For clinicians
The Five Traps, and the One That Feels Like Ethics
Couples in this territory are unusually skilled at recruiting a third person into their structure. Not deliberately
— reliably. It is what the structure does, and you are the third person available.
Five traps. Four of them you will recognise and can watch for. The fifth is the one that gets experienced clinicians, because it does not feel like a lapse. It feels like integrity.
One — explaining one partner to the other
You become the translator. She says something, he does not receive it, and you render it into a version he can. It works, the temperature drops, and it feels like the most skilled thing you do all week.
It is also the exact capacity you are supposed to be building, now being performed by a contractor. A couple who can only be understood through you have not learned to translate; they have learned to require an interpreter, and they will need one after you discharge them.
The correction is not to stop entirely. It is to hand it back inside the same session: I have just said that for you. Say it again in your own words and I will stay out of it.
Two — recruiting the calm one as your co-therapist
The regulated partner is easier to work with. They track what you say, they do the assignments, they take feedback well. So without deciding to, you work with them — you address explanations to them, you check your formulations against them, and the session subtly becomes the two of you managing the other one.
The other partner notices before you do. And it confirms exactly what they came in fearing: that in any room with a reasonable person and an upset person, the reasonable one gets the alliance.
Three — mistaking calm for progress
The arguments have stopped. Both report things are better. You are pleased and you begin to think about ending.
Sometimes that is recovery. Sometimes it is detachment — the third phase of a sequence, in which the noise stops because the need has been deactivated rather than met. Two people who have quietly stopped expecting anything from each other present as a calm couple, and calm is very easy to accept as evidence.
The check is behavioural, not affective. Have they done anything that requires depending on each other? A couple who have stopped fighting and also stopped asking are not further along. They are further apart, more comfortably.
Four — working the affect and never the structure
Sessions that feel deep, week after week, with nothing changing outside the room. Everyone leaves moved.
Nobody is doing anything different on a Tuesday.
Emotional depth in session is not the mechanism of change; it is one of the conditions for it. If the couple cannot name a single thing that happens differently at home, the depth has become the product rather than the route.
Five — the trap that feels like ethics
You decide, on the evidence, that one partner is more wounded than the other. And you begin — carefully, professionally, without ever saying so — to advocate.
Your questions to that partner get warmer. Your questions to the other get sharper by a degree nobody would be able to demonstrate. Your case notes describe one of them with more generosity than the other.
And when the less-favoured partner becomes defensive, you read it as confirmation rather than as a response to what is actually happening in the room.
This is the dangerous one precisely because it arrives dressed as conscience. It does not feel like a bias. It feels like being on the side of the person who has been hurt, which is a good thing to be, which is why it is so hard to interrupt.
It ends the therapy for the other partner long before they say so. Frequently they simply stop coming, and the case is recorded as a dropout.
The question that finds all five
Which partner would be more upset to hear how I just described this couple?
Ask it about your last case note. Ask it about your last supervision presentation. Ask it about the last time you described this couple to a colleague over lunch, where the language is loosest and therefore most revealing.
If the answer comes quickly and it is always the same partner, you have found it. Not a catastrophe — a correction to make, this week, and one you can only make once you know.
Escalate to supervision if any of these are true
• You have stopped looking forward to a session, and you know which partner is why.
• You have found yourself explaining one of them to the other more than twice in a session.
• You felt relief when one of them cancelled.
• You have an opinion about whether they should stay together.
• You have said something about this couple to a colleague that you would not say in the room.
The fourth one deserves a note. Having a private view about a couple’s future is not a failure of neutrality; it is close to unavoidable. Acting on it without noticing is the problem, and the only reliable defence is having said it out loud to somebody whose job is to notice what you cannot.
The reframe worth holding
The pulls described here are not lapses in your professionalism. They are information about the system you have joined — a system that has been recruiting third parties for years and is good at it.
They stop being information the moment you decide they are a personal failing and stop recording them.
Which is the whole argument for writing them down, weekly, in a form nobody else has to read.
What to do once you have found one
Noticing is most of it, but not all of it. Four corrections, matched to the traps.
• For translating: hand it back inside the same session, out loud. I have just said that for you — say it again in your own words. Repeated three or four times, the couple stops waiting for you.
• For the alliance drift: deliberately address your next three formulations to the partner you have been under-including, and watch what happens to the room. If the temperature changes noticeably, you had drifted further than you thought.
• For calm mistaken for progress: set a behavioural marker and check it. Has either of them asked the other for something in the last month? Not a task — something that involves needing them.
• For advocacy: say it out loud in supervision, in those words. I think I have been on her side for about six weeks. It is uncomfortable for approximately ninety seconds and it is the only reliable interrupt.
Logging it so it stays information
A countertransference log is worth about four minutes a week and it only works if nobody else reads it.
What you felt. Toward whom. At what moment — the moment matters more than the feeling. What in your own history it is adjacent to. And what the system might be doing with it: whose position have you been recruited into, and which absent figure are you standing in for this week?
Then one line on what you will do differently next session. Specific, small, and checkable — the same standard you would hold a client to.
From the book: The Clinical Workbook builds this into Part D: the five-traps self-audit answered against a specific case rather than in the abstract, a countertransference log with the escalation list above, and a supervision preparation sheet built around the question that finds all five.
Approx. 1222 words in the body above.