When I work with couples, I always (playfully) introduce the ground rules with reference to the film Fight Club. For those who haven’t seen it, there are two ground rules that are essentially the same: “You do not talk about Fight Club.”

In couple therapy, this translates into two critical safety mechanisms.

The first is that what is said in the session stays in the session. Unless both partners can agree that a session will not be followed by a fight about what the other said, no accusations, no interrogations, no post-session cross-examinations, the work will not move forward. This is an essential boundary. As the work progresses, difficult things will be said and heard, often things that have never been spoken before. The ground rule is protective. It stays here.

This is about more than containment. It creates a dedicated space that allows sharing without fear of retaliation or anxiety about how it will shape the rest of the week. It initiates the process of compartmentalising certain discussions and learning to step away rather than escalate. It connects directly to the second rule.

The second ground rule is to actively refrain from having relationship conversations at home. This rule almost always creates resistance, particularly from the partner who typically initiates those conversations. It is critical.

Relationship conversations are conversations about the relationship, and these are often the most compromised space. Either they merge with arguments, or the relationship becomes saturated with talking about the relationship. In other couples, they rarely happen or only occur in volatile escalations. A central issue is the imbalance of definitional privileges, who gets to define what is happening in the relationship. This is rarely equal.

What should lead to repair instead contributes to injury and maintains the pattern. Yes, couples need these conversations. But before that can happen, their capacity to have them constructively must be rebuilt.

Over the course of the work, this capacity is developed in a structured and contained way. Couples learn to have relational conversations differently. But at the beginning of therapy, the very conversations that should create repair are often so destabilised that they do the opposite.

The Fight Club rules are one of the oldest components of how I work. Not following them almost always leads to the intensity escalating beyond what is workable. Later in therapy this changes, because the end point involves the couple being able to have relational conversations, to interrupt and reduce runaway escalations, and to intentionally engage in a repair process for the inevitable frictions that arise.