I’ve written before about the importance of managing nervous system activation and staying out of full survival states. But the opposite mistake is just as limiting: the idea that couple therapy should always stay calm, soft, and comfortable. It shouldn’t. Over the years, one thing has become very clear to me: couple therapy requires optimal intensity.

Think of it like cooking. If the heat is too high, everything burns. But if the heat is too low, nothing transforms. You just warm ingredients that never become anything new. The same is true in the room. If the emotional intensity drops too low, the relational pattern never activates. The couple may talk, reflect, share insights — but the actual system stays untouched. Therapy becomes psychoeducation instead of transformation.

Optimal intensity is the point where there is enough emotional heat for the pattern to show itself and enough activation for meaningful intervention to work, but not so much that the couple slides into survival states. Without this level of intensity, the pattern you’re trying to shift remains dormant. And a dormant pattern cannot be changed.

This is where therapeutic structure matters. Interventions that soothe the legacy of injury, introduce new conversational behaviours, and expand the relational system all depend on the couple being in that zone of workable intensity. Too little intensity and none of it lands. Too much intensity and the system collapses into protection instead of reorganisation.

This is why keeping everything “calm” can be its own barrier to change. Comfort does not shift a relational system. Optimal intensity does.