Services
Written and medically reviewed by Dr. Parth Vaishnav, Consultant Psychiatrist (MD Psychiatry) · Last reviewed October 2026
Couples Therapy
Premarital Care
Trust Repair
Quick Answer
Marriage and couple counselling is a structured, neutral, confidential process that helps partners repair communication, resolve recurring conflicts, rebuild trust, and make clear decisions about their relationship. It is effective for arranged and love marriages alike, at any stage — including before marriage. Dr. Parth Vaishnav provides couple, family, and premarital counselling in Ahmedabad, in person and online.
Introduction
When the same arguments keep repeating, or you feel distant from your partner, it is usually not because you have stopped caring. It is because you are stuck in a painful cycle. Dr. Parth Vaishnav uses Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), a research-supported approach to couples counselling, to help partners understand the emotions behind the conflict and rebuild a secure, trusting bond. He works with couples on frequent fights, communication problems, emotional distance, trust after an affair, intimacy concerns, conflicts with family and in-laws, and premarital counselling, in person in Memnagar, Ahmedabad, or online.
Overview
Relationship counselling applies evidence-based frameworks to identify each couple's negative interaction cycle — pursue-withdraw, criticize-defend, silent distance — and replace it with communication that actually lands. In the Indian context, effective counselling must also navigate joint-family dynamics, in-law relationships, arranged-marriage adjustment, financial control patterns, intimacy concerns, and the involvement of extended family in couple decisions. Individual mental health is assessed too, since untreated depression, anxiety, or addiction in one partner is a hidden driver in many strained marriages.
Conditions Treated
• Couple Counselling — structured joint sessions to break negative cycles and rebuild connection • Marriage Counselling — for married couples facing conflict, distance, trust breaches, or major decisions • Premarital Counselling — expectation-setting on finances, family boundaries, career, intimacy, and children before marriage; increasingly chosen by couples in arranged matches • Relationship Counselling — for unmarried and long-term partners • Family Counselling — parent-adult child conflict, in-law tensions, joint-family friction, and communication breakdown across generations • Divorce & Separation Support — emotionally neutral support for couples deciding on, or coping with, separation, including co-parenting guidance
Signs & Symptoms
• Recurring arguments about the same issues without resolution • Communication reduced to logistics — or to silence • Feeling unheard, criticized, or taken for granted • Trust breaches — secrecy, financial hiding, emotional or physical affairs • In-law and joint-family conflicts straining the couple bond • Loss of emotional or physical intimacy • Staying together 'only for the children' or family reputation • Considering separation but feeling confused, guilty, or afraid
Causes & Risk Factors
• Unspoken and mismatched expectations — especially acute in early arranged marriages • Poor conflict skills inherited from each partner's family of origin • Boundary struggles between the couple unit and extended families • Financial stress and control disputes • Work pressure leaving no couple time; parenting disagreements • Untreated individual conditions — depression, anxiety, addiction, or sexual difficulties • Erosion: years of small hurts never repaired
How Diagnosis Works
The process begins with a joint session to map the relationship's history and each partner's perspective, often followed by brief individual sessions so each person can speak freely. Dr. Parth Vaishnav Vaishnav identifies the couple's core negative cycle, contributing individual factors, and family-system pressures, then agrees goals with both partners — whether reconciliation, decision clarity, or respectful separation. Strict neutrality is maintained: the counsellor is on the side of the relationship's health, never one spouse.
Treatment Options
• Structured couple therapy sessions with communication retraining — speaking to be understood, listening to understand • Conflict-resolution frameworks replacing blame cycles • Trust-rebuilding protocols after breaches, with realistic timelines • Boundary-setting strategies for joint-family and in-law dynamics • Intimacy restoration — including referral into clinical sexology care where needed, seamlessly and privately • Premarital modules covering finances, family boundaries, career plans, intimacy expectations, and children • Individual treatment alongside couple work when depression, anxiety, or addiction is fueling the conflict • Separation and co-parenting counselling when parting is the chosen path — minimizing damage, especially to children
Why Early Intervention Matters
Couples who seek help early — while goodwill still exists — have markedly better outcomes than those arriving after years of contempt and parallel lives. Early counselling repairs patterns in weeks that later take months, protects children from chronic conflict exposure, and often prevents separations that neither partner truly wants. If you've wondered whether counselling might help, that's the moment to come.
Why Choose Dr. Parth Vaishnav
Couples choose Dr. Parth Vaishnav because sessions are strictly neutral, deeply confidential, and practical for Indian family realities — joint families, community reputation concerns, and all. As a psychiatrist, he also detects and treats the individual conditions (depression, addiction, sexual difficulties) that pure relationship counselling often misses. Sessions run in Gujarati, Hindi, or English; online joint sessions are available, including for couples living in different cities or NRI couples.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about this mental health service and treatment options.
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a research-supported form of couples therapy that helps partners understand the emotional needs and fears behind their arguments, and rebuild a secure, trusting bond. It is one of the most thoroughly researched approaches to couples counselling.
EFT is based on attachment science. Instead of focusing on who is right, sessions help each partner see the cycle they get stuck in, such as one partner pursuing and the other withdrawing, and express the feelings underneath, like fear of losing the other or feeling unimportant. Couples learn to respond to each other with more safety and closeness.
EFT helps with frequent conflict, emotional distance, communication problems, broken trust after an affair, and premarital concerns. Dr. Parth Vaishnav offers EFT-based couples and marriage counselling in Ahmedabad and online.
Consider marriage counselling when the same arguments keep repeating, you feel distant or lonely in the relationship, communication has broken down, or trust has been damaged. Couples who seek help early usually find the relationship easier to repair.
Counselling also helps with premarital concerns, adjusting to marriage or a new baby, conflicts with in-laws or the joint family, intimacy problems, and decisions about the future of the relationship. It is not only for couples in crisis, and going does not mean the relationship has failed. If one partner is unwilling to attend, individual sessions can still help.
Yes — and it genuinely helps. One partner changing their side of the interaction pattern measurably shifts the relationship, and reluctant spouses frequently join after seeing the process is neutral, not a blame tribunal. An individual session also helps you plan how to invite your partner in a way they can accept.
No. Professional couple counselling is structurally neutral — the 'client' is the relationship, not either individual. Both perspectives are heard fully, both partners' contributions to the negative cycle are addressed, and neither is publicly blamed. Most couples are surprised to discover the enemy was a pattern, not a person.
Completely. Nothing is disclosed to parents, in-laws, or anyone else without both partners' consent — a protection that matters enormously in close-knit communities. Confidentiality is also legally protected under the Mental Healthcare Act 2017. What is said in the room stays in the room; that safety is what makes honest work possible.
It isn't mandatory — it's smart. Arranged-match couples often have limited time to discover expectations around finances, in-law boundaries, careers, intimacy, and children before living them. A few structured premarital sessions surface these conversations safely, dramatically reducing first-year conflict. Many couples describe it as the most practical wedding preparation they did.
Many marriages do survive infidelity — when both partners commit to a structured rebuilding process: full ending of the affair, honest accountability, managed disclosure, and staged trust repair over months, not days. Counselling provides the framework and referee that raw emotion cannot. Where rebuilding isn't chosen, counselling instead supports a clear, less destructive parting.
Separation done badly scars adults and children for years. Separation counselling helps you part with clarity instead of chaos — processing grief and anger, communicating decisions to families, and building a co-parenting plan that shields children from conflict. Some couples also discover, in that calmer space, that the decision deserves one more look. Either way, you leave with less damage.