When You Catch Yourself Taking Sides in Couples Therapy: Staying Balanced Without Going Neutral

Couples Therapy: What to Do When You Realize You're Taking Sides

There's a moment in couples work that sends a chill down any clinician's spine. One partner turns to the other, almost triumphant, and says some version of: "See? Even the therapist agrees with me!" In that instant, you can feel the therapeutic alliance start to crack.

Couples therapy carries a far more complex set of dynamics than individual work. Caught between two people and their crackling tension, the therapist is quietly cast as referee—and it's easy to find your sympathies sliding, almost without permission, toward whoever looks like the "victim" in the room.

Neutrality is supposed to be the clinician's lifeline. But in the heat of a couples session, holding it is genuinely hard. When one partner appears to be on the receiving end of domestic violence, infidelity, or sustained emotional abuse, your own rescue fantasy can get activated. And the moment you visibly side with one person, the other feels shut out—and responds by resisting, going quiet, or simply not coming back.

So how do you stay deeply attuned to one person's suffering while still holding the whole system in view? This article looks at the central challenge of couples therapy—bias, or the pull to take sides—and at how to put that pull to clinical use through a stance called multidirected partiality.

Why We Lean Toward One Partner: The Psychology of Taking Sides

Therapists are human, and perfect mechanical neutrality across both partners isn't actually possible. Worse, unconditional, robotic evenhandedness can read as coldness—leaving both clients thinking, "This person doesn't understand any of us." The bias that becomes a clinical problem is the kind that emerges when our own unresolved material gets snagged, or when we're pulled into a client's projective identification.

1. The projective identification trap. When couple conflict runs hot, one partner may project their own shame or aggression onto the other—casting the spouse as the "perpetrator" and themselves as the "helpless victim." If the therapist accepts that unconscious invitation, a powerful countertransference kicks in: an urge to protect the partner playing the wounded role.
2. Personal values and countertransference. Your own family-of-origin history or beliefs about marriage can quietly load your read of one partner's behavior. A clinician raised under an authoritarian father, for example, may feel sharper antipathy toward a controlling husband—or, conversely, shrink and over-accommodate.
3. The split alliance. Research points to a clear driver of early dropout in couples therapy: the feeling that "the therapist didn't understand me," or the perception that "the therapist is on my partner's side." This isn't merely a skills gap. It tends to surface when the clinician loses sight of the system's circular causality and slips into linear, who-started-it thinking.

The goal, then, isn't to avoid taking sides. It's to take everyone's side. The family therapist Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy named this stance multidirected partiality: empathizing deeply with one person's position, then deliberately crossing over to empathize just as deeply with the other's. It is an active, moving process—not a withholding one.

Mechanical Neutrality vs. Multidirected Partiality

A common misconception among newer clinicians is that neutrality means silence or the posture of a judge. In couples therapy, neutrality isn't a frozen state—it's a dynamic one, constantly in motion. The contrast below can help you locate your own style.

Table 1. Two therapeutic stances compared

Three Practical Skills for Staying Balanced Mid-Argument

The theory is one thing; voices rising in your office is another. Here are three concrete techniques you can reach for when the temperature climbs.

1. Use circular questioning. Instead of a linear question like "What do you think of your husband's behavior?", ask about the pattern of the relationship. Example: "When your wife gets that angry, what comes up for you? And when you feel that, how do you tend to respond?" This reframes the problem—away from one person's fault and toward a loop of interaction the two of them build together.
2. Announce your side-taking transparently. When you need to lean deeply into one partner's experience, naming your intention up front prevents misreads. Example: "Right now your wife's situation looks genuinely painful to me, so I'd like to stay with her side for a moment. When we're done here, I absolutely want to hear how frustrating that same scene was from your point of view." This kind of preview reassures the partner who might otherwise feel sidelined: my turn is coming.
3. Translate the soft emotion. When blame and attack (the hard emotions) are flying, you can voice the fear and loneliness hiding underneath them. It's a potent move because it touches the core affect of both partners without appearing to favor either. Example: "You raised your voice—but it sounds like underneath was real fear that she might leave. And when she heard that volume, she felt dismissed, so she went colder."

Check Your Balance With Objective Data

Couples therapy demands a great deal of emotional energy. You may walk out convinced you gave both partners equal airtime—when in fact you nodded along mostly to one, or unconsciously cut the other off. These micro-asymmetries are nearly impossible to catch from memory alone. Supervision is the ideal corrective, but no one gets supervised on every session.

This is where AI-assisted session transcription can be a strong supplement. Widely available tools—Otter.ai, the transcript feature built into Zoom, and similar services—now do more than convert audio to text; many can break down talk-time by speaker and surface recurring emotional themes.

Suppose a review of one session shows the husband held 70% of the talk-time and the wife only 20%. That's actionable: next session, you can deliberately protect the wife's floor. And by re-reading exactly how you responded—your phrasing, your tone in text—you can spot the early signatures of your own countertransference before they steer the work.

In the end, the heart of couples therapy isn't adjudicating who's right and who's wrong. It's helping both people see how each of them contributes to the other's pain—and, alongside that, holding yourself accountable for your own sense of balance. Did both voices ring out equally in your office today? Pairing clinical insight with the right tools is one way to make sure they do.