A few years ago, I worked with a woman I’ll call Sarah. She was a counselor herself — smart, articulate, doing meaningful work with her own clients — and she came to me following the discovery that her husband had been unfaithful. She was, by any measure, not okay.
What I remember most about the early sessions wasn’t the presenting issue. It was the question I kept quietly circling: How do I treat her? When I explained a concept, how much should I assume she already knew? Would she find it condescending if I walked through something basic? Would she notice if I skipped a step?
I eventually made a decision that I’ve come back to many times since: I would treat her as if she didn’t know anything. Not because I thought she was ignorant, but because she wasn’t here as a therapist. She was here as a person whose marriage was in crisis. And in that role, she needed the same thing everyone needs — to be seen, accompanied, and given permission to just be in it without performing competence.
That decision, it turned out, was more important than I realized at the time.
The Room Gets Complicated Fast
When a therapist shows up as one half of a couple in treatment, something particular happens in the room. Not always, and not uniformly, but often enough that it’s worth naming.
What the non-therapist partner often knows that they can’t quite say: they feel observed rather than loved.
The therapist-partner — knowing the framework, knowing what good communication is supposed to look like — may arrive having already done what clients tend to do implicitly but what therapists do explicitly: they’ve diagnosed the situation. They’ve identified the problem, located it in their partner, and brought clinical language to make the case. Not maliciously, usually. But effectively.
And they look, often unconsciously, to the couples therapist for confirmation.
This puts the couples therapist in an interesting position, because the expectation — usually unspoken, occasionally quite spoken — is that two people who understand the field will recognize what’s obvious. The partner has anxious attachment, or avoidant tendencies, or narcissistic traits. You can see that, right?
What the therapist-partner frequently can’t see — or at least can’t fully sit with — is their own contribution to the pattern. This isn’t unique to therapists; it’s what brings most couples into treatment. But therapists have an additional layer: they have a professional identity organized around understanding relationships, which makes it harder to admit that they may be actively misunderstanding this one.
One colleague described the experience of pointing out passive-aggressive behavior in a therapist-client during a couples session — the partner heard it, took it in. But what my colleague noticed was the therapist-client’s ongoing struggle with neutrality itself. She really wanted me to align with her, my colleague said. To see all the things that were wrong with her husband. The clinical language, the deference to process — these were also ways of lobbying.
The Non-Therapist Partner, Who Is Being Massively Brave
Here’s a thing that doesn’t get said enough: showing up to couples therapy when your spouse is a therapist takes real courage.
You walk into a room knowing your partner speaks the language fluently — and that the person running the session speaks it too. The assumption, however unfair, is that the two professionals will find common cause. That you’ll be identified as the problem. That your emotional responses, which don’t have clinical names attached to them, will be treated as evidence of something diagnosable.
What is important to say directly to non-therapist partners in these situations is: It’s really brave that you’re here. I know what it’s like to be in a relationship with a therapist. It comes with its own challenges, and walking into this room took something. That acknowledgment matters. It creates just enough space for them to stop managing the perception of themselves and actually say what they came to say.
Because here’s what the non-therapist partner often knows that they can’t quite say: they feel observed rather than loved. They feel evaluated. They feel that every argument is eventually going to be translated into a framework that locates the problem in their inability to communicate the way their spouse can communicate. They’ve learned to say you’re right and then quietly not change, because agreeing has become the only way to exit a conversation without losing.
In Gottman’s terms, what the therapist experiences as a healthy pursuit, the partner experiences as contempt. Not because of intention — but because expertise deployed at a partner reads as hierarchy. As “I know how to do this, and you don’t.”
The more the therapist-partner pursues, the more the other retreats. The more the other retreats, the more the therapist pursues. Neither is wrong, exactly. Both are doing the only thing they know how to do. But the cycle feeds itself, and knowing that it’s a cycle — knowing it intellectually — does not stop you from being inside it.
Two Things a Good Couples Therapist Has to Do at Once
Working with therapist-clients in couples treatment requires holding two things simultaneously.
The first is to not be intimidated. This sounds simple. It isn’t. When someone sits across from you who holds a doctoral degree, who knows the research, who may even be familiar with your supervisors or your training program, there’s a pull — a subtle but real pressure — to defer. To skip past the obvious. To perform sophistication. To not ask the basic question because surely they already know.
But the basic question is often exactly the right one. And the therapist-client, however much they know, has not been able to answer it in their own relationship. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the room.
The second thing is to explicitly hold the role. It is important to have a direct conversation early in the process: “I’m going to be asking you to take a different role here than the one you’re used to. I’m the one running this. That might feel unusual, and I want to name that it might be uncomfortable. Sometimes I’ll even set up a signal — a way to flag when someone’s professional instincts are running the show rather than their actual self.”
It’s also worth asking the therapist-partner what it’s like to be in a client role. Not as a clinical question — as a human one. Because many of them have never really been in one. They may have been in individual therapy, where their intelligence and self-awareness were assets, where the conversation could stay largely intellectual. Couples therapy asks something different. It asks you to be witnessed in your failure by your partner and by a stranger simultaneously. That’s harder than knowing how to do it.
When someone sits across from you who holds a doctoral degree, who knows the research, who may even be familiar with your supervisors or your training program, there’s a pull — a subtle but real pressure — to defer.
What This Tells Us About the Rest of Us
Here’s what the therapist in couples therapy eventually has to face, usually somewhere in the middle of the work when the clinical scaffolding has come down: they are not in the room as an expert. They are in the room as someone who is hurting their partner and being hurt by them, and who doesn’t fully understand how.
That moment of genuine not-knowing, in a person whose professional identity is organized around knowing, is often where the real work begins. And it’s available to anyone. Not because therapy democratizes suffering, but because the thing that actually moves relationships forward isn’t comprehension. It’s contact. The willingness to be seen as you actually are, rather than as you understand yourself to be.
The therapist sitting across from their spouse, unable to use the tools that have always worked, is not a cautionary tale about hypocrisy. They’re a fairly precise illustration of what it means to be human in an intimate relationship: skilled in some directions, blind in others, trying to love someone with what they have.
That’s the same work for the therapist as it is for anyone else. The training helps in some ways and makes it harder in others. The knowledge is real, and it is not enough.
And honestly? Knowing that it isn’t enough might be the beginning of something.
