Marina’s approach and specialisms

Marina’s clinical approach is relational, structured, and emotionally precise. She works actively in the room, helping couples identify the moment conflict escalates and guiding them toward accountability, clarity, and repair. Her work integrates Transactional Analysis and Relational Life Therapy, supporting behavioural and emotional change rather than insight alone.

High-Conflict Couples

Marina specialises in working with couples who feel trapped in repetitive cycles of criticism, defensiveness, withdrawal, control, or escalation.

Many of the couples she supports appear highly functional externally, yet privately experience volatility, resentment, or emotional distance. Her work focuses on identifying the protective strategies beneath conflict: shame, fear, attachment injury, and unmet needs - and helping both partners move beyond blame into responsibility and relational honesty.

Leadership & High-Performing Couples

With her background in business and entrepreneurship, Marina specialises in working with high-achieving and visible couples where ambition, identity, and performance intensify relational strain.

She understands how perfectionism, emotional withdrawal, grandiosity, or high-stakes conflict can develop when success becomes fused with self-worth. Her work supports couples in separating performance from intimacy and developing the capacity to remain emotionally available even under pressure.

Neurodiverse & Mixed-Neurotype Couples

Marina has experience working with neurodiverse couples, including mixed-neurotype partnerships where ADHD or differences in sensory processing, communication style, and nervous system regulation shape relational dynamics.

She helps couples understand how:

• Emotional intensity or shutdown may be protective rather than intentional

• Direct communication can be experienced as criticism

• Executive functioning challenges become relational flashpoints

• Differences in processing speed or emotional expression create misattunement

• Chronic misunderstanding erodes safety and goodwill

Her approach ensures that neither partner is pathologised or sidelined. Instead, sessions focus on building shared language, realistic expectations, and relational accountability. Couples begin to see how neurobiology and attachment patterns interact, and how repair becomes possible when both partners feel seen and respected.

Intercultural Relationships

Marina brings particular depth to intercultural partnerships, exploring how migration histories, family expectations, transgenerational narratives, cultural values, and power dynamics shape attachment and conflict.

She works thoughtfully with questions of belonging, loyalty, identity, and difference, helping couples build understanding across cultural frameworks without erasing individuality.

Infidelity & Betrayal Recovery

Marina supports couples recovering from infidelity, emotional affairs, breaches of trust, and significant relationship ruptures.

She provides a structured and emotionally contained space where couples can process the impact of betrayal, rebuild trust where possible, and develop greater honesty, accountability, and understanding. Her approach helps partners move beyond blame and defensiveness while exploring whether and how the relationship can move forward.

Drawing on Relational Life Therapy and Transactional Analysis, Marina works actively and directly to support meaningful repair and lasting change.

Couples Intensives

Marina also offers online Couples Intensives for couples who need deeper, more concentrated support than weekly therapy can provide.

For some relationships, especially during periods of crisis, infidelity, escalating conflict, emotional disconnection, or major life transitions, a weekly 50-minute session may not feel enough. Intensives offer immersive, focused work over one, two, or three days, allowing couples to work through patterns in real time without long gaps between sessions.

Her intensives are trauma-informed and informed by Relational Life Therapy (RLT), combining emotional depth, accountability, practical relational skills, and active therapeutic work.

Couples often seek intensives when they:

• Feel trapped in repetitive cycles of conflict or withdrawal

• Are recovering from betrayal or significant rupture

• Want meaningful change in a shorter period of time

• Have tried previous therapy without lasting progress

• Are at a crossroads in the relationship

• Want to reconnect and rebuild emotional intimacy

The work focuses on identifying destructive relational patterns, understanding the emotional wounds beneath them, and developing healthier ways of communicating, repairing, and staying connected.

Marina offers one-day, two-day, and three-day online intensives depending on the couple’s needs and the depth of work required. Follow-up support is also available where appropriate.