Couples & Relationship Therapy

Being in a relationship doesn’t automatically mean being close. Being together doesn’t always mean truly understanding each other. Sometimes, love exists—but it doesn’t know how to express itself. Sometimes it’s communication, past wounds, misunderstanding, or silent patterns that stand between you.

My name is Marko and I work as a therapist offering individual, couple, and group therapy in the Netherlands (Arnhem and Amsterdam) and online. I am part of the queer community myself and I believe that relationships—whether monogamous, open, polyamorous or fluid—deserve a space free of judgment.

In working with couples (and triads, polyamorous constellations, and open relationships), I use knowledge and methods from multiple modalities: Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), the Gottman Method, Gestalt therapy, Schema therapy, and other approaches.

My education includes training in working with individual and relational trauma, attachment, communication patterns, and inner saboteurs. The therapeutic space I offer is not a courtroom or a place for assigning blame—but a space where we try to understand what really matters to us, how we seek contact, and where our relationships touch us most deeply.

💬 Why do people come to couples therapy?

According to research:

• They feel their partner doesn’t hear or understand them
• They keep returning to the same conflicts
• They’ve grown distant and lost intimacy
• They disagree about sex, money, or parenting
• Trust has been damaged (infidelity, lies)
• They want to redefine the rules of their relationship (openness, boundaries, polyamory)

Therapy can help:

• Rebuild a safe emotional connection
• Develop new ways of listening and expressing
• Process pain and anger in a way that doesn’t endanger the relationship
• Increase the capacity for vulnerability, forgiveness, and choice

❤️ What does EFT and Sue Johnson say?

According to Emotionally Focused Therapy, love is not just a feeling—it’s an attachment. People want to know: “Do I matter to you? Can I rely on you? Will you be there when I need you?”

When we feel this bond is under threat, we respond with withdrawal, attacks, silence, or despair. Therapy helps uncover the vulnerable need beneath those strategies: for connection, safety, belonging.

Working with me is gentle but direct. We create a space without “good or bad” people—only people who are trying to be loved and seen, but no longer know how.

What kinds of challenges can you bring to me?

• A sense of distance and loss of intimacy
• Recurring, unresolved conflicts
• Issues with sexual connection or desire
• Jealousy, agreements in open relationships
• Pain due to betrayal, loss, separation
• Family, cultural, or language interference
• Transition from friendship to romantic relationship (or vice versa)
• The feeling that the relationship is “not bad,” but there’s no life in it

Whether you want to reconcile, grow together, part ways with respect, or just try to understand where you are—therapy can be a place for that.

What does couples therapy with me look like?

• The first conversation lasts 60 minutes and is used to map what’s going on in the relationship
• We set goals: what would “success” in therapy mean to you?
• Each partner has time to express themselves without interruption
• I use a combination of EFT, the Gottman Method, Schema, and Gestalt—depending on your dynamic
• The focus is on emotions, the body, patterns of reaction—not just words

We work in a way that empowers you to recognize patterns and find new ways of connecting even outside the therapy room.

I work in English. Therapy is available online and in person in the Netherlands—in Amsterdam and Arnhem.

If you’re looking for a space where you and your partners can speak honestly, without fear of being judged, labeled, or misunderstood—write to me.

Your relationship deserves space to breathe. And maybe even to bloom.