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  • Psychotherapy in West London
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Psychotherapy in West London

Psychotherapy & Counselling with Marcus Gottlieb

Gay Couples Therapy in London

Gay Relationship Advice & Counselling with Marcus

Why “Gay Couples Therapy”? Isn’t a relationship a relationship regardless of whether there are two people of the same sex or one of either sex?

Couples in gay relationships face many of the same challenges as heterosexual couples, and the same dynamics and issues arise around commitment, acceptance, power, difference, loneliness, intimacy and jealousy.

“Two things make God laugh: when a healer says ‘I healed them!’ or when bickering lovers say ‘We have nothing in common!'” Ramakrishna, mystic

However, in addition to these universal ‘couples issues’ there can be many that are specific to lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people (LGBT), including societal pressure, family and friends’ support, being a couple together on the gay scene, managing others’ expectations, discrimination, alternative forms of relationship and lifestyle including parenting, and even legal and health issues.

Gay Couples Therapy and the challenges of Open relationships

Though not exclusive to same sex couples, the potential issues or difficulties around ‘Open Relationships’, such as jealousy, insecurity, sexual health concerns, to name a few, can really challenge the stability of many gay relationships.

‘Open’ describes a relationship that is open to new partners, be that in a sexual sense or a romantic sense. There are many variations. You can be in an open monogamous relationship, sometimes called ‘monogamish’ (e.g. couples that swing). Or you can have closed polyamorous one (e.g. a triad with no one new coming in).

There are numerous variations to open relationships. The important questions are:

  • How do you negotiate what you both want?
  • What are your hopes and fears?
  • What does commitment mean for you and your partner?
  • Is what you get from the third person different from the love you have with your partner?
  • How will you take care of yourselves and each other?
  • What will help you navigate when things don’t go to plan?

Gay Couples Therapy gives you a safe forum to discuss, with your partner, your feelings and fears regarding an open relationship, and negotiate or map out your boundaries.

Is your partner in the closet?

Problems can arise when one person, in the relationship is not out. Loyalties get muddled, anxieties become intensified, and in the end couples can split as a result of the pressures.

If, say, one partner is not out to their family, the other can be left feeling devalued and insecure, while the one who’s in the closet feels their situation is not understood.

Moving in together can have huge ramifications. Then there can be stressful family issues, especially given that gay people, in general, do not share their minority status with their family. When one partner is not accepted by the other’s parents, choices become limited and limiting.

There are whole important areas of your life you feel you cannot talk to your family about. Time spent with parents can become something that detracts from and hurts the relationship.

Talking with an experienced therapist, you can explore the issues and challenges raised when one or both of you are in the closet and, as a result, the relationship is experiencing difficulties.

Gay Couples Therapy and issues around Sex

  • Do one of you want more sex than the other?
  • Does one person want to explore sexual fantasies or styles, that don’t appeal to the other?
  • Is there an issue around what role you take within the sexual element of the relationship?

Many couples live with a high degree of frustration and disappointment that can feed into distancing and even estrangement. The tenderness and excitement you hope for may seem unachievable.

Talking with a therapist gives you an opportunity to be able explore, in a non-judgmental setting, what is right for you and for your partner, developing a healthy attitude and approach to sex, which is key to bringing you closer together.

Gay Relationships and dealing with Homophobia

  • Do you or your partner avoid outward signs of affection to each other e.g. holding hands?
  • Are you avoiding the subject of ‘moving in’ together?
  • Do social events where you will be bringing your partner, cause you concern?

As a gay couple, you will most likely have encountered homophobia, perhaps within your family, amongst friends or checking into a hotel. In most western, urban centres homophobia has been in gradual decline for decades but it is still there and still has the capacity to injure and hurt.

Aside from the impact of society’s homophobic attitudes and behaviour, you and your partner will likely have your own internalised homophobia. You may be aware of your partner being unwilling to hold your hand or show affection in public, or being hesitant about moving in together or making your relationship ‘official’. This may or may not be related to internalised homophobia. The most insidious effects can be those we are least aware of.

Gay relationship therapy gives you an opportunity to explore how you react to incidents of external homophobia but also the way you see yourselves as a gay couple in society and how you feel about this.

Gay Relationships and the question of Civil Partnership or Marriage

Many gay couples struggle with this. One partner wants to go down the ‘legal’ route, while the other wants to keep the relationship ‘unregulated’ or untainted by and outside of the legal structures of marriage and civil partnership. This can be for many reasons, often positive ones. Gay relationship counselling with Marcus offers a space to process these important questions in a spirit of respect, care and honesty.

Gay Couples and Parenthood

The decision to become parents is more complicated for gay couples than for straight couples. It cannot happen without planning. There will be a number of steps, including consideration perhaps of adoption, surrogacy and, in the case of lesbians, insemination. Each of these raises its own issues, and there are not all that many roadmaps to follow. While this can be enormously freeing, it can also be frightening and confusing.

There are also the issues that can arise where one of you wants to parent but the other person does not. This situation also occurs in straight relationships, however the added issue of what is biologically ‘normal’ is also thrown into the mix.

Exploring you and your partner’s desires to become parents will help you navigate the issues and discuss a practical way forward.

Gay Couples Therapy with Marcus

No two gay relationships are the same. Every couple has different challenges to face and their choices and outcomes will be unique to that relationship. However, many gay couples will, at some point, face some specific issue or concern. Talking these issues through with an experienced gay relationship counsellor can help you to find ways forward and build a stronger bond with your partner.

Gay Couples Therapy in London with Marcus

Take the first step to a stronger relationship and talk to Marcus about Gay Couples Therapy.

 

Contact Marcus


Here are some interesting articles and pages on Couples & Relationships that you might find helpful

Robert Waldinger | A recent TED talk on “What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happines”
Watch the video or read the transcript

One-in-Five Relationships in Crisis | A recent study warns 3 million people regularly argue or consider divorce – and 1.4 million families are ‘at breaking point.
Read the full article …

One Woman’s Perspective | Jeanette Winterson would like to see ‘creativity applied to love and affection’.
Read the full article …

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West London Psychotherapist with Client | Notting Hill Therapy

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Pesso Boyden Group with accredited practitioners Deborah Clarke and Marcus Gottlieb

Pesso Boyden Group with accredited PBSP practitioners Deborah Clarke and Marcus Gottlieb

Pesso Boyden Therapy (‘PBSP’) is a philosophical process for becoming whole.

It is a respectful, interactive group process that heals by embedding new memories in the brain and in the body

Most people consciously or unconsciously have memories – explicit or implicit – of 

1. deficits 

2. traumas 

3. having to take care of others when we were too young – e.g. protecting a sibling, providing the joy in the life of an unhappy parent, unconsciously becoming the ‘spouse’ of a widowed parent, or making the world right after hearing stories of injustice. 

When any of these three categories of memory appear in the client’s work, the client and therapist work together to externalise them, in order to illuminate the client’s ways of handling life and to facilitate change. The client is always in charge of this process – people and incidents from the client’s past will be symbolised in the here-and-now either by people in the group or by objects in the room, all chosen and placed by the client. 

The therapist then works with the client to facilitate an antidote to what happened in the past – a new memory which provides what the client needed at that particular time in their past, from a specific kinship figure. This new memory may be developed over several sessions in a number of steps. In the Pesso approach we don’t change our history; however, we do change our response to our history, leading to a new perspective. 

The way is opened to possibilities of greater pleasure, satisfaction, meaning, integration and connectedness.

 



Deborah has worked as a Performance Coach for over 16 years having trained with Coach U. Her background is in the arts as an actor, theatre director and artistic director. She has worked with a wide range of people from all walks of life. Having first encountered Pesso Boyden as a client, she felt inspired to do the training herself. Since graduating in 2013 she has been running Personal Development workshops using the Pesso Boyden system and is now accredited by the official PBSP U.K. organisation.

Notting Hill Therapist | Marcus Gottlieb Psychotherapist & Counsellor
Marcus Gottlieb is a highly experienced London-based psychotherapist with a particular interest in boarding school survivor syndrome. Having trained alongside Deborah directly under Al Pesso and his closest collaborator Lowijs van Perquin, he is steeped in the work of PBSP and a strong believer in the client’s genetic impulse towards health and expression of their unique potential and individual destiny. He became an accredited Pesso Boyden therapist in 2021.
An Introduction to the Pesso Boyden Method

 

An opportunity to learn about and observe the distinctive techniques of this respectful body-based psychotherapy.

Suitable for both psychologically interested professionals, people seeking personal development/CPD and for people not in the therapeutic professions seeking to address entrenched issues. For all those who are interested in living a larger life. A special price of £35 for the day includes lunch and refreshments. CPD certificates will be available.

PBSP (Pesso-Boyden System Psychomotor) is a powerful, deeply respectful, psychotherapeutic process that uses feedback, ritual, objects and role players in a unique manner to heal the traumas, wounds and losses that affect our personal map of the world.

Its central goal is the imaginative creation of an ‘ideal’ healthy past that a person’s brain processes so that they emerge feeling differently about themselves. As Albert Pesso said, ‘Humanity is responsible for the meaning that surrounds us. The task for each person is to create a meaningful life and then live it with existential courage and passion.’

As well as gaining new perspectives, clients often experience increased pleasure, satisfaction, meaning and connectedness following a PBSP session and find themselves psychologically freer to make the changes they wish for in their lives.
Date: Saturday 7 October 2017
Venue: Notting Hill, London W11
Time: 10.00 am – 4.30 pm
Cost: £35 (inc lunch & refreshments)

 

Register Your Interest


Boarding School Survivor Syndrome Conference

BOARDING SCHOOL: Surviving the Syndrome
Broken Attachment and Childhood Trauma

University of Brighton

Saturday 9 September 2017
9.30 am to 5.00 pm

Conference for psychotherapists, counsellors, mental health workers, boarding school survivors and other interested people.

Conference overall aims are to:
§ Present key aspects of what has been published about the psychological and other effects of boarding.
§ Explore helpful therapeutic approaches for clients who are former boarders.
§ Consider current research and a possible agenda for future research
§ Enable networking amongst those interested in this important topic

Chair: Pam Howard, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton.

Speakers: Nick Duffell, Joy Schaverien, Alex Renton, Thurstine Basset, Anni Townend, Olya Khaleelee.

Group Discussion Facilitators: Marcus Gottlieb, Leslie Lund, Nicola Miller, Simon Partridge, Boarding Concern Directors.

For more details, contact Laura Williams:
southcoastevents@brighton.ac.uk

Pesso Boyden Workshop with Ana María Ruiz Sancho and Marcus Gottlieb

 

Pesso Boyden Therapy is a respectful and highly respected, body-based psychotherapy with distinctive techniques aimed at addressing entrenched issues. It is an interactive process that creates new body-based memories to heal emotional deficits of the past.

An exceptionally powerful personal development tool, it uses feedback, systematic procedures, objects and role players in a unique methodology, in order to repair the early traumas, wounds and losses that can powerfully influence the brain’s map of the world.

In shifting underlying perspectives, the way is opened to the possibility of greater pleasure, satisfaction, meaning and connectedness, and an enhanced freedom to effect longed-for changes.

It is expected there will be between 8 and 12 participants, with an absolute maximum of 15. The day will start with an explanation of Pesso Boyden and an experiential introduction, followed by 4 actual client sessions of an hour each.

Venue: Philadelphia Association, 4 Marty’s Yard, London NW3 1QW
Date: Saturday 3 June 2017
Time: 0930 to 1800
Cost: £75

Register Your Interest



Ana María Ruiz Sancho is an experienced psychiatrist and a psychotherapist. She is also a specialist in group dynamics and an Institutional and Team Motivation Consultant.

Ana is the Founder and a Director of VocAcción, as well as being a qualified Pesso Boyden psychotherapist.


Notting Hill Therapist | Marcus Gottlieb Psychotherapist & Counsellor

Marcus Gottlieb works with relationships, sexuality, abuse and trauma, with a particular interest in boarding school survivor syndrome. Qualified in Pesso Boyden as well as other psychotherapies, he is also an Alexander Technique teacher.

Contact Marcus

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