Couples Counselling in HK
For couples having the same conversation and getting nowhere
Max Hogan Counselling
The Problem Most Couples Wait Too Long to Admit
The problem is almost never the thing you're arguing about.
Most couples counselling in Hong Kong runs eight to sixteen sessions. Not years.
Most couples don't come in after a crisis. They come in after years of small erosions nobody named at the time.
A conversation that got shut down. A birthday that got forgotten. A hundred moments where one of you reached and the other one was tired, or busy, or already asleep.
None of it looked like a problem on the day. Together it becomes the thing you're living inside now.
You might be having the same argument on a two-week loop, with different words and the same ending. You might not be arguing at all, which is often worse. You might be sitting across from someone you have known for fifteen years and realising you have no idea what they are thinking.
That isn't the end of a relationship. It's usually the sound of something that stopped getting attention a long time ago.
WHAT THERAPY ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE
If your picture of couples counselling is two people taking turns to complain while someone nods, I understand the hesitation.
This is more structured than that. I think about it in three layers, and I move between them depending on what's needed.
The surface: stopping the fire.
Most couples arrive too flooded to do anything deep. You're fighting about chores, money, in-laws, or the kids, and the fight itself has become the problem.
Here I use the Gottman Method, which comes out of decades of research into what actually predicts whether a relationship lasts. We build a shared language for what's going wrong. Softened start-ups. The four patterns that reliably wreck a conversation. What flooding is, physiologically, and why nobody argues well once it kicks in.
This gives you usable tools in the first few weeks, and enough stability to go further.
Underneath: what the fight is actually about.
Nearly every recurring argument sits on top of a much smaller set of questions. Am I safe with you. Do I matter to you. Am I losing myself in this.
Here I work with emotionally focused therapy and attachment. We map the pursue and withdraw cycle you're both stuck in. One of you gets louder, which is a bid for connection that doesn't look like one. The other goes quiet, which is self-protection that reads as indifference.
Neither of you is doing it wrong on purpose. You're both responding to the surface behaviour instead of the need underneath it.
The root: why this pattern and not another one.
Sometimes a pattern is too old and too repetitive for skills alone to shift it.
When that's the case we go further back, to what each of you learned about closeness long before you met. Most people end up recreating the exact thing they were trying to avoid, without ever deciding to.
Making that conscious is usually what lets a couple stop repeating history.
What the first few sessions look like
Session one is both of you together. What's happening now, how you got here, what each of you actually wants.
Sessions two and three are usually individual, one with each of you. This is where the honest version tends to arrive.
After that we're back in the room together, working on what we found.
I hold a no-secrets policy. Anything you tell me individually can come into the joint room if it matters clinically. I'll tell you before it does.
And we'll figure out what to do about it. Not someday. Now.
WHAT COUPLES BRING TO THERAPY
The same argument, endlessly
Different words, same ending, and neither of you can remember what started it.
After an Affair
Rebuilding trust is possible. It's slow, it's specific, and it doesn't happen by promising.
Sex and intimacy
The thing that used to be easy and became a negotiation, or stopped entirely
Two cultures, one relationship
Different assumptions about family, money, and what a marriage is supposed to be.
Parenting apart
Disagreeing about your child, including when one of you thinks a diagnosis explains it and the other doesn't.
Expat strain
One career relocated and one career paused. Nobody has said out loud what that cost.
Deciding whether to stay
Sometimes the honest work is separating well rather than staying badly.
Before the wedding
Premarital counselling, done properly, is the cheapest hour you will ever spend.
The One Who Didn't Book This
One of you booked. The other one agreed.
That's normal, and it's usually the man. He's been told the relationship has a problem. He's braced for an hour of being told that he is the problem. He's already decided how this ends and he isn't planning on a second session.
Most of my practice is men. It's what I write about and it's the work I know best. I understand the calculation a man runs in that first hour, weighing what he could say against what saying it might cost him.
That matters here for a practical reason. Couples counselling in Hong Kong is delivered overwhelmingly by women, and a man who feels outnumbered on day one doesn't come back on day eight.
My job is not to referee. It is not to establish who is right, and it is certainly not to help one of you build a case.
If either of you leaves the first session feeling ambushed, we have wasted an hour and probably the relationship's best chance at this.
One more thing, for whichever of you is reading this reluctantly.
I'm not going to argue you into wanting this. Pushing directly against someone's resistance almost always strengthens the side you're pushing on. If part of you thinks this is pointless and part of you showed up anyway, both of those are worth taking seriously. You don't have to resolve that before the first session.
Working With All Couples
Married, unmarried, engaged, living apart. Same-sex, mixed-nationality, second marriages with children from the first.
I don't have a template for what a relationship should look like, and I'm not interested in steering you toward one.
What I care about is whether the two of you want to make something work. If you do, I'm in.
You don't have to be in crisis to deserve help with this.
Fee Structure
75 minutes: HKD 1,550
90 minutes: HKD 1,800
Online sessions or in person, Central office.
Most couples choose 90 minutes, because 75 goes quickly with two people in the room.