a life together.

The average house price here sits at around £410,000. Getting on the property ladder typically means saving a deposit of close to £75,000 — something most couples are working towards while already spending around 46% of their income on rent.¹ The UK average is 35.7%.² That gap is significant. When nearly half of what you earn disappears before you’ve bought food or paid bills, the stress doesn’t stay separate from your relationship. It finds its way in.

For couples renting along the Lewes Road corridor, or in the seafront areas where older properties carry high energy bills, money worries become a constant low-level hum that rarely switches off.

Then there’s the commute. Around 25% of Brighton’s working population travel to London regularly.³ Door-to-door, that’s often four hours a day. A couple where both partners make that journey can easily spend twelve hours apart — and come home too worn out to do much more than sit quietly in separate corners of the flat. The Royal Pavilion, with its long winding corridors and layered interiors, is a fair picture of what a long-term relationship can feel like under that kind of strain: full of beauty and history, but hard to find your way through when you’re exhausted.

The things that used to bring you together — dinner along the seafront, a walk up to Devil’s Dyke, a weekend somewhere different — get quietly dropped. Not because you don’t want them. Because time and money have both run short.

Brighton and Hove’s Health Counts 2024 survey — the largest wellbeing study ever carried out in the city, with over 16,700 adults taking part — found that 24% of residents recorded low happiness scores, higher than the national average.⁴ Anxiety levels here are consistently above the national rate too. That emotional weight doesn’t stay with individuals alone. It shapes how couples speak to each other, how arguments start, and how connected — or disconnected — partners feel day to day.

Why Couples Don’t Ask for Help (And Why That’s Understandable)

Only around 19% of couples who are struggling ever seek professional support.⁵ That’s not because people don’t care about their relationships. More often, the barriers are practical and emotional at the same time.

Finding a therapist, getting to an appointment after a long day, sitting in a waiting room, paying for parking — for couples already running on empty, these aren’t small obstacles. They’re real ones. There’s also the quieter worry about what it means to walk into a therapy room at all: the fear that doing so signals something is seriously wrong, or that a stranger will judge what’s happened between you.

Online couples therapy removes most of those obstacles in one go.

What the Evidence Shows About Online Therapy

A question that comes up often is whether therapy done over a screen is as effective as being in the same room as a therapist. The evidence is clear.

Around 70% of couples report meaningful improvements from relationship counselling — and that figure is consistent whether sessions happen face-to-face or online.⁶ A large review published in BMC Psychology in 2025 found that online couples therapy produced real increases in relationship satisfaction and clear reductions in stress and anxiety.⁷

Part of the reason is straightforward: most people find it easier to speak honestly from their own home than from an unfamiliar office. Familiar surroundings help people relax and open up. Partners who might struggle to find words in a formal setting often find them more readily when they’re sitting on their own sofa.

There’s also something useful for the therapist: seeing a couple in their own space can reveal behaviour patterns that an office setting would never show.

The Therapy Approaches That Work — and What They Involve

Different therapy methods suit different couples, and it helps to know what’s out there. The approaches that work well online all share something in common: they rely on conversation, emotional honesty, and structured support rather than physical presence.

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) — separate from EFT Tapping, which is a different technique — looks at the emotional patterns that keep couples trapped in the same cycles of arguing, shutting down, or pulling away. It has a success rate of between 70% and 75%, and works well online because it’s built around what people say and feel rather than what they do physically.⁸

The Gottman Method gives couples practical tools to say what they need without immediately putting the other person on the defensive. Many couples find having a clear structure gives them something solid to return to between sessions.

Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) runs over fewer sessions — usually five to eight — and concentrates on what’s already working rather than going through everything that isn’t. Around 70% of couples report hitting their goals within two months.⁹

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is as effective online as in person for reducing anxiety and low mood — both of which frequently sit underneath relationship difficulties. When one or both partners are struggling emotionally, this can be a good place to start.¹⁰

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT Tapping) works quite differently from the other approaches here — and that’s part of why it can reach places that talking alone sometimes doesn’t. The method involves gently tapping with the fingertips on specific points on the face and upper body — similar to the points used in acupuncture — while focusing on a difficult feeling or memory. The tapping sends a calming signal to the part of the brain that manages the stress response, which helps reduce the emotional charge attached to painful experiences.¹¹

For couples, this matters because some of the most persistent patterns in a relationship — the sudden defensiveness, the shutting down, the hurt that resurfaces no matter how many times it seems to be dealt with — are held in the body as much as in the mind. Talking through those experiences is valuable, but the body’s response can linger long after the conversation has moved on. EFT Tapping works directly with that physical reaction, making it particularly useful for couples carrying old wounds, unresolved conflict, or the kind of argument that keeps coming back.

It translates well to online sessions. The tapping requires no equipment and no physical contact with the therapist — just two people on a video call, with the therapist guiding and both partners following along at home. Claire Sainsbury holds an Advanced Level 3 certification in EFT Tapping, one of the higher qualification levels available in the UK.¹¹

Brighton’s Diversity and Why That Matters in Therapy

Brighton and Hove is one of the most varied cities in the UK. The Health Counts 2024 survey found that 28% of residents identify as LGBQ+, and 5% identify as trans or non-binary — both figures well above regional and national levels.⁴

For LGBTQ+ couples, finding a therapist who genuinely understands the specific pressures their relationship carries — rather than one who simply says they’re open to it — makes a real difference. Online therapy opens up that choice: couples can work with practitioners who have real experience with LGBTQ+ relationships, regardless of where those practitioners are based.

One in five Brighton and Hove residents lives with a disability.⁴ For those with mobility difficulties, chronic pain, or health conditions that make travel unreliable, the option to attend a session without leaving home changes whether support is actually within reach.

There’s also growing need for therapy among couples where one or both partners is neurodivergent — particularly those living with ADHD or autism. These relationships have their own particular patterns, often around how each person communicates, what they find overwhelming, and how they process emotion. A good therapist helps both people understand each other better rather than treating difference as a problem to be fixed.

Who Lives Here — and What Shapes the Couples Who Seek Support

The stretch of coast from the Peace Statue in Hove to the Palace Pier in Brighton is home to a remarkable mix of people. Young professionals whose combined incomes still don’t cover the cost of living comfortably. Long-term partners whose relationship began before property prices became what they are now. LGBTQ+ couples who moved here for community and who carry what that choice has cost them. Families managing the strain of parenting in expensive, cramped homes near Preston Park or the quieter streets behind Hove Lawns.

Jobs in tech and creative industries in the city have grown by around 38–40% over the last five years.³ But in real terms — once inflation is accounted for — the average Brighton and Hove resident is around £2,000 a year worse off than they were in 2011.¹

These aren’t just numbers. They describe the day-to-day conditions in which couples are trying to stay close, stay kind, and stay in love.

The Hove Counselling Practice: Online and In-Person Couples Therapy

The Hove Counselling Practice is led by Claire Sainsbury, a fully accredited member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (MBACP) with a Master’s degree in counselling and an Advanced Level 3 certification in Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT Tapping).

Claire draws on several approaches — including CBT, psychodynamic therapy, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT, a method that builds skills for managing difficult emotions), and attachment theory (which looks at how our earliest relationships shape the way we behave in adult ones). Rather than applying one fixed method to everyone, she shapes the work around what each couple actually needs.

Individual sessions are £90. Couples sessions are £110.

Clients consistently describe Claire’s approach as direct and warm at the same time. Ben Silva described his experience as “invaluable in helping to identify and break extremely damaging emotional patterns,” and said the practical techniques he learned became “the foundation for rebuilding trust.” Another client noted that when travelling to the practice wasn’t possible, online sessions via Zoom were equally professional, and that Claire’s flexibility about timing made real support genuinely possible.

That flexibility — moving between in-person appointments in Hove and online sessions according to what each week allows — sits at the heart of how the practice works.

What an Online Session Actually Looks Like

For anyone who hasn’t tried therapy before, it helps to know what to expect.

You join a secure video call — usually Zoom — from wherever you are. Some couples sit together; others join from different rooms or even different locations if that suits the week better. Sessions run for around fifty minutes to an hour.

Early sessions are mostly about understanding: what each person is experiencing, what keeps repeating, and what you’re both hoping might change. There’s no pressure to say everything at once. A good therapist takes the pace from you, not from what looks neat on a schedule.

Many couples find that being at home changes what they’re able to say. A familiar setting lowers the guard in a way that an unfamiliar office rarely does. For a lot of people, that makes starting the first real conversation easier.

You Don’t Have to Be in Crisis to Come

Therapy isn’t only for couples on the edge of separation. That idea stops a lot of people from getting support at exactly the point it would help most.

Many of the couples who work with the Hove Counselling Practice aren’t in crisis. They notice they’re not as close as they used to be. They keep having the same argument without it going anywhere. They’ve been through something difficult and want to deal with it properly, rather than wait to see if it passes on its own.

A walk along the Hove seafront, past the beach huts and out towards Shoreham, offers a particular kind of space — the sense that there’s room to breathe and think. That’s something therapy can offer too. Not answers handed to you. Just room to look at things clearly, with someone skilled enough to help.

A Note on Brighton’s Commuter Couples

For couples where one or both partners commute to London, getting to an in-person appointment can feel like one demand too many. A session that means leaving work early, travelling from the station, finding somewhere to park, and getting home late uses up whatever was left in the day.

Online therapy removes that entirely. A session can start within minutes of walking through the door — or from a private space before the commute begins. The Brighton mainline annual season ticket costs over £5,600,³ roughly 15% of median local wages. When that much is already going on transport alone, having therapy that comes to you rather than requiring another journey matters.

If You’re Thinking About Getting Support

The space between noticing something is wrong and actually doing something about it can be surprisingly hard to cross. Not because you don’t care — you’re reading this, which suggests you do — but because reaching out takes a kind of effort that’s difficult when you’re already tired.

You don’t have to know exactly what you want to say before you get in touch. That’s what the first conversation is for.

If you’d like to talk to Claire Sainsbury at the Hove Counselling Practice, call 07947 073298 or use the contact page at thehovecounsellingpractice.co.uk/contact.

Online sessions are available via Zoom. In-person sessions are available at the practice in Hove. Individual sessions are £90; couples sessions are £110.

Sources

1. UK House Price Index / Rightmove Brighton and Hove data, 2024–2025
2. Office for National Statistics: Private Rental Market Statistics, 2025
3. Brighton and Hove City Council Economic Strategy Report / ONS Commuter Flow Data, 2024
4. Brighton and Hove Health Counts Survey 2024 (n=16,729 adults)
5. Relate / Marriage Foundation Research on Help-Seeking Behaviour in Couples, 2023
6. Gurman, A.S. & Snyder, D.K. — Clinical Handbook of Couple Therapy, 5th Ed.
7. BMC Psychology: Meta-analysis of digital couple interventions, 2025
8. Johnson, S.M. — The Practice of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFT outcome data)
9. de Shazer, S. / SFBT outcome literature, including BRIEF UK research
10. NICE Guidelines: Evidence for CBT in online format for depression and anxiety, 2024
11. Church, D. — The EFT Manual, 3rd Ed.; AAMET International — EFT Advanced Practitioner Level 3 Standards