Before We Begin
An existential pre-marital journey for couples
An eight-week online course for couples preparing for marriage or a long-term commitment, starting in December 2026. Each couple works with me on their own.
Dr Ramesh Pattni · Existential psychotherapy, face-to-face and online
Some difficulties are not problems to be solved.
They are questions about how to live: what to choose, whom to love, how to bear a loss, what our time is for. I work face-to-face and online with individuals and couples who want to look at these questions honestly, with someone who will take them seriously.
Starts December 2026 · Online · For couples
Before We Begin
An existential pre-marital journey for couples
Most couples spend months on the wedding: the venue, the guest list, the ring. Far fewer set aside time to talk properly about the marriage. Before We Begin gives you that time.
Over eight weekly sessions on Zoom, you and your partner meet with me, just the three of us. We move through freedom and commitment, identity, conflict, meaning, impermanence and the sacred, and in the last week you turn to the vows only the two of you can write.
This isn't religious marriage preparation, although faith and the sacred are welcome in the room. Nor is it communication-skills training, and it won't tell you whether you should marry. No course can promise a smooth marriage. What this one can do is help each of you know the other, and yourself, more honestly before you make the promise.
What existential therapy is
A reflective space grounded in freedom, responsibility, meaning, and authentic presence.
Existential therapy grows out of a long philosophical conversation about what it means to be human. Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Buber and Sartre shaped that conversation, and therapists such as Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, Emmy van Deurzen and Ernesto Spinelli brought it into the consulting room.
Its starting point is that much of our distress comes from meeting the plain facts of being alive. We have to choose without certainty. We are bound to other people, yet alone in our own experience. Our time is limited, and meaning is something we have to find or make. None of this is an illness, and none of it can be cured. It can be faced more honestly, and that changes how a life is lived.
In practice, I am less interested in diagnosing you than in understanding your world as you live it. I see myself not as an expert on your life but as a fellow explorer of it. We look closely at your experience, slowly and without rushing to explain it away, until what matters in it becomes clearer to you.
What it is not
Existential therapy is not a set of techniques applied to a diagnosis, and it will not steer you towards a way of living that someone else has chosen for you. It is not a philosophy lesson or a belief system to adopt, and I won't give you advice on how to live. It starts by staying with the way things are for you now, so that possibilities you had not seen can come into view.
Ways to work with me
Individual therapy
Face-to-face and online sessions for people facing a choice they cannot make, a loss they cannot settle, a change they did not ask for, or a quieter sense that something is missing. We work collaboratively: together we agree how we will work, and the sessions stay close to your own lived experience.
Couples therapy
Face-to-face and online sessions for partners who keep returning to the same conflict, or who feel they have drifted apart. I attend to each of you as a person, and to the relationship you make between you.
About me
I am an existential psychotherapist, a chartered psychologist and an author. My work draws on existential philosophy and on many years of therapy and personal meditation practice, which shape how I sit with people and how I help them transform their lives.
Dr Ramesh Pattni DPhil (Oxford) DCPsych CPsychol OBE
Existential Psychotherapist · HCPC-registered Practitioner Psychologist (PL045562) · BACP Registered Member · BPS Chartered Psychologist
Books
Bringing existential wisdom into everyday dilemmas of love, family, and personal freedom.
Published Work
Love, Authentically: The Existential Way
A guide to building genuine relationships through existential wisdom: on loving another person without losing yourself, and on the choices and responsibilities that keep love alive once the early certainty fades.
Published Work
The Courage to Parent Differently: Existential Wisdom for Raising Authentic Children
For parents who notice themselves repeating what was done to them, and want to choose for themselves instead.
If something here speaks to you
Write to me with a few lines about what brings you here and whether you are thinking of the course, individual sessions or couples work. I will reply to suggest how we might begin. Replies may take a few days at present.
Send a message
Or email contact@drrameshpattni.com