Couple therapy is not individual therapy with two people in the room. It is a structural intervention. It targets the organisation of the relationship—the rules, roles, pacing, asymmetries, and conversational architecture that have stabilised over time. And whenever you intervene at the level of structure, the system reacts. Perturbation never lands quietly. 

The moment a therapist interrupts a conserved pattern—escalation, withdrawal, pacing, or a hierarchy of meaning—the relationship responds. This reaction is not personal. It is structural conservation: the system trying to return to coherence.

This shows up in two directions.

One direction is the pull. The system attempts to draw the therapist back into its existing choreography—aligning with the more fluent narrator, validating the dominant frame, or inviting reinforcement of familiar roles. It often appears as clarity or cooperation, but functionally it neutralises the intervention by absorbing the therapist into what the system already knows.

The other direction is the pushback. When the architecture of the relationship is disrupted, the system reacts as if its stability is threatened. Couples may challenge the intervention, criticise the approach, redirect the session, or position the therapist as biased. At its sharpest, this becomes personal: frustration or attack aimed at the therapist rather than at the structure being addressed.

Both movements—the pull and the push—serve the same function: the system conserves itself through seduction (neutralising) or attack. A relational system organised around a particular choreography will protect that choreography through either pathway. This is not psychological resistance; it is systemic inertia.

This is what makes couple therapy uniquely challenging. The therapist is entering a live system that actively protects its architecture. The task is to anticipate reactivity, recognise it as structural rather than personal, and remain steady within the disturbance long enough for reorganisation to become possible.

To intervene in a couple’s structure is to provoke a response. The work is not to avoid that response, but to hold the perturbation in place while the system attempts to pull you back into what it already knows—because only then does a different organisation become possible.