You Love Each Other.
Let’s Understand the Rest.
Psychodynamic couples therapy at Sage Mind is for couples who want more than tools and techniques — couples ready to understand the deeper patterns shaping how they love, argue, and connect.
In-person only · Oran Park, Sydney · Saturdays & select evenings available
This isn’t crisis management.
It’s for the couples who are in it for the long haul — and know there’s real work still to do.
- Everything is already on fire and you need urgent stabilisation
- You’re looking for quick fixes or communication scripts to follow
- One partner has already decided the relationship is over
- You’re committed, but something has been quietly smouldering
- You love each other but the same patterns keep pulling you back
- You want to understand why — not just change how you argue
- You’re both willing to look honestly at yourselves, not just each other
- You’re navigating a significant life change — new marriage, becoming parents, blending a family — and the relationship has become harder than you expected
The arguments aren’t really about what they’re about.
The same fight, cycling back. The withdrawal that follows. The way small moments carry weight that seems disproportionate. These aren’t just bad habits or communication failures — they are signals from deeper places. From the attachment histories you each carry. From what you learned about love, safety, closeness, and conflict long before you met each other.
Most approaches to couples work focus on managing these patterns — slowing the cycle, naming the dynamic, practising new responses. Psychodynamic therapy goes further. It asks where the pattern comes from, what it means, and what it would take to genuinely free you both from it. The work is slower, and more demanding — and the change it produces is of a completely different order.
Insight is not just intellectual understanding. When two people begin to see each other — and themselves — with real clarity, the relationship changes in ways that no technique can replicate.
Understanding the roots — not just pruning the branches.
Psychodynamic couples therapy works from a foundational premise: who we are in relationship — how we love, what we fear, what we reach for and push away — was shaped long before this relationship began. In childhood. In family. In the formative moments that taught us what to expect from closeness, and what happens when we are vulnerable with another person.
The work is to make these patterns conscious. To understand the internal world each partner brings — their early attachments, their defences, the parts of themselves they’ve learned to hide. When that understanding grows — in both partners, and between them — genuine change becomes possible. Not just different behaviour, but a genuinely different way of being together.
Christina works with what lies beneath the surface — the histories, the unconscious dynamics, and the meanings that shape your relationship.
Christina has spent over fifteen years sitting with people at the most vulnerable edges of their lives — carrying things they’ve never said aloud, old wounds from childhood, and the ways those unspoken experiences keep resurfacing in the people they love most. She understands, from years of deep clinical work, how the past quietly shapes the present — and how bringing it into the light can change everything.
The therapy room becomes a space where both partners can begin to understand themselves and each other at depth — not to excavate the past for its own sake, but because lasting relational change comes from genuine insight, not from technique alone.
Registered Psychotherapist & Depth-Oriented Clinician.
She Specialises In
- Deep, unconscious relational patterns
- Early attachment & childhood experience
- Complex trauma & its relational impact
- Parenting histories & their transmission
- Identity, grief & loss within couples
- The stories you’ve never said aloud — because you didn’t realise how impactful they are
Insight that transforms — not strategies that manage.
For couples doing psychodynamic work, change comes from understanding. The outcomes below are earned through genuine depth — not shortcuts. They take time, and they last.
Understand why you react the way you do
Not just what triggers you — but where that trigger lives, what it carries, and what it means about your history.
See your partner more clearly
Less projection, more accurate perception. The relationship becomes less burdened by each other’s pasts.
Break cycles at their root
Change that lasts because it comes from insight, not technique — you understand the pattern, so it loses its grip.
Make sense of your emotional world
Understand how your childhood, your family, your formative losses and loves shaped who you are in this relationship.
Relate with more freedom
Less reactive, more present. Not through suppression, but through genuine self-knowledge and earned security.
Build something genuinely new
A relationship that isn’t just a replay of what you each already know about closeness — but something you’ve consciously chosen.
Consistent. Deep. Built over time.
Initial consultation
Take stock of where you are, what each of you brings, and whether this depth of work feels right. An honest conversation before any commitment is made.
Regular, consistent sessions
Psychodynamic work deepens with regularity. Weekly or fortnightly sessions, each one building on what came before — following what’s alive between you.
Genuine, lasting change
There is no fixed endpoint. Couples leave when they feel genuinely different — more free, more clear, more at ease with themselves and each other.
We’re not here to teach you scripts. We’re here to help you understand each other.
Skills-based couples therapy teaches new behaviours. Psychodynamic therapy goes further — it explores why the old ones persist, what that persistence means, and what lies beneath the surface of your relationship dynamic. The work is slower and more demanding. The change it produces is of a different order entirely.
- Both partners’ histories, defences, and internal worlds are taken seriously in every session — not as problems to fix, but as material to understand.
- Sessions are not structured around exercises or homework — they follow what’s alive between you, what emerges, and what it points to.
- Individual sessions alongside couples work help each partner process what the joint space cannot always hold — available where clinically appropriate.
Oran Park · In-Person Sessions Only
Sessions take place in-person at our Oran Park practice only — not available via telehealth. Reach out to check current availability.
This Is Serious Work
Psychodynamic therapy requires commitment. Sessions are regular, the process is gradual, and the change — when it comes — is real. This is for couples who want lasting transformation, not a brief intervention. If you’re ready to unpack the hidden layers, so is Christina.
No Fixed Timeline
Some couples find real clarity in a few months. Others choose to go further. There is no set program to complete — we review as we go, and you decide when the work feels done. The process moves at the pace your relationship needs.
Depth-oriented work shaped by what emerges between you.
Sessions are not scripted or structured around exercises. The focus follows what arises — what you bring, what unfolds between you, and what it points to beneath the surface.
Transparent, straightforward pricing.
All fees are invoiced directly — no hidden costs, no packages required upfront.
50-Minute Couples Session
Weekly or fortnightly. Each session follows what’s live between you — no prescribed agenda, no workbook.
$260 per session- Joint session for both partners
- Depth-oriented, psychodynamic lens
- No scripts, no exercises — follows what emerges
- Both internal worlds held with equal care
Individual Support Session
Individual space to process what arises in couples work — available where clinically appropriate.
$230 per 50-min sessionSome material cannot be held in the joint space. Individual sessions offer each partner the room to process their own history and internal experience alongside the couples work.
Initial Consultation & Extended Sessions
Used for your initial consultation, and for any session where more time is needed to go fully into what’s present.
$340 per 80-min sessionThis rate applies to the initial consultation and to extended sessions — scheduled whenever you feel it would help, or when your therapist recommends more time is needed.
Private-pay service only. Fees are invoiced directly — no Medicare or private health fund rebates are available for couples therapy sessions. Payment is due at the time of each session.
Your Relationship Is Worth the Work.
No commitment required.
Reach out and tell us a little about where things are. We’ll find a time that suits you both — the initial consultation is the place to explore whether this feels right, before you decide anything further.
In-person only · Oran Park, Sydney · Saturdays & select evenings