Why Working With Couples Changes You as a Therapist

Working with Couples as a Therapist - The Atmosphere in the Room

There is often a particular moment in couples work when the atmosphere shifts. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. No raised voices, no overt hostility. Sometimes it is simply a tightening of tone, a partner leaning forward as if bracing for impact, the other withdrawing slightly, eyes fixed somewhere just beyond the conversation. And in that small recalibration of posture and breath, you feel it — the charge between them, and the fact that you are now part of it.

Many therapists approach couples work assuming that it will be an extension of what they already do. If you are trained relationally, attuned to attachment, comfortable with rupture and repair, what difference does an additional chair make? After all, the theories translate. The concepts hold. Empathy is empathy.

And yet, the lived experience of the room tells a different story.

Working with couples is not simply relational work with twice the material. It is structural work. It is systemic work. It is the management of a living, reactive organism in which every intervention lands in more than one place at once. When you turn towards one partner with curiosity, the other is watching. When you hold silence, it resonates differently for each of them. Even the smallest micro-gesture can be interpreted as alignment, withdrawal or judgement.

The therapist is no longer in a dyad but in a triad, and the emotional mathematics changes.

When the Work Becomes Immediate

What often surprises thoughtful, experienced clinicians is not the complexity of the theory, but the immediacy of the emotional field. In individual therapy, projection and transference unfold over time. In couples work, they ignite in front of you. Attachment wounds are activated not in recollection but in interaction. Escalation can gather pace in minutes. The work is less about interpretation and more about containment, pacing and structure.

And, inevitably, your own nervous system enters the equation.

Two dysregulated partners can activate a third. You may notice a pull towards the more visibly vulnerable partner, or a quiet identification with the one who seems more coherent, more articulate. You may find yourself wanting to calm the room quickly, to restore civility, to reduce intensity. Or you may lean back into a kind of studied neutrality that protects you from feeling too implicated.

Couples work has a way of revealing our own thresholds — our tolerance for anger, our comfort with confrontation, our relationship with power and passivity. It brings into focus aspects of ourselves that can remain less visible in individual practice. Without a framework, this can feel exposing. With a framework, it becomes part of the craft.

The Difference a Framework Makes

I have come to think that many good therapists hesitate to work with couples not because they lack capacity, but because they sense, correctly, that the work demands something different. Much of our core training is intrapsychic. We are schooled in the internal world, in narrative coherence, in developmental understanding. We are less often trained in managing live relational escalation between two people whose patterns are interlocking and mutually reinforcing.

To sit in that space requires steadiness. It requires an ability to tolerate conflict without rushing to smooth it over, to remain engaged without becoming partisan, and to intervene in ways that shift process rather than merely content. It is less about offering insight and more about shaping interaction.

When practitioners do receive grounded, structured training in couples work, the anxiety softens through better understanding. Patterns emerge more clearly. Escalations can be tracked rather than feared. Interventions become intentional rather than reactive. And perhaps most interestingly, this clarity feeds back into individual practice. And systemic awareness sharpens.

In this sense, couples work does not only broaden a practice. It matures it.

If you are noticing more couples enquiries, or finding that individual clients’ relational struggles sit at the centre of their distress, it may be that you are standing at the edge of this shift. That edge can feel both compelling and slightly daunting. It is worth approaching thoughtfully with your supervisor.

Because couples work does not simply add another service to your website. It alters the way you sit in a room, the way you think about conflict, and often, the way you understand relationship itself.

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Couples dynamics is a key area on Ian Tomlinson's two-day Getting Started in Couples Therapy (Imago Foundations) training at Northside. Not as a leap into the deep end, but as a considered beginning in Imago Relationship Therapy.