End of another week with couples, and there’s always that moment where you see the power of the pattern trying to pull the whole thing back into its familiar shape. The same content, the same injuries, the same well-worn paths. Two people who genuinely want something different, but the moment the conversation heats up, the system snaps back into the choreography it knows. It’s not deliberate. It’s not malicious. It’s the pattern doing what patterns do: conserving itself.

And that’s the thing most people don’t realise about couple therapy. It’s not about getting the story right. It’s not about digging deeper into the details or endlessly revisiting the old injury in the hope that this time, saying it again will finally unlock something. The story isn’t the engine. The pattern is.

When couples start slipping into the familiar loop—who interrupts, who withdraws, who explains, who reframes, who tightens, who goes blank—you can almost feel the gravitational pull of it. Once it activates, it runs the room. The couple isn’t driving the conversation anymore. The pattern is.

That’s where the therapist comes in. Not to take sides, not to get lost in the narrative, not to soothe or referee. The work is to disrupt the choreography just enough that something else becomes possible. A nudge. A redirect. A pause. A structural interruption that breaks the automatic sequence and gives the couple a brief moment of choice instead of inevitability.

This is what I mean by relational formulation. It’s not a list of issues or a psychological profile of each partner. It’s a way of seeing the underlying architecture the couple builds together—the path the conversation takes the moment distress shows up. Who does what, in what order, and how those moves lock together into something neither partner can shift on their own.

The work of couple therapy starts there. Not in fixing the story, not in adjudicating whose version is more accurate, but in interrupting the pattern that keeps producing the same emotional outcome. Once the structure is disrupted, even slightly, new interactions can emerge. And that’s where change lives.

Couples don’t need more analysis of their injuries. They need help stepping out of the choreography that keeps those injuries alive.