Therapy for Relationship Difficulties in Edinburgh

How relationships become difficult

Most people come to therapy already knowing that things aren’t right. They may not know what, exactly, is wrong, or why it keeps repeating, but they recognise the repetition: the same arguments, the same disappointments, the same distance returning again and again despite their best efforts.

Relationships are where our earliest emotional patterns surface. You learn how to seek closeness, handle conflict, and tolerate vulnerability early, in childhood. Yet those early lessons echo in your adult relationships in ways you struggle to fully see. What looks like a problem between you and another may have older roots — harking back to ways of relating you developed to manage the relationships you were born into, but which now get in the way of the ones you choose.

The hardest part is that these patterns are often only visible in retrospect. Each new beginning can feel like a fresh start, and only later reveal itself to be more of the same. Life can feel like a ferris wheel, where the constant motion conceals the fact that nothing is changing: each turn returns you to where you began. What this erodes, over time, is hope, until the intimacy that might bring change comes to seem more trouble than it is worth.

Seeing a pattern isn’t the same as blaming yourself for it. Done clearly, it is closer to the opposite. When you see what you do, and understand why you do it, you begin to have some control over whether you continue to do it in future.

When therapy might help

Relationship difficulty doesn’t always look like crisis. Often it is quieter than that: a slow withdrawal, a growing sense that something is wrong, or a loneliness that lives inside a relationship that looks fine from without. You don’t need to be at breaking point for it to be worth bringing.

Sometimes it can feel as though no single thing has happened that would justify coming to therapy. No rupture, loud argument or violent signal. Only the accumulation of small things over months or years: the quiet tensions and irritations that have soured what once felt vital. To talk to a friend about these feelings may feel disloyal, a betrayal of your love. But the gap that has grown between this love and the way you used to feel is unlikely to go away on its own. It may not be that the love has lessened. Often it has simply been crowded out, forced to compete with the frustration, boredom, resentment, and disappointment that any life and any long-term partnership must weather. Therapy can be a way to reattune yourself to this relationship and to recentre it in your life.

It may be instead that you are coming to therapy because something has already broken: you are undergoing a separation, a divorce, a breakup. That’s okay too. Grieving takes time, and may be as much about the loss of who you were in the relationship as the loss of the relationship itself.

What the pattern might be saying

Much of how we relate to other people is learned early, so early that we never had to learn it consciously, and can scarcely recall it. It simply was how things were, and you simply did what you had to do to survive. The psychoanalyst John Bowlby gave this process a name. From our first relationships (with parents, with siblings, with the way our family treated each other) we build what Bowlby called internal working models: templates for what closeness is, what it costs, and what we can expect from it. Were these early relationships places of refuge and steadiness, or of conflict and unpredictability? Were your needs met, tolerated, or treated as too much? The answers are rarely black and white, but in their specifics lie assumptions formed when you were too young to examine them, but which you have carried into your relationships ever since.

These may be academic theories, but they aren’t academic questions. They bear directly on what is happening in your life now: on why you reach out for someone and then can’t bear their closeness, or choose, again and again, to follow someone who cannot give you what you need, or why you feel most alone in the company of the person who knows you best. The template of internal working models runs quietly underneath our lives, shaping what we expect from people and, at its most problematic, obscuring who they actually are.

But Bowlby’s ultimate point is a hopeful one: these models are not fixed. They were formed in relationship, and in relationship they can be revised. That is part of why therapy works the way it does. The template is not only described in the room; sooner or later, it is enacted there. The bond you build with a therapist becomes an attachment in its own right, and how securely it comes to hold is closely tied to the work the two of you can do (Mallinckrodt & Jeong, 2015).

Is this couples therapy? What if my partner won’t come?

I want to be plain about my scope: I work with individuals, not couples. Ideally we will have established that by email before we ever meet. But working as an individual upon your relationships is not a lesser version of couples therapy. It is a different thing, with its own drawbacks and gains.

The drawbacks are real. I can’t watch your dynamic unfold in front of me. I can’t hear your partner’s side, or speak to them, or work with the two of you together as a couples therapist would. What individual work offers is the inverse of those limits. I am your therapist, and only yours. My concern is you: your feelings, your part, your side of the story, given undivided attention. This in itself can matter, because when you are deeply enmeshed with another it can be hard to find anywhere that is simply yours. To have this space, apart from your partner, where you can freely air your difficulties and frustrations about them, may in itself ease the tensions within your relationship. Moreover, it lets us explore your role in the conflict and how it sits within the pattern of your past relationships without the pressure of your partner’s physical presence.

I can’t promise that changing yourself will change your partner. It might shift things, and often does, but it may not, and to pretend otherwise would be dishonest. What individual therapy can reliably offer is a clearer understanding of the part that is yours in the relationship difficulties, how you feel about it, and what you want to do. This isn’t only my view: individual therapy of this kind can improve not just how you feel in yourself, but how you relate to others, with benefits that tend to last (Shedler, 2010).

That said, there are times I’ll think couples work is the better fit, and when this happens I’ll say so. If the difficulty seems particular to this one relationship rather than rooted in your longer history, or if it is driven largely by what your partner is doing, individual therapy may not be the right tool, and I’ll be happy to try and help you find a couples therapist.

There is one important exception to this. If you are living with controlling, coercive, or frightening behaviour, then this is not a pattern to understand or correct in yourself, and this kind of therapy is not the right first step. In this case, it is worth speaking to a service that specialises in this kind of work. In Scotland, the Domestic Abuse and Forced Marriage Helpline is free and open at any hour on 0800 027 1234, and organisations such as Women’s Aid and the Scottish Women’s Rights Centre can also help. If it becomes clear that this is your situation whilst we are already working together, I’ll say so, and try to help you find the right specialist support rather than carry on as though domestic abuse were an ordinary relational difficulty.

How I work with this specifically

My work is relational before it is anything else. This means that what tends to change your outside relationships is not just the insights of the sessions themselves; it is the experience of being met by someone who doesn’t need you to perform, and who won’t leave when you stop.

Here is a composite of the kind of work I mean, drawn from many clients and describing no single one. She is in her twenties, and she comes into the room already talking. A great deal has happened to her, a great deal is happening now, and some of it is still happening on the phone in her hand, which she turns face down but leaves on vibrate, just in case. She has had relationships before, and breakups before. She has loved and been disappointed, and now she is turning over one relationship in particular: why it isn’t working, why her partner can’t seem to give her what she gives to him so freely. The talk comes fast. She needs to talk, and here is the one place she can, without guilt and without repercussions, because it is my job and I don’t know her partner or her friends or her family. I listen, I notice, I take her seriously.

After a while the phone buzzes against her palm. She silences it without looking and carries on. I stop her, gently, and say I’ve noticed how much she is holding at once: how even here, in the hour meant to be hers, she is keeping a line open to everyone else. She starts to explain herself, then doesn’t. It’s a small thing, the buzz and the reflex to tend to it, but it opens onto a larger one. She is always the one who is giving, to me as much as to her partner, and almost never the one who gets to receive. For a moment she does, and it is quiet in a way our sessions rarely are. Then she carries on, but something has been let in, and I have seen it, and she has let me see it.

What made that possible wasn’t the observation itself. It was that, for once, she was being attended to rather than doing the attending, allowed to receive instead of to give, and to find that she could bear it. Only then was it safe to be quiet.

Most people arrive holding a relationship together, and holding themselves together with it. Therapy is one of the few places where you can let go.

Composite drawn from clinical experience; no individual client is described.

Relationship therapy in Edinburgh and online

I work in person from a quiet consulting room on Drumsheugh Gardens, in Edinburgh’s New Town, a few minutes’ walk from Princes Street and well connected by bus. Sessions are 50 minutes, weekly, and continue for as long as the work needs. Online sessions are by secure video call, available across the UK.

There is no fixed number of sessions. Some people come for a defined stretch to work through one difficulty; others stay longer, particularly when the patterns run deep. The fee is £70 per session.

A free 20-minute consultation is a good place to begin: a conversation about what is bringing you, what you might want, and whether we would work well together. There is no obligation to continue, and I reply to enquiries within one working day.

Frequently asked questions

• Can therapy help if my partner won’t come?

  Yes. Individual therapy is often an effective way to work on relationship difficulties, because the patterns that cause trouble belong to each person individually as well as to the couple. Understanding your own history, your own ways of coping, and how they shape the relationship can make a real difference, even if your partner is not in the room.

• I don’t know if I’m the problem or my relationship is. Can therapy help with that?

  This is a common question people bring, and worth sitting with rather than rushing to answer. In a close relationship our sense of ourselves can become entangled with the other person, which makes it hard to tell what belongs to whom when things go wrong. Therapy can help you separate the strands: what is yours, what is the relationship’s, and what might need to change in each. The answer is rarely clean, but understanding your own part gives you something you can actually act on.

• Why do I keep repeating the same patterns, or choosing the wrong people?

  Many people find themselves stuck in the same loop: choosing partners who are unavailable, withdrawing when things get close, ending up in the same argument with different people. These patterns usually have deep roots in how you first learned to relate. Psychodynamic therapy is well suited to this, because it pays close attention to how the past shapes the present. Seeing the pattern clearly is usually what allows it to begin to change.

• Can therapy help with loneliness, including feeling lonely in a relationship?

  Yes. Loneliness isn’t only about being alone; many people feel it sharply inside a relationship, a family, or a busy social life. Therapy can help you understand what gets in the way of feeling connected. Sometimes it traces back to patterns learned early: difficulty trusting, a belief that your needs are too much, a habit of keeping people at a safe distance. Understanding these can make real closeness feel more possible.

• Can therapy help if I’m going through a separation or divorce?

  Yes. Separation and divorce can be among the most painful experiences in adult life, whether or not you believe parting is right. The loss is often more layered than it looks from outside: not only a partner, but a shared future, a financial prospect, a daily shape to things, and part of your own identity. Therapy can help you make sense of what is happening and think about what comes next, without hurrying you toward resolution before you are ready.

• I find it hard to trust people. Can therapy help with that?

  Yes. Difficulty trusting is often rooted in early experiences, in relationships where trust was broken, withheld, or never reliably offered. Those experiences shape how you approach closeness now, often in ways hard to see from the inside. In therapy we can look at where the difficulty comes from and how it plays out in your current relationships. The therapeutic relationship itself can become a place where trust is tested and, slowly, rebuilt.

• Do you offer couples therapy?

  No. I work with individuals, not couples, and I don’t offer family therapy. Individual work can still make a real difference to your relationships, because so much of what causes difficulty belongs to each person’s own patterns. If it becomes clear that couples therapy is what you need, I’ll say so and help you find someone suitable.

About this page

Written by Tom Wells, MBACP, COSCA. Last reviewed July 2026.

Trained at the University of Edinburgh (PGDip Counselling and Psychotherapy). Registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (profile on the BACP register) and with Counselling and Psychotherapy in Scotland (COSCA).

Scope of practice: adults aged 18 and over; individual therapy only. I do not offer couples therapy, EMDR, formal diagnosis, or medication; where any of these would serve you better, I am glad to point you towards them.