Continuing from my last post on the Wild West of couple therapy—the volatility, the chaos, the moments where the room feels untamed.

If the Wild West names the volatility of couple therapy, the enchanted forest names its seduction.

When working with couples, what unfolds in the room is never just a set of facts or objective realities. Every gesture, silence, tone, and phrasing is part of the living pattern of the relationship revealing itself. The room itself becomes an expression of the system. The therapist is not an observer—they are already inside it, drawn into the gravity of its organisation.

This is where seduction lives. I don’t mean manipulation or deceit. The seduction we are talking about is systemic: each partner’s narrative, emotion, and way of engaging pulls the therapist toward alignment. 

The relationship invites you to join its logic, to take sides, to believe one story over another. Systems recruit; that’s what they do. To understand this pull is critical, because therapists are vulnerable to leaning toward narratives that sound insightful or emotionally convincing. The challenge is to remain grounded in a relational formulation, where both partners—through action and inaction—co-create and conserve the very pattern they struggle against.

In this sense, the therapist is the foreign body. No one is doing this intentionally; it is simply how systems maintain coherence. The relationship will always try to absorb the therapist. What feels emotionally resonant or intuitively right can be the first step toward losing neutrality. Empathy mistaken for tenderness. Insight mistaken for change. Resonance mistaken for truth.

The deeper danger arises when the therapist’s own blueprint comes alive—when similarity pulls, shared wounds blur boundaries, or aversion hardens into certainty. This one is good, that one bad. This one right, that one wrong. Even structure can seduce: frameworks and models promise safety, but the forest resists maps. Every path winds back into stories of injury, loyalty, repetition, and fear.

The task is not to avoid seduction but to notice it—to hold the fruit offered without eating it, to feel resonance without mistaking it for truth, to stay awake inside the shimmer.

This is what neutrality means in systemic terms: seeing how the relationship functions as a system while staying alert to the pull of being absorbed by it.