Counselling for polyamory & non-monogamy

Affirmative counselling for polyamorous, open and other consensually non-monogamous relationships — online across the UK, and walk-and-talk in Edinburgh.

You won't be asked to justify the shape of your relationships

A lot of people arrive having had at least one experience of a therapist treating non-monogamy as the thing to be examined — as a symptom, a phase, an avoidance of commitment, or the obvious cause of whatever else is going on. Having to explain and defend your relationship structure before you can talk about the actual problem is exhausting, and it wastes the hour.

That isn't how I work. Consensual non-monogamy is treated here as a legitimate way of organising a life, in the same way monogamy is. I'm familiar with the vocabulary and the common structures, so you won't spend your first session teaching me terminology. We can start where you actually want to start.

The question is never whether your relationships take an acceptable shape, but whether they're working for the people in them.

What people bring

The difficulties that come up are often not exotic at all. They're the ordinary difficulties of intimacy — jealousy, insecurity, feeling deprioritised, struggling to ask for what you need — happening across more relationships and with fewer cultural scripts to fall back on.

• Jealousy, envy and insecurity, and what they're pointing at underneath
• Negotiating agreements, and renegotiating them when circumstances change
• Time, attention and the sense of being someone's afterthought
• Opening a previously monogamous relationship, or closing an open one
• Hierarchy and its discontents — primary, secondary, and who gets to decide
• New relationship energy, and its effect on established partners
• Breakups, de-escalations, and grief that others may not recognise as loss
• Disclosure — to family, at work, to children — and the cost of concealment

Living with a stigmatised structure

Alongside the relational work, there's often a second layer: the experience of living in a way that many people around you consider illegitimate. That can mean managing what's safe to say at work, weathering a family's disapproval, or absorbing the assumption that your relationships are less serious than a marriage.

This is worth naming directly, because it's easy to internalise. When a structure is stigmatised, every ordinary problem inside it can start to feel like evidence that the critics were right. Part of the work is separating the genuine difficulty from the pressure of being watched.

My background in anthropology is relevant here. I'm interested in how societies decide which relationships count, and how that pressure lands on individual people — which makes me less likely to mistake social disapproval for a personal failing.

Individuals, couples and other configurations

I see individuals working through something on their own, and I see partners together. If you're part of a larger polycule, we can talk about who it would be most useful to have in the room — that might be two of you, or it might change over time. Not everyone needs to attend for the work to be useful.

Where I'm seeing more than one person, I'm not there to adjudicate. My job isn't to decide who's being unreasonable, but to help the conversation get somewhere it hasn't managed to get on its own.

Related areas

This work sits alongside the rest of my practice: LGBTQIA2S+ affirmative therapy, GSRD-aware counselling, and affirmative work with sex workers and people with unconventional lifestyles. Whatever your identity and however your relationships are arranged, you're welcome here.

Practical details

Individual sessions are £80 for 50 minutes; relationship counselling is £160; a limited number of concession places are available at £65. Sessions are online across the UK via Zoom, or walk-and-talk in Edinburgh. Available in English and Italian.

A note on what I can and can't offer: I work with adults experiencing mild to moderate difficulties. As a counsellor I don't provide diagnoses or prescribe medication, and some situations need specialist or multidisciplinary care instead. If you're not sure whether this is the right fit, you're welcome to ask — we can think it through together. More detail in the questions on the main page.