News & Articles

Published: 12 February 2025

Goal setting is an important strategy that should be discussed weekly for all couples. This gives an opportunity to discuss what is working and not working when it comes to managing the responsibilities and nourishing the relationship. Discussing the goals for the week can help make clear what needs fixing and why. It also helps each person in the relationship become clear of their role or new role and how they can contribute actively to cooperate with changes that need to be made.

When it comes to couples counselling, the weekly sit-down meetings give them an opportunity to practice what was modelled in the session. For those not in couples counselling the meetings present as an opportunity to discuss literature on how to improve their relationship, for instance they can reflect on Jon Gottman's Seven Principles of Making a Marriage Work or the Four Horsemen. The meetings can help them both understand their role in dysfunctional behaviours and what they each need to do to help bring more support to the relationship.

There are two rules that need to be followed when working with goal setting at these meetings: specify what exactly each partner needs to do to repair the relationship or continue to nourish the relationship, and provide an opportunity for each partner to show their commitment to support the relationship. Reflect on what you need for the week and consult with your partner. The goal should be geared towards helping you improve the quality of your relationship. Ask your partner how they can help you accomplish this goal. If you are the partner supporting the goal, please be as responsive to exactly what your partner needs to commit to achieving the goal. Remember to be considerate, accept imperfection, commit to change, focus on problem-solving, and work on a compromise.

If you need support, please feel free to contact me. I support connection with any Clinical Psychologist. I practice psychological counselling and provide psychotherapy services. My office is located in Vaughan, Ontario.

Published: 12 February 2025

Many individuals struggle with jealousy in their relationships. The feeling of jealousy is overwhelming, and it can influence your mood and your behaviours. Part of working with jealousy in session is helping the client understand that their thoughts around jealousy are really influenced by not being able to tolerate uncertainty. Examples of uncertainty that people struggle with in session include what would happen if their partner was unfaithful, left them, or wanted a divorce. At times, there are no reasons for the person to feel jealous, and they just feel jealous of their partner, which often interferes with their relationship.

What I help people understand when it comes to jealousy is that it is very much influenced by anxiety. I also try to educate patients that the jealousy is based on a subconscious story of what they believe would happen if their partner did leave, divorce them, or have an affair. When the person is triggered, the story plays. When the story plays, they become overwhelmed by the story, and they start to believe that the story is more likely and possible (in the OCD literature, we call this Thought Action Fusion). There can be clear indicators that their partner is faithful, but this is never processed because they are so consumed by the story. The story is scary and overwhelming, and it is based on what the person believes will happen if the bad situation does occur (their partner was unfaithful). Part of the problem is that the person doesn't believe that they can cope with the situation. We work together to figure out what the story is and how they would best want to cope with that situation if the bad situation were to occur.

I work with clients who experience difficulties with jealousy by using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in combination with Exposure and Response Prevention. I help educate them on the safety behaviours that they engage in (such as tracking their partner or questioning their partner) charge the scary story, but also maintain the anxiety. We work together to let go of unhealthy safety behaviours and accept that life is uncertain and that anything can happen even if they keep engaging in safety behaviours. I help introduce cognitive challenges to help them better understand how their thinking may be influenced by cognitive distortions that perpetuate negative thinking.


By Robert Roopa


If you need support, please feel free to contact me. I support connection with any Clinical Psychologist. I practice psychological counselling and provide psychotherapy services. My office is located in Vaughan, Ontario.

Published: 12 February 2025

I do believe that every relationship has its vulnerabilities, and it's best that we consider examining and exploring how these vulnerabilities affect the unit of the relationship. The more 'baggage' we bring into a relationship, the more it is at risk, and therefore, it's best to work on these issues, which would allow the relationship to foster growth and maturity as it ages. Jealousy does occur in many relationships, and at times, it manifests itself in ways that permit the development of the relationship and the individual self. Partners may feel unwilling to take on new challenges because they accommodate their partner's jealousy (i.e., sharing your location with your partner). Part of the work I do at the clinic is to better understand how jealousy influences the relationship negatively and how most of the feelings of jealousy are actually manifested by anxiety.

When a person is jealous, it really isn't the root of the problem; it's more of a surface-level fear than a deep-rooted one. We often refer to their thoughts related to jealousy as a feared consequence. This means that when a person expresses jealousy (an emotion), they are likely feeling this because they believe that something terrible will happen. The bad outcome could be, 'my partner will leave me' or 'I will be left alone.' Through the use of various psychological interventions, most particularly the downward arrow technique, we can determine what the core of the fear is that is really influencing the feeling of jealousy. Sometimes, that core fear could be being alone, depressed, feeling like a failure, or feeling like a bad person. The core fear is what manifests jealous emotions.

In therapy, we work with jealousy using cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). This helps our patient group better understand how their thinking may be influenced by cognitive distortions, but most importantly, we work on learning to accept uncertainty. Life is uncertain, and at any time, the controlling behaviours you believe are helping keep you safe are an illusion of control. In reality, your partner can leave at any time, and the bad things that you worry about happening can happen. We really don't have any control. This means we are faced with figuring out how to pick up the pieces if this does happen. The most important discussion that we have in counselling is learning how to manage the bad thing happening- your partner leaving you for someone else. Anything you imagine can happen, and part of learning to manage your anxiety, which is manifesting itself as jealousy, is to embrace the idea of it and figure out how to cope with it if it did happen. If it hasn't happened yet, then we just enjoy our life with our partners until a situation comes about (if it ever does). This also means we should stop the unhealthy behaviours that don't protect you anyway.

By Robert Roopa