Luke Row

When understanding isn't enough

You don't need more advice. You've had plenty. From friends, books, probably other therapists, now ChatGPT. You can explain what's wrong with perfect clarity, whether it's the pattern in your own life or the one between you and your partner. You can map it, name it, point to where it started.

But nothing actually changes.

Or maybe you can't explain it at all. The same fights, the same silences, the same exhaustion that arrives on cue. You don't have words for it, but the rhythm is unmistakable: the moment the conversation tips, the look that means here we go again, the distance that opens for reasons neither of you can name.

Either way, you're stuck.

For couples

You've had the same fight so many times you could script it. One of you does that thing. The other reacts that way. The whole sequence plays out exactly as it always does, and you both end up exactly where you knew you'd end up.

You can see what your partner is doing wrong with perfect clarity. They can see what you're doing wrong just as clearly. You've explained your position a hundred times. So have they. Nothing shifts.

You probably understand each other well enough. What neither of you can do is see the pattern from inside it. You're not really fighting about what you think you're fighting about. You're fighting about something underneath: the fear of being controlled, abandoned, diminished, unseen. Those fears took shape somewhere else, with someone else, long before you met. Now they're playing out here, with each other, and you can't find your way out.

In couple psychotherapy, we look at how your two histories meet in the present. How your defences lock together. How the dynamic between you is something you're both creating, again and again, without meaning to. We work out what each of you is protecting and what it's costing the relationship.

I see couples who fight constantly and couples who've stopped fighting because what's the point. Couples where one of you is reaching and the other is retreating. Couples who love each other but can't reach each other anymore. Couples deciding whether to stay, and couples who've decided to stay and don't know how.

I'm completing advanced training in couple psychotherapy at Tavistock Relationships, which specialises in psychoanalytic couples work. The training informs how I think about what happens between two people: an unconscious meeting of partners, shaped by histories that pre-date the relationship.

Couple sessions are weekly, 50 minutes, in person in Croydon, with both of you always in the room. The work needs both of you, and it needs the rhythm of meeting at the same time each week.

For individuals

I work psychodynamically with people who understand the surface issue but remain stuck. The patterns you can name but can't shift. The feelings you've explained instead of felt. The version of yourself you keep performing because you don't know who you'd be without it.

What brings people varies: anxiety that doesn't respond to the techniques, depression you can explain but can't lift, relationships that keep ending in the same place with different people. Often you're the capable one - the person who holds everything together, who everyone else leans on, and who has quietly run out of ways to help themselves.

Sessions are weekly or twice-weekly, in person in Croydon or online across the UK.

How the work happens

The gap between what you know and what you keep doing anyway, that's where the work happens. Not in your head, where you've already worked everything out, but in what's actually going on: the things you do without realising, the feelings you have before you can name them, the patterns running underneath your explanations.

Those patterns will show up here too. With me, with each other. You'll do what you do everywhere else: perform, withdraw, over-explain, keep things light, arrive with an agenda so there's no space for anything unexpected. This isn't a problem. It's the point. Because this time, instead of the pattern playing out invisibly, we can look at it together.

This isn't quick. You'll discover things you've been avoiding. Couples often have sessions that feel like they've made things worse before anything starts to shift. You might feel angrier before you feel different, might grieve things you didn't know you'd lost. But something shifts that couldn't shift before. Not because you understand it better, but because you've experienced something different.

Getting started

You don't need to know what you want to work on. You don't need the right words for it. You can come defended, uncertain, sceptical.

For couples, both of you need to be in touch with me from the start. When you first email, copy your partner in so we're all in the same conversation. I don't hold separate communication with one of you about the other.

Email me at hello@talktoluke.com. Tell me what's going on, or just tell me you don't know how to say it.

Individual therapy: Weekly or twice-weekly, 50 minutes, £70 per session. In person in Croydon or online. (Fees negotiable for twice-weekly work)

Couples therapy: Weekly, 50 minutes, £100 per session. In person in Croydon.

I am also part of a collective that you can read more about here

https://www.couplesinmind.co.uk