Any Way Back?
Five questions to help you assess whether your relationship can improve and whether you want to continue.Free written guide and accompanying audio. Read or listen at your own pace.
Welcome from Dominic
Any Way Back? will help you assess whether your relationship can improve and whether you want to continue.
You have probably already given this question a lot of thought. An honest review of your relationship means looking at past hurts and disappointments as well as future hopes and expectations. You may have imagined one life and now face another.
After years together, you may share much of your life: friendships, a home, financial commitments, and, if you are parents, the care of your children. Separation may mean disrupting much that you have treasured. Staying may mean continuing to make compromises that leave you unhappy, without addressing what needs to change.
Many relationship books focus on improving communication, affection or intimacy. You may be asking whether you want to undertake that work at all, and whether there is enough reason to invest more effort and hope.
Love, history and a shared life may offer you reasons to want the relationship to recover. Those reasons alone cannot tell you what would need to change, whether you both agree on what recovery would look like, or whether the changes you are each willing to make would be enough for the other.
Fear may play a quiet but decisive role in how you approach your choices. Separating can mean facing an exhausting upheaval, guilt about the effect on those close to you and the possibility of regretting a choice you cannot easily undo. Staying raises another fear: that years from now you will face the same decision and wish you had acted sooner.
Deciding whether to stay or separate involves taking those fears seriously, alongside what has happened, what you each need and what you are both willing to change. That judgement should be grounded in care, including care for yourself.
The guide is structured around five core questions designed to help you:
- Define what needs to change.
- Assess whether you are both willing and able to make those changes.
- Consider whether giving the relationship more time to improve would be worthwhile, and what that would require.
This guide is based on extensive work with couples in counselling. I hope it helps you understand your choices more clearly and decide what to do next.
Best wishes, Dominic
What you receive
- The complete PDF to save, print or read offline.
- Online access to read the guide section by section.
- Accompanying audio to listen at your own pace.
Your partner does not need to take part for the guide to be useful. There is no score to calculate or deadline for reaching a decision.