This morning I was thinking of one of my trainers, Prof Ricky Snyders, who used to speak about the “Wild West” of couple therapy. It’s a phrase that’s stayed with me because it captures the work perfectly.

Couple therapy is unpredictable, volatile, and at times lawless. There are few rules that hold for long. What works in one session can fall apart in the next. You walk into the room and the emotional terrain is already loaded — history, blame, longing, fear — all sitting just beneath the surface, waiting to ignite.

Very little about this work feels neat or contained. Not because we can’t bring structure or direction, but because we’re working with a live system. Sessions can turn on a single breath, a word, a sigh. Both partners are often dysregulated. The therapist, if they’re honest, is managing their own regulation too. It’s not a tranquil space. It’s closer to a standoff in slow motion — where timing, tone, and movement matter as much as insight.

The work is to hold chaos without collapsing into it. To read micro-signals, regulate the emotional weather, and intervene without becoming part of the crossfire. You’re constantly negotiating between containment and disruption, empathy and direction. There’s no manual for that part — it’s learned through experience.

Couple therapy isn’t for the faint-hearted. It tests every part of you — clinical and personal. It exposes your biases, your unfinished business, your need to be liked, your fear of failure. But it’s also where the most extraordinary moments of change can happen — not because the therapist is brilliant, but because two people, for a moment, stop defending long enough to see each other again.

That’s the work: to interrupt patterns of injury, to nudge both partners toward different ways of engaging, speaking, and behaving — for long enough for something new to take root.