Couple therapy is not individual therapy with two people in the room. It is a structural intervention that targets how the relationship operates. This includes the rules, roles, pacing, asymmetries, and conversational patterns that have stabilised over time.

When intervention occurs at that level, it is not received in a neutral way. It provokes a response. The moment a therapist interrupts a relational pattern, something shifts in the interaction (Bateson, 1972; Maturana & Varela, 1980).

What has stabilised over time does not yield easily or without resistance.

This shift tends to move in two directions.

One direction is the pull.

The system attempts to draw the therapist into its existing choreography. This can take the form of aligning with the more fluent narrator, validating the dominant frame, or reinforcing familiar roles and positions within the interaction. It often presents as clarity, cooperation, or reasonable explanation, which makes it difficult to recognise (Cecchin, 1987; Cecchin, Lane, & Ray, 1992).

Functionally, it brings the therapist into the existing pattern. The intervention is absorbed without appearing to be resisted. Some systemic therapists have described this as the point where the therapist becomes “impotent,” unable to shift what is happening (Cecchin et al., 1992).

The other direction is pushback.

When the structure of the interaction is disrupted, the response can be more direct. Couples may challenge the intervention, question the approach, redirect the session, or position the therapist as biased or misattuned. At times this becomes more explicit, with frustration, irritation, or even attack directed at the therapist rather than at what is being interrupted within the interaction.

Both movements serve the same function in practice.

The interaction returns to what is familiar, either by drawing the therapist into it or by pushing against what is being introduced. What appears as cooperation or resistance are different expressions of the same coherence (Bateson, 1972; Dell, 1982).

This is what makes the work demanding. The therapist is not working with two people who have stepped outside the pattern and are calmly trying to change it. The therapist is working inside an interaction that continues to shape itself in real time.

Intervention therefore provokes a response.

That response is not something to remove or work around. It is part of the process and has to be worked with directly. The task is to recognise these movements as they happen and to remain steady within them long enough for something different to occur (Maturana & Varela, 1980).

The work is to hold the interruption in place without being drawn into the familiar pattern or pushed out of the process. Only then does the possibility of a different way of interacting begin to emerge.