Is there an alternative to Relate?

[MakeTeaNotWar]

DH and I are not getting along. We paper over the cracks but nothing fundamentally changes. I'm starting to care less but with DCs aged just 3 & 10 months, we need to sort our shit out. I've read some negative stuff on here about Relate - has anyone found them good? Are there alternatives!

I'd give it a go. Our situation is similar to yours and have started Relate weekly sessions. Early days but I am hopeful - I think some people it works for, others not - but unless you try I'm not sure anyone else can tell you definitively whether it's for you or not.

You don't have to go to Relate. You could go to anyone who is a trained and fully accredited relationship counsellor by looking at the BACP . Choose carefully because some people who are still training are reistered there as 'associate' members- you need someone who ideally is senior accredited and also works as a supervisor ( supporting more junior counsellors).

Counselling is very personal so if you don't click with the person, move on- don't allow them to tie you in to a course of sessions- most will offer the first session ( paid) as an assessment session to see how you feel.

If y

If you are in London TCCR are very good.

I recommend BACP website search too. Found fantastic one on there.

Terrible experience with TCCR. they wanted to charge nearly £200 an hour for each session!! They say its all sliding scales etc based on wages but there was no way we could afford that once a week on very average wages. They say you can negotiate but quite frankly its quite a sensitive thing to negotiate when you've made the big step of getting there in the first place. its kind of like hmmmmm what price do you put on your relationship?

When i asked by phone what the counsellor's qualifications would be, they said i could ask them at session two. When i said that i would like to know before the next session the manager lady started psycho-analysing why i wanted to know!! Their website is very ambiguously worded about qualifications.

Anyway that massive moan out of the way-we did find as I say a brilliant one on BACP. so very good luck OP we found it very definitely worth the search and a couple of different initial assessments.