Years ago I did a family therapy practicum with Maurizio Andolfi in Rome. I was struggling to find my professional identity as a systemic therapist in the UK shortly after qualifying. I was trying to locate myself within the work, to find a position that felt coherent, and I kept looking for clearer lines than the work itself seemed to offer. His response was direct. Embrace the edges. Embrace the grey areas.

At the time, it did not immediately resolve anything. If anything, it made the lack of clarity more explicit. But over time, those words have stayed with me, and they have come to define how I understand couple therapy and the position it requires.

Couple therapy takes place at the edge. Not at the level of the individual, and not in the certainty of shared meaning, but in the space between. Between two experiential worlds that do not fully align. Between what is said and what is heard. Between intention and impact. Between what is experienced and what is inferred. Between what is real and what is constructed.

This is not simply a conceptual position. It is where the work actually happens.

It is not a space of clean lines. Both partners can feel justified and injured at the same time. Both accounts can make sense when taken on their own terms. Both can feel coherent from within. The work unfolds in that tension, without resolving it too quickly and without collapsing it into a single, simplified account.

There is a constant pull away from this level of complexity. Toward simplification. Toward linear explanations. Toward identifying who did what to whom and why.

This pull is understandable. Linear thinking creates a sense of clarity. It reorganises the interaction into cause and effect. One person becomes the source, the other the reactor. The problem becomes located, contained, and easier to describe.

But this comes at a cost that is not always immediately visible. The moment the interaction is reduced in this way, the system disappears. What remains is a simplified account organised around blame, pathology, and correction. The interaction becomes easier to explain, but significantly harder to shift, because the very level at which change occurs has been lost.

To work systemically requires holding the complexity of how both partners are participating in what is happening. Not as equal responsibility, and not as moral equivalence, but as coordinated participation in a pattern that has formed between them over time and now organises their interaction in predictable ways.

This is where the edge sits.

It is the point at which the interaction has not yet been reduced. Where multiple realities are still active and have not yet been collapsed into a single version. Where meaning is still forming rather than fixed. Where the sequence is unfolding and remains open to influence.

Because the work takes place there, the therapist has to occupy that position.

You are inside the interaction as it unfolds. You are affected by it. Your attention shifts. Your responses are shaped by what you are hearing, by what is being emphasised, by what is being left out, and by how each partner is positioning themselves and the other. The system is continuously organising around you as well, not just around the couple.

At the same time, you have to remain oriented to the interaction as a whole. Not to one account, not to one narrative, but to the movement between them. To how each response shapes the next. To how the sequence is tightening or opening.

This is not a stable position.

The edge is where competing realities are most active, and it is also where they are least settled. It is where the system is still in motion. Where meanings are being assigned in real time rather than retrieved from a fixed narrative. Where responses are forming, and where small shifts in timing, wording, or direction can alter what happens next.

The moment the interaction settles into certainty, it is no longer being worked at the level of the system. It has already been reduced to an explanation. From there, each response follows that explanation. The sequence tightens. The pattern stabilises. What happens next becomes more predictable and less open to change.

Working at the edge means staying with the interaction before that consolidation occurs. It means noticing the moment where meaning is about to be fixed and intervening before it settles.

This is not a comfortable position to occupy.

There is no stable ground. The interaction is shifting, and your own responses are part of that movement. You are required to remain with something that is unresolved, often intense, and not yet coherent. There is no immediate clarity to hold onto, and no single account that can organise what is happening.

There is a constant pressure to move away from this. Toward clarity. Toward resolution. Toward deciding what is really happening and who is responsible.

Each of these moves creates a form of stability by reducing complexity. The interaction becomes easier to understand in the moment, but that same reduction limits what can shift. The system becomes more fixed precisely at the point where it needed to remain open.

The edge is where the system is most open to change, and it is also where the greatest complexity exists.

In natural ecosystems, the edges between environments are often where the most variation is found. Different systems meet, interact, and produce something more complex than either on its own. The same applies here. Between two people, in the unstable space where their realities meet, something complex emerges. It is often difficult, conflictual, and unpredictable, but it is also where reorganisation becomes possible.

To work effectively, you have to stay there.

Not resolving the tension too quickly. Not stepping out of it in search of certainty. Not allowing the interaction to collapse into a fixed version of events that simply reproduces itself.

The edge is not a metaphor.

It is the point at which the interaction is still forming, and therefore the point at which it can still be altered.