You drive home from the session and you cannot tell if you are furious or relieved. Because for fifty minutes, the therapist kept turning toward your partner. Nodding at their words. Softening their tone for them. Reframing their behavior with a generosity that never quite got extended to you. And when you tried to name what you were feeling, the therapist gently redirected you back to “understanding your partner’s experience.”
You sat there in that leather chair and felt the exact loneliness you came to therapy to end.
Or maybe you are the other one. The one the therapist keeps agreeing with. And it feels good for about ten minutes, until you realize your partner has gone flat and quiet next to you, and you are now carrying a session’s worth of validation into a car ride that is going to be even icier than the one on the way in.
Either way, you typed some version of “therapist taking sides” into a search bar because your gut is telling you something is off. Trust that gut. I have been a couples therapist for a long time, and I want to tell you plainly: a therapist siding with one partner is one of the most common and most damaging failures in this work. It is worth understanding exactly what is happening in that room, why it happens, and what to do about it.
If cost is part of why you have stayed with a therapist who is not working for you, I wrote a guide to online therapy that takes insurance and how to check your coverage before you switch.
The Courtroom You Both Walked Into
Which pattern is running your relationship?
Take the free three minute quiz and meet the creature behind the cycle you keep getting stuck in.
Here is what I have watched hundreds of couples do without realizing it. They walk in the door already exhausted, already braced, already carrying a private case file against each other. They shake the therapist’s hand. They sit down. And within the first ten minutes, both of them, quietly, in their own bodies, hand the therapist a gavel.
If you simply disagree with your therapist and are not sure whether to say so, I wrote about what to do when you disagree with your couples therapist.
They did not mean to. But something in them is desperate for a judge. Someone impartial and credentialed who will finally, finally settle it. Who did what. Who is the reason. Who needs to change.
This is the courtroom. And the courtroom is where a lot of couples therapy quietly dies.
Because the therapist is a human being. A mammalian nervous system in a chair, with their own shelter scars, their own attachment history, their own instincts about who reminds them of a difficult parent and who reminds them of a friend they liked in graduate school. When you hand them a gavel, some of them, more than the profession likes to admit, will pick it up.
Sitting with this in your body right now?
Talk to Figlet about what happened in that room. AI relationship coaching grounded in Figs O’Sullivan’s work, LMFT. Free to start, no credit card.
From Empathi’s research: in 58,221 completed relationship assessments, 74.1% of the 6,159 couples where both partners completed were in the pursue-withdraw cycle. Both partners typically describe the other as the one withdrawing.
Why Therapists Get Drafted Into One Side
Let me be honest about my own profession here. When two nervous systems start throwing verbal boomerangs across a room, the therapist’s savanna alarm fires too. Their body registers the threat. Their throat tightens. And if they experience a small internal capability failure, a whisper that says “I do not know how to move this,” they will often, quietly, retreat to the safest part of their own mind and reach for the easier partner to attune with.
That partner is almost always the expressive one. The one who cries, who names feelings, who leans forward. In the language I use in my clinical work, this is often the Relentless Lover, sometimes called the Protester or Pursuer. Their pain is legible. It arrives in full sentences. It is easy to feel toward them.
The other partner, the Reluctant Lover, is doing something completely different in their body. They are collapsing inward. They are going flat. Their face is unreadable and their voice, when it comes, sounds like a lawyer’s. To an undertrained or dysregulated therapist, that presentation looks like coldness, avoidance, maybe even contempt.
So the therapist, without any conscious intent to betray anyone, starts nodding more at the Relentless Lover. Softening their questions for them. And starts, sometimes with the best pop-psychology vocabulary in the world, to gently pathologize the Reluctant Lover. “You seem to be shutting down.” “It looks like you have some avoidant tendencies.” “Can you try to lean in here?”
This is triangulation. And it is a protective act by the therapist. They are managing their own dysregulation by picking the easier person to align with. They have forgotten, in that moment, that their alliance was never supposed to be with either partner. Their alliance is supposed to be with the bond itself.
That is why I lay out the questions I ask in couples therapy so that both partners can make sense, not just the more articulate one.
The Damage Done Inside the Session
Here is what happens in the Reluctant Lover’s body the moment they register the therapist siding against them.
The chest goes cold. The throat closes. There is a specific inner sensation, and I have heard it named in my office a thousand ways, of feeling like a little kid who just failed a test in front of the whole class. Shame arrives, and shame is not a thought. It is a full-body biological event that shuts down the higher brain.
In that state, the Reluctant Lover has almost no options. They cannot suddenly become articulate. They cannot suddenly cry on command to prove they have feelings. They can only execute one of the defensive strategies of shame: attack the other, attack the self, withdraw, or avoid. So they go stonier. Or they get sharp. Or they check out. Or they crack a joke that lands badly.
And here is the tragedy. That defensive move, born entirely from the shame of being sided against, gets read by the therapist as further confirmation that this partner is the problem. The bias hardens. The Relentless Lover watches the withdrawal, feels their deepest abandonment fear light up, and criticizes harder to try to get any response at all. Now everyone is locked deeper into the Waltz of Pain than they were before they walked in.
You paid two hundred dollars an hour for that.
Why “Neutrality” Is the Wrong Frame Anyway
The standard rebuttal in the profession is that the therapist is supposed to be neutral. Balanced. Even-handed. And plenty of therapy training programs teach a version of this: track time, alternate reflections, do not favor either partner.
Neutrality is not the answer. Neutrality is a checklist, and a checklist cannot hold two panicked nervous systems.
What actually protects you in that room is not a therapist who is carefully doling out equal airtime. It is a therapist whose fundamental allegiance is to the attachment bond between you. Someone who understands that the enemy is the loop, not the partner. Someone who can feel toward both of you at the same time, even, especially, when one of you is presenting in a way that is hard to feel toward.
That loyalty to the bond is the biggest difference I see in couples therapy vs individual therapy, where your therapist is meant to be your ally.
Grounded in attachment theory, adult love partners settle each other’s bodies the way a caregiver settles an infant. Two questions run under every fight, in both of your bodies, without words: Are you there for me? Am I enough for you? A therapist who sides with one of you has essentially answered “no” to one of those questions on behalf of the whole room. That is not a communication error. That is an attachment injury delivered by a professional.
I have written more about the architecture that makes rooms feel safe in what secure functioning actually looks like. The same principle applies to the therapy room itself. The room has to function securely before either of you can.
How to Tell the Difference Between Siding and Skillful Work
Not every strong intervention is siding. Sometimes a good therapist will name a pattern that one of you is running, and it will sting, and it will feel unfair for about forty-five seconds. That is not siding. That is a therapist doing their job.
The difference is this. Skillful work names a pattern and then, in the same breath, names the vulnerability under the pattern. It does not leave anyone standing in the courtroom exposed. If a therapist says, “I notice you get sharp when your partner cries, and I wonder if underneath that sharpness there is a boy who feels like he is failing a test he can never pass,” that is not siding. That is seeing.
Siding sounds different. Siding sounds like: “You seem defensive.” Full stop. No underneath. No compassion for the biology that made the defense necessary. Just a diagnostic label handed to your partner like a verdict.
Siding also has a physical signature you can feel in the room. Your body knows. The therapist’s eyes rest on one of you more than the other. Their voice softens for one and stays clinical for the other. They ask one of you follow-up questions that invite depth and ask the other questions that invite explanation. Over a few sessions, one of you starts feeling like a client and the other starts feeling like a subject being studied.
If you want to name your own pattern in the room before your next session, you can take the free Figs Quiz. Knowing whether you show up as the Relentless Lover or the Reluctant Lover, or somewhere in between, helps you spot the moment a therapist is about to make one of you into the problem.
What Is Actually Happening in the Silent Partner
I want to slow down here because this is where most therapy rooms, and most articles about therapy rooms, get it wrong. If you are the partner watching your spouse go flat and unreadable while the therapist keeps turning toward you, please hear this.
Your partner is not fine. Your partner is not cold. Your partner is not “avoiding intimacy” in the sanitized way the internet describes it.
Your partner’s chest is freezing. Their throat is closed. They are carrying an internal experience that has no language yet because language requires the higher brain to be online, and shame has taken the higher brain offline. When they slink away, when they go rigid, when they answer in flat sentences that sound almost robotic, they are trying to preserve a scrap of dignity while burning alive on the inside.
I have watched this exact scene resolve, over and over, when the room finally gets safe enough for the silent one to say the true sentence. And the true sentence is almost always some version of “I feel like I am failing you and I do not know how to stop.”
That is not the sentence of a bad partner. That is the sentence of someone who cares so much that the possibility of failing you feels unsurvivable. I have written the full anatomy of this dynamic in why your partner ignores you, and the same biological truth applies inside the therapy room as much as it does in your kitchen.
A therapist who sides with the expressive partner will never get to that sentence. They will end sessions with the Relentless Lover feeling temporarily validated and the Reluctant Lover feeling further pathologized. Nothing shifts. The Waltz continues, just now with professional narration.
Ready to name what actually happened in that room?
Figlet is AI relationship coaching grounded in attachment science and Figs O’Sullivan’s clinical work, LMFT. First messages free, no signup.
What to Do If You Think It Is Happening in Your Therapy
First, tell each other. Before you tell the therapist, tell each other. In the car after the session, or that night, one of you needs to be able to say, “I felt like they were on your side today,” and the other needs to be able to hear it without defending the therapist. Because if you cannot talk about the room together, the room will keep dividing you.
Second, name it in session. Not as an accusation. As an observation of your own experience. “I have been noticing that when we talk about the fight from Tuesday, I feel like I keep being framed as the one who did the damage. I need to say that out loud.” A good therapist will hear that as a gift and adjust. A therapist who has been drafted into taking sides will get defensive, or they will over-explain, or they will subtly turn the moment into more evidence of your pattern. Watch their body when you say it. Your body will read theirs faster than your thinking mind will.
Third, if it does not shift after you name it, leave. This is the part therapists do not want people to say out loud. You are allowed to leave a therapist. You are allowed to fire them. Continuing to sit in a room where one of you is being systematically pathologized is not loyalty to the work. It is an ongoing injury dressed in professional clothes.
Fourth, understand what you are looking for in the next therapist. Not someone with the fanciest training, although training matters. Not someone with the best office. You are looking for someone whose loyalty in the room is visibly and repeatedly to the bond between you. Someone who, when one of you goes flat, gets more curious rather than more diagnostic. Someone who can hold both of your pain in the same breath.
The Sovereign Us the Therapist Should Be Protecting
The whole point of couples work, when it is done well, is to build what I call a Sovereign Us. Two whole people who can stand on their own ground and also settle in the ground of the bond between them. That does not get built in a courtroom. It gets built in a room where both bodies finally, slowly, get to unclench.
A therapist siding with one partner makes that shared ground impossible to build. They have taken the bond, the actual client, and dismembered it into a winner and a loser. Even if the “winner” partner leaves the session feeling temporarily good, the bond has been weakened, and their partner walks out further away from them than they walked in.
Your therapist’s job is not to figure out which of you is right. Your therapist’s job is to protect the fragile thing between you until it is strong enough to hold both of you without needing an outside referee at all.
If you want a longer view of what it takes to reach the person on the other side of the couch from you, I have written about that in how to get your partner to open up emotionally. Everything that applies at home applies in the therapy room too.
Common Questions
How do I tell my couples therapist they are taking sides without making it worse?
Name your experience, not their behavior. Instead of “You keep siding with them,” try “I have been leaving the last two sessions feeling like I am the problem in the room, and I need to say that.” A therapist worth staying with will slow down, get curious, and check their own bias out loud. If they defend, deflect, or subtly turn it back on you, that is your answer.
Is it ever appropriate for a couples therapist to agree with one partner?
Sometimes, briefly, yes. If one partner is doing something genuinely harmful, a therapist should be clear. But agreement is not the same as siding. Skillful agreement names a specific behavior and stays deeply curious about the vulnerability underneath it in both partners. Siding is a sustained pattern of alliance across sessions, where one partner is repeatedly framed as the healthy one and the other as the problem.
Why does one partner always seem like the “bad guy” in couples therapy?
Because expressive partners are easier to read, and undertrained therapists mistake legibility for health. The partner who cries and names feelings looks like they are doing the work. The partner who goes flat looks like they are refusing to. Both are actually in survival mode. The flat one is drowning in shame. A skilled clinician sees this instantly; a biased one keeps handing the drowning partner more paperwork.
Can couples therapy work if we already feel one of us is being unfairly targeted?
Not with that therapist, usually. Once the bias is set in the room and does not shift after being named, the injured partner cannot settle inside those walls. The work becomes about defending against the therapist rather than turning toward each other. Better to interview two or three new clinicians and find one whose loyalty is visibly to the bond, not to either of you individually.
What kind of couples therapist is least likely to take sides?
Look for someone trained in attachment-based models, especially Emotionally Focused Therapy or PACT. Those approaches explicitly train the therapist to see the cycle as the enemy and to protect both bodies in the room equally. Ask directly in the intake call: “How do you handle it when one partner is expressive and the other goes quiet?” Their answer tells you more than any credential on their wall.
This is not a you problem or a them problem
“To step out of this cycle, couples must break the Versus Illusion and recognize the system itself as their common enemy. This is achieved when both partners accept the systemic truth: we are both hurting, we are both reacting, and it is only happening because we are so important to each other.”
“Neither partner is the villain. They are two younger selves inside adult bodies trying to stay safe in the only ways they once knew.”
Figs O’Sullivan, LMFT
What to Do Next
Do not just close the tab on this.
Bring what surfaced here into a real conversation. Figlet coaches you through it, grounded in Figs O’Sullivan’s work, LMFT. Free to start.
You are allowed to leave a therapist who cannot hold both of you. You are allowed to name what happened in that room out loud. The bond between you is the client. Find someone who remembers that, or become the two people who protect it yourselves.
Keep Reading
Every couple has a pattern they cannot see. Find yours.
In love, each of you is a Relentless or a Reluctant, which makes you one of three kinds of couple: Relentless and Reluctant, two Relentless, or two Reluctant. The free quiz reveals your creatures and the cycle they fall into together. About three minutes.
No signup needed to start.
The Relentless
The Reluctant
