Couples Counsellors in Lagos, Nigeria

Assessment, diagnosis and medicine sit outside counselling; ask who provides them where you are. Open the profiles below to compare experience, language, fee, and whether they work online. Ask how soon each one can see you.

If you are afraid of your partner, say so to the practitioner before any joint session is booked. Ask to be seen on your own first.

Everyone on this page describes their work as counselling. A counsellor listens and helps you find your own solutions to problems.

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.

Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital Yaba Outpatient Mental Health Services. Phone +234 815 517 0000. The provider marks Clinical Psychology as NHIS accredited and directs patients to use NHIS health-insurance services. The current NHIA benefit statement says beneficiaries do not need cash for treatment except a 10% medicine co-payment, and its live fee-for-service list includes comprehensive psychiatric assessment and psychotherapy. This affordable route is limited to eligible NHIA enrollees. The hospital describes two public entry points for first-time patients. Its outpatient clinics cover adults, addiction, forensic, geriatric, rehabilitation, and children and adolescents. To use the National Health Insurance Authority cover you must be currently enrolled. You can also attend and pay cash.

Usually. Partners are almost always seen together¹. Couples sessions require safety.

Some practitioners will see one partner alone where the other will not attend. Ask what a practitioner does when one person is unwilling.

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.

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.

Yes, and many practitioners offer it. Couples therapy by video shows few significant differences from face-to-face sessions². 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.

A statutory council exists. The Counselling Practitioners Council of Nigeria was created by an Act of 2022 and inaugurated in 2025³.

A psychiatrist is a doctor, and the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria keeps the register of doctors⁴.

Ask what the qualification is and where it was awarded.

Couple therapy is an effective treatment for relationship distress, and the main models reach broadly similar results⁵.

Behavioural, cognitive-behavioural, emotionally focused and integrative behavioural couple therapy meet the criteria researchers use for a well-established treatment⁶.

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.

What the research does not settle is which approach suits you. Ask a practitioner how they work with two people, and what they do when the two of you want different things.

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 stage¹.

In the first meeting you usually talk about why you are coming now, how each of you sees the problem, and what each of you wants changed.

Before you start, ask the practitioner these questions.

• Does the practitioner see each partner alone?
• What does the practitioner do with what one partner tells them in private?
• How will you know the work has finished?

The National Health Insurance Authority runs the national scheme and publishes its benefit package⁷.

Private cover is separate, and each plan sets its own outpatient benefits.

Ask your health maintenance organisation whether outpatient consultations with your practitioner's category are covered, and ask the practitioner what they can invoice.

There is no threshold you have to cross first. Relationship distress is one of the commonest reasons adults seek psychotherapy at all⁵.

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 household¹.

Couples come with a repeating argument, with an affair, with a decision about whether to stay together, and with none of those. You do not have to agree on the problem before you make contact.

The title you will see is Counsellor.

See the Nigeria page.