About Grant Wattie

40 years of marriage. More than 10,000 sessions. One thing we know for certain: you are not broken.

What we teach didn't come from a training programme. It came from almost losing everything. That's the foundation of everything I do.

Grant Wattie, relationship transformation specialist

5,000+ Couples helped

10,000+ Sessions delivered

85–90% Success rate

40+ Years married

20+ Years in practice

Who I Am

This isn't traditional therapy. It never was.

My name is Grant Wattie. I work with couples who are running out of time, and with leaders who have built successful lives on the outside while quietly going bankrupt on the inside. Christine and I have been doing this work for over twenty years. Not because we studied it at a distance. Because we lived it, and nearly didn't survive it.

What we do goes deeper than behaviour management and moves faster than weekly sessions. Because the problem was never what happened between you. It was who you were being while it happened. Shift that, and everything else reorganises. That's the work.

"You're not experiencing your partner. You're experiencing your predicted meaning about your partner."

That's the distinction most approaches miss. We don't. It's why people come to us when everything else has failed.

The Story

It started on a playground in Hawke's Bay, 1968.

I was six years old. New school. New grey shorts, the thick cotton kind. I walked through the orchard to get there, Golden Queens rotting on the ground, that heavy sweetness you only get when fruit finally gives up.

I walked toward two boys. Asked if I could play. "Go away. You're too big." Not cruel. Just a fact, delivered the way you'd say it's Tuesday. They kept playing like I hadn't spoken. And something cracked.

That's when I made the decision. Not in words. Not consciously. But a decision nonetheless: needing people was dangerous. Better to be impressive. Better to be the one people needed instead of the one doing the needing.

I didn't understand until much later that I'd spend the next fifty years paying for that choice.

The Years That Looked Like Success

Christine and I met studying Horticultural Science. Before we built anything together, I moved into financial services, leading major teams for AXA and Prudential across New Zealand. I was good at the performance. Very good.

Then we built a portrait photography business that took us around the world. Royal connections. Photographing sultans. Limousines to palace gates. Two businesses — one in New Zealand, one in Australia. By every visible measure, we had everything. And underneath it all, my wife had been trying to reach someone who wasn't actually there.

Rachel. Seven years old. Back seat of a car.

I came home from Malaysia. Hollow. Jet-lagged. Rachel was in the back seat, still young enough to believe I might actually choose her. We were driving somewhere ordinary, a Tuesday errand that wouldn't make it into any performance review. I don't remember where we were going. I just remember what she said.

"I just want you and Mum."

Not the royal photographer. Just me. The actual person underneath the performance. I heard it. I knew she was right. And I got on another plane.

Christine packed her bags.

I walked up the stairs and the bags were there. Not hidden. Not dramatic. Just sitting at the top of the stairs the way a fact sits when it's finished waiting to be acknowledged.

We had everything. Two businesses. An international reputation. Three children. The life we'd built looked extraordinary from the outside. And inside our own home, my wife had been trying to reach someone who wasn't actually there. Who delivered presence without offering it. Who checked boxes instead of showing up.

I was in the kitchen next door, quiet sobs I couldn't control. And I was thinking: the same protection that kept me safe on the playground in 1968 was destroying everything that actually mattered in 2000.

"The costume had kept me safe. And it was killing me."

I sold the photography business. Not because it made financial sense. Because nothing else made any sense at all if I lost my family.

What We Built From the Wreckage

Christine and I trained as certified professional counsellors at New Zealand's first and most respected family therapy centre, working across Maori, Pacific, and diverse cultural backgrounds. Gottman, Imago, EFT — the full range of evidence-based approaches to relationship and family therapy.

I went on to serve as Regional Manager for New Zealand's largest Employee Assistance Programme, working with Australia's top 100 companies. Hundreds of Family Court custodial mediations. Together Christine and I co-founded Aroha Leadership and led the Global Women's Leadership Summit from 2013 to 2016.

But the real work — the work that actually transforms people — came from inside our own wreckage. It goes beyond any method. It works at the level of being, not behaviour. Once you understand that distinction, you can't un-see it.

Bernardo O'Higgins Award — the highest honour conferred by the Government of Chile upon a foreign dignitary. Grant is among a small number of practitioners globally trained in the 3D Relational Simulation methodology developed by Dr Carlos Raimundo.

If something brought you to this page, I don't think that's an accident. The work is right here whenever you're ready.

What People Say

Real results. Real people.

"I read every word. I think it's one of the best books I've read in the last three years. What a masterpiece."

"To be, as you two are, modern shamans — those rare humans who hold the sacred space for others to do what they know they must do."

"You don't need another book to improve your life. You need one that tells you the truth. This is that book."

Meet Christine

Christine Wattie

Christine has been in this work alongside me for over twenty years — and she's the reason most of what we've built exists at all. Where I tend toward directness and challenge, Christine draws people in with a warmth and depth that makes it possible to say the things they haven't been able to say anywhere else.

She's trained in Gottman Method, Imago Relationship Therapy, and Emotionally Focused Therapy. She's the co-author of Love Without Limits and is at work on her own book Buried Not Broken. And she's been my wife for over forty years — which means everything we teach, we've also lived.

We work as a team. Most couples work with both of us. Christine brings the relational intelligence; I bring the directness. Together, we cover the territory most couples need covered.

Visit Christine's Site

Qualifications & Training

Twenty years of professional practice. Trained under the world's leading relationship institutes. And forty years of marriage — including the hard parts.

Certified Professional Counsellor 20+ years in practice

Gottman Method trained Research-based couples therapy

Imago Relationship Therapy trained Depth relational work

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) trained Attachment-based approach

Leadership & Executive Mentor Individual and team transformation

Co-creator The Aroha Rapid Transformation Method

Grant and Christine are both certified professional counsellors with over two decades of practice. Their work integrates the best of Gottman Method, Imago Relationship Therapy, and Emotionally Focused Therapy — alongside their own Aroha Rapid Transformation Method, developed through thousands of hours working with real couples in real crisis.

Google classifies relationship and mental health support as YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) content — meaning expertise and lived experience matter enormously. What Grant and Christine bring is both.

How I Work

Frameworks forged in the middle of our own wreckage.

Not invented in a boardroom. Not borrowed from a certification programme. These came from twenty years of direct practice, beginning with what we learned almost losing each other.

The Inside-Out Method™

Transform who you're being first. The relationship transforms as a result. When you shift to your best self, you create a pull that no behavioural strategy can replicate.

The Phoenix Protocol™

For couples on the edge. Affairs, shutdown, divorce threat. This works in days and weeks, not months, because we shift the being state underneath the crisis — not just manage the symptoms on top of it.

Love Without Limits™

The 9 Principles for relationship transformation. A structured path from wherever you are now to the relationship you actually came here to have.

We still live in Havelock North. We still do this work.

Christine and I still sit across from couples who are scared and exhausted and, underneath all of it, still reaching for each other. We still talk every day about what we are learning. We are the grandparents of five grandchildren. The family we almost lost is the reason for everything.

The thing that hasn't changed in twenty years of this work — and forty years of marriage — is the single thing that matters most. People don't need fixing. They never did. They need a shift in the context they're operating from. Shift who you're being, and the relationship you want is already there, waiting.

We work with clients in person in Havelock North and online with couples all across New Zealand and beyond — Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Asia, the Middle East. The method is the same. The results are the same. What changes is simply where you're sitting when you have the conversation.

With Aroha, Grant and Christine

Ready to Have That Conversation?

Every client works directly with Grant and Christine. Not junior consultants. Not a programme. With us.

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