One of the real, lived challenges in couple therapy is the idea of neutrality. It’s often spoken about as if it’s a position you take or a line you hold. In practice, it’s nothing like that. It’s a constant balancing act, negotiated moment by moment in the room.

Couples don’t arrive in the same place. Two people turn up with very different levels of activation, different capacities to stay regulated, and different sensitivities to what is said, how it’s said, and when it’s said. Remaining neutral doesn’t mean staying distant or evenly silent. It means engaging without being absorbed into one narrative or seduced into one version of events.

The work itself is interventive. At times you have to interrupt, slow things down, or actively support regulation. The difficulty is that this support can’t always be symmetrical. When one partner is more dysregulated, attention inevitably shifts in that direction. Even when the intention is to support the couple as a system, this can easily be experienced as imbalance, focus, or even alignment.

A large part of interventions in couple therapy is about landing something that holds both partners at once, so neither feels picked on, isolated, or implicitly blamed. That’s often the aim. But the reality is that it isn’t always achievable in the moment. Regulation is uneven, capacity fluctuates, and when one person is significantly more activated, the work naturally leans in that direction. Supporting one partner more closely at times isn’t about alignment against the other; it’s about stabilising the system so the work can continue at all.

This is the tightrope of neutrality in couple therapy. Not a fixed stance, but an active, ongoing process of engagement, interruption, and recalibration. It’s one of the places where the strain of the work is most felt, and where neutrality reveals itself not as detachment, but as disciplined involvement.