If you or your children are not safe, get help now. Visit a nearby emergency service, hospital, or police station immediately. The lines listed below are relationship and gender-based-violence lines.
Crisis numbers in Australia
- 1800RESPECT, for domestic, family and sexual violence: Tel: 1800 737 732 | Text: 0458 737 732. 24 hours.
- Family Relationship Advice Line: Tel: 1800 050 321. Weekdays 8am to 8pm, Saturday 10am to 4pm, local time; closed Sundays and national public holidays.
This page lists Couples Counsellors in Brisbane. 3 in all.
What the counsellors on this page do, and how to choose one
For a couple, the counsellors listed in Brisbane offer talking sessions of about an hour 1. Counselling usually runs weekly, for a set number of sessions.
Assessment, diagnosis and medicine sit outside counselling; ask who provides them where you are 2. Open the profiles below to compare experience, language, fee, and whether they work online. Ask how soon each one can see you.
What a counsellor does, and how counselling differs from psychotherapy
Everyone on this page describes their work as counselling. A counsellor listens and helps you find your own solutions to problems 1.
The training emphasises the conversation itself. Sessions usually stay close to something happening now: a loss, a relationship, work, a decision. That focus is what most often separates counselling from longer psychotherapy.
A counsellor is not a medical doctor and does not prescribe or diagnose. Ask a counsellor what they work with, and for how long.
What this page filters on
These are the only filters: the specialism recorded as Couples and the professional title counsellor.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do both of us have to come?
Is this for married couples only?
No. Couples counselling is for people in a relationship, married or not, of any gender, living together or not. The same practitioners work with couples deciding whether to separate, and with couples who have already separated and are parenting together. Say which of those describes you at first contact.
Will the therapist say who is right?
No. The work is with what happens between two people rather than with a verdict on either of them. Effective work with couples needs its own theories and methods, drawn from research on relationships. Ask a practitioner how they handle it when you disagree in the room.
Can couples counselling be done online?
Yes, and many practitioners offer it. Couples therapy by video shows few significant differences from face-to-face sessions5. Symptom reduction, engagement and the therapeutic alliance are comparable.
Sitting in the same room at home suits some couples and not others. Ask what a practitioner offers.
What does couples counselling cost in Australia?
Each practitioner sets their own fee; no published tariff applies.
Four things move a fee. The practitioner's registration category, their experience, the session length, and whether you meet in a room or online.
TherapyRoute publishes a cost guide for Melbourne6 and one for Sydney7. Both are written for therapy in that city rather than for couples work. We have not checked either guide against what the practitioners on this page charge.
Lower-fee couples services exist. Relationship Matters Counselling and Mediation, in Melbourne, sees couples in the room or online, at fees scaled to income8. It is the only Australian couples service whose fee our own record verifies. In another city, ask a community service what it charges.
Where a practitioner states a fee on their listing, that figure is their own. Ask before the first session. Ask too whether the fee runs per session or per person in the room.
Does couples counselling work?
Couple therapy is an effective treatment for relationship distress, and the main models reach broadly similar results9.
Behavioural, cognitive-behavioural, emotionally focused and integrative behavioural couple therapy meet the criteria researchers use for a well-established treatment10.
Those findings describe groups of couples in studies. They are not a forecast about any one relationship, and nobody listed here can promise you an outcome.
Ask a practitioner which of those approaches they work in. The approach is something you ask about.
What happens in a couples counselling session?
Both partners usually attend together. The practitioner works with what happens between you, not with one person's account of it.
Practice differs on what comes first. Some approaches open with a formal assessment that combines joint and individual meetings. Others use no set assessment stage3.
The Australian Psychological Society's code of ethics sets a standard for work with more than one client11. The practitioner explains the limits of confidentiality to each person in advance. The practitioner gives each person the chance to consider them, and asks each to accept them.
Ask before you start whether the practitioner sees each partner alone. Ask what they do with what one partner tells them privately.
When should we go for couples counselling?
There is no threshold you have to cross first. Relationship distress is one of the commonest reasons adults seek psychotherapy at all9.
Distress between partners travels. It is associated with mood, anxiety and substance-use difficulties in the partners themselves, and with difficulties for children in the household3.
Couples counselling works on a repeating argument, an affair, a separation or a divorce, or none of those. You do not have to agree on the problem, or on whether the relationship continues, before you make contact.
Who registers therapists in Australia?
Our records name no register for the title counsellor in Australia. See the Australia page for the professions that do carry a register there.
Nearby places and related listings
- Anxiety Counsellors in Brisbane
- Female Psychologists in Brisbane, one filter on the full Brisbane psychologists list
- Male Psychologists in Brisbane, one filter on the full Brisbane psychologists list
- Psychologists in Brisbane
- Counsellors in Brisbane
- Psychotherapists in Brisbane
- Brisbane: all therapists listed (38)
- Couples counselling in Brisbane
References
Real choice. Authentic, independent, clinician-led care.
TherapyRoute is a clinician-led directory that champions independent practitioners who answer to you and their professional ethics. We don't take commissions, sell your data, or assign therapists by algorithm. You browse, compare, and choose.
Vincenzo (Enzo) Sinisi, Clinical Psychologist (HPCSA), Psychoanalyst (IPA/SAPA), Group Analyst (IGA)


