Unbalancing a Couple: How and When to Strategically Take Sides

We often enter a consultation room believing that our neutrality is our greatest asset. This belief is a tactical error that allows a rigid couple to maintain their pathology by using you as a stabilizer. When a couple has refined their conflict over a decade, they have already accounted for a neutral observer. They will attempt to pull you into the center of their seesaw so that neither side ever touches the ground. If you remain exactly in the middle, the seesaw stays level, the tension remains constant, and nothing changes. I once worked with a couple, Sarah and Mark, who had spent four years in various offices where every practitioner tried to be even handed. Mark would offer a list of logical grievances, and Sarah would respond with a list of emotional injuries. Each time a practitioner validated both sides equally, the couple left the office feeling heard but remained entirely stuck in their cycle. The neutrality of the previous practitioners had become the very glue that held their misery together.

We define unbalancing as the deliberate act of joining one member of a system against another to change the power structure. This is not a permanent alliance based on who is right or who is more likable. You are not a judge rendering a final verdict on their character. You are a lever. Jay Haley observed that in any dysfunctional system, there is a hierarchy that has become malformed. One partner may be using a symptom, such as chronic lateness or physical withdrawal, to control the other. If you treat that symptom as an isolated issue to be discussed neutrally, you support the person using the symptom. You must instead throw your mass behind the partner who is currently being defeated by the symptom. When you do this, you force the system to reorganize because it can no longer function in its habitual way.

I recall a situation where the wife, Elena, complained that her husband, David, never initiated any household decisions. David sat in the chair with a pleasant, vacant expression and agreed with everything she said, yet he never followed through on any agreement. A neutral approach would involve asking David why he forgets or asking Elena how she can be more clear. Instead, I ignored Elena entirely for the first twenty minutes of the session and focused solely on David. I praised his ability to remain calm while his wife was clearly distressed. I suggested that his quiet was actually a form of protection for her, as her ideas were likely too fragile to handle his input. By siding with David’s lack of speech and framing it as a condescending protective measure, I made his passivity uncomfortable for him. He could no longer hide behind the mask of the easy husband because I had defined that mask as a superior, patronizing position. Elena, seeing me side with him in this way, became confused and then angry, which finally forced a real interaction between them.

You communicate your alliance through your physical orientation as much as your words. We know that the way you angle your chair tells the couple who is the focus of your attention. If you are unbalancing a system, you turn your body fully toward one partner. You maintain eye contact with them while the other speaks. This creates a visual coalition that the excluded partner will find impossible to ignore. I use this when a dominant partner refuses to let the other speak. Instead of telling the dominant partner to be quiet, which often results in a defensive argument about fairness, I turn my back slightly toward them and begin an intense conversation with the quieter partner. You are signaling that the interesting part of the session is happening over here, in this new alliance. This triggers a specific kind of curiosity and urgency in the excluded partner that we can use later in the session.

When you choose a side, the excluded partner will often attempt to recruit you back to neutrality. They will accuse you of being unfair or of not understanding the full story. You must expect this reaction and refuse to defend yourself. If you defend your position, you have entered a symmetrical struggle with the client and you have lost your strategic advantage. We handle these moments by acknowledging the observation without changing the behavior. You might say to the complaining partner that they are correct, and that for the next fifteen minutes, you are indeed going to be unfair because fairness has failed them for five years. This transparency strips the unfairness of its power. You have turned a critique of your method into a component of treatment.

The words you choose must be sharp. You do not use soft, invitational language when unbalancing. You use declarative statements that force a response. For example, if you are siding with a wife who feels neglected, you do not say that her husband should listen more. You say to the husband that he is likely right to ignore her, because if he actually listened to her, he might realize how much he has failed, and that realization would be too heavy for him to carry. This is an Ericksonian maneuver. You are siding with his resistance, but you are framing that resistance in a way that makes it look like a weakness rather than a choice. You are challenging his competence by agreeing with his behavior. I have used this to provoke a husband into proving me wrong by listening intently for the first time in a decade.

We never stay on one side for the duration of the entire treatment. The unbalancing is a temporary state designed to break a stalemate. You watch for the moment when the power change has occurred. You know this has happened when the partner you are supporting begins to take over the work themselves, or when the excluded partner finally breaks their habitual pattern to demand entry into the conversation. I once worked with a couple where the husband was the primary breadwinner and used financial control to keep his wife quiet. I spent three sessions siding with him, praising his fiscal responsibility and suggesting that his wife was perhaps too flighty to handle the stress of money. By the fourth session, the wife had become so indignant that she brought in a detailed ledger of her own and demanded that I look at it. She had finally found her voice. At that moment, I immediately changed sides. I turned to the husband and asked him why he had been hiding his wife’s competence. I accused him of misleading me into thinking she was incapable.

You must observe the system for any sign of new flexibility. If the excluded partner remains passive, you have not pushed hard enough. When the couple starts to argue with you instead of each other, they have joined together to defeat your provocation. The movement leaves the dominant partner off-balance and ready for change.

You must recognize the precise moment when the dominant partner begins to doubt their own authority. This doubt does not manifest as a polite admission of fault. It appears as a sudden, sharp indignation or a confused retreat into silence. When you successfully unbalance a couple, the person who previously held the power in the relationship feels the floor beneath them become unreliable. We do not offer them a hand to steady themselves. Instead, we increase the tilt. If you provide a safety net too early, you reinforce the very hierarchy you are attempting to dismantle. Your role is to sustain the imbalance until the couple is forced to reorganize their interactions into a more functional pattern.

I once worked with a couple where the husband used his technical expertise to diminish his wife’s contributions to the household finances. He spoke in spreadsheets and percentages, while she spoke in fears and needs. To unbalance this, I did not ask him to be more empathetic. I did not ask her to be more assertive. I chose to side with his technical rigidity but in a way that made it a burden rather than a tool of power. I instructed him to provide her with a daily, ninety-minute seminar on fiscal management, starting at five thirty in the morning. I told him that since he was the only one with the intellectual capacity to understand these figures, it was his duty to ensure she reached his level of competence. By the third day, his desire to dominate through expertise had vanished. He was exhausted, and she had become the one who controlled the schedule of his lectures. We use the ordeal to make the dominant position too expensive to maintain.

You will encounter resistance when you stop being a fair judge and start being a strategic ally. When the “victim” in a relationship realizes you are siding with the “aggressor,” they will look at you with betrayal. You must resist the urge to explain your strategy. If you explain the maneuver, you destroy its clinical efficacy. We call this the refusal to understand. When a wife complains that her husband is emotionally distant, you side with the husband’s distance. You might tell her that his silence is a gift of peace that she is too loud to appreciate. This provocation forces her to defend her own value. It also forces the husband to defend her against your “unfair” assessment, or to acknowledge that his silence is not a gift but a weapon. Either way, the old pattern of nagging and withdrawing is interrupted.

I worked with a man who was frequently depressed, which forced his wife to handle every aspect of their lives, from car repairs to social engagements. She complained about her burden, but she also protected it. To unbalance them, I told the husband that he was far too fragile to handle the news I was about to share. I spoke only to the wife for twenty minutes, discussing the husband as if he were a delicate child who might break if a loud noise occurred. I instructed her to check his pulse every hour to ensure he was not overexerted by the simple act of sitting in the room. This moved the wife into a position of absurd responsibility and the husband into a position of forced incompetence. The husband’s anger at being treated like an invalid was the lever we needed. He eventually stood up and demanded that I speak to him directly. In that moment, the hierarchy changed because he claimed his adulthood to spite me.

We observe that most couples come into the room with a pre-arranged script. They expect you to be the audience or the referee. When you refuse these roles and instead join one of the actors, the script becomes useless. You must watch the physical orientation of the couple during this process. If you are siding with the husband, you might lean toward him, use his jargon, and mimic his posture. You might say to the wife, “I can see why he has to hide things from you, as you seem quite difficult to please.” This is not a personal insult. It is a structural intervention. You are becoming a part of the husband’s defense, which makes the defense unnecessary for him to maintain on his own. At the same time, you are giving the wife a clear target for her frustration that is not her husband. When she attacks your logic, she is practicing an assertiveness that she previously felt she could not use with him.

The timing of switching sides is a matter of clinical rhythm. You do not switch sides because the session time is ending or because you feel guilty. You switch sides when the power dynamic has visibly inverted. When the previously dominant partner begins to look to the other for cues on how to respond, the unbalancing has reached its peak. I once worked with a couple where the mother was overbearing toward her thirty-year-old son who still lived at home. I sided with the mother, telling her she was right to treat him like a ten-year-old because he clearly lacked the basic survival instincts of a man. I told her she should even cut his meat for him at dinner to ensure he did not choke. When the son finally began to protest, I turned on the mother. I accused her of being a failure as a parent for raising such a helpless creature. This sudden shift forced the mother and son to join together against me. They left the session as an alliance of two adults defending their family against an “insulting” therapist. We use our own reputation as a sacrifice to create a new boundary around the couple.

You must be prepared for the client to use “incompetence” as a weapon. When a partner claims they “cannot” do a task, they are exercising a profound form of power over the relationship. In these cases, we do not encourage them. We side with the incompetence. You tell the client, “You are right, you are far too limited to handle this responsibility, and we must accept that your partner will always have to carry you.” This creates a crisis of identity. Most people will fight to prove they are capable if you firmly tell them they are not. I told a husband who refused to help with housework that he was likely physically uncoordinated and might hurt himself if he tried to use a vacuum cleaner. I suggested his wife should buy him a helmet for when he walked through the kitchen. His “incompetence” became a source of ridicule rather than a way to avoid work. He began doing chores to prove his physical prowess.

As practitioners, we must remain detached from the need to be liked. Unbalancing requires a willingness to be the villain in the couple’s narrative. If you are worried about your ratings or your rapport, you will hedge your statements. You will say “Perhaps you might consider” instead of “You must do this.” The former is a suggestion that the couple can ignore. The latter is a command that demands a response. We use the follow-up session to see how the couple has reacted to the unbalancing. Often, they will arrive and report that they had a “terrible week” because they were arguing with each other about what you said. This is a successful outcome. They are talking about the therapy rather than repeating their old, tired arguments about the laundry or the in-laws. The tension has been relocated from their internal cycle to the external intervention.

The finality of a strategic side-taking maneuver depends on your ability to maintain the stance even when the couple pleads for neutrality. If they ask, “Why are you being so one-sided?” you might respond, “I am not being one-sided, I am being accurate.” This shuts down the debate about fairness and keeps the focus on the power dynamic. When the couple finally achieves a moment of genuine, balanced interaction, you do not praise them with sentimental language. You observe it coldly. You might say, “It seems you have found a way to be civil despite my best efforts to show you how difficult you both are.” This keeps the change within the couple’s ownership. They believe they changed in spite of you, which means they are more likely to maintain the change when you are no longer in the room.

We recognize that the symptom is often the only way a partner can exert influence in a rigid system. By siding with the partner who has the symptom, you validate the influence but redirect its purpose. If a husband has “spells” that prevent the wife from going out, you side with the spells. You tell the husband that his body is very wise to protect him from the dangers of the wife’s social life. You then prescribe the spells to happen at a specific time, such as every Tuesday at four o’clock. This takes the “spontaneous” power of the symptom away and places it under your control. The husband then has to choose between obeying you or regaining his health to spite your control.

The effectiveness of unbalancing is measured by the disappearance of the presenting symptom once the hierarchy is reset. When the “victim” no longer needs to be a victim to get attention, and the “aggressor” no longer needs to be an aggressor to feel secure, the therapeutic work is nearly finished. You will see a physical relaxation in the couple, not because they have “resolved their feelings,” but because the struggle for power has been rendered unnecessary. Your final task is to retreat from the coalition and allow them to stand on their own. You observe the husband hold the door for the wife, or the wife speak for herself without looking for her husband’s approval, and you know the unbalancing has served its purpose. A couple in a functional hierarchy does not need a therapist to take a side because they have learned how to negotiate their own.

We transition from the active disruption of the couple’s structure to the reinforcement of their new hierarchy. This transition requires you to adopt a stance of skeptical observation. When a couple reports that they have stopped fighting or that the dominant partner has finally shared power, you do not congratulate them. We know that praise from an authority figure can often trigger a return to the old behavior. If you celebrate their success, you take credit for it. Instead, you express a calculated doubt about the permanence of their change. I once worked with a couple where the husband had been chronically unemployed and the wife had played the role of the martyr who paid all the bills. After I spent several weeks siding with her resentment and suggesting the husband was perhaps genetically incapable of working, he secured a job and held it for three months. When they arrived for our final session, they were proud. I told them that the first three months of a job are simply a novelty phase and that the real test would be whether he could handle the boredom of the fourth month. This skepticism forced the husband to work harder just to prove my low expectations were wrong.

We use the final sessions to predict a relapse of the original symptoms. You should describe a specific scenario where the couple will likely fail. If a wife has started to stand up to an overbearing mother in law, you tell her that she will probably apologize to the mother in law during the next holiday dinner. You provide a description of how she will feel guilty and how her husband will likely side with his mother against her again. By predicting this failure, you place the couple in a therapeutic double bind. If they succeed and maintain their new structure, they are defying your expert opinion. This defiance gives them a sense of independent strength. We prefer that the couple defies us. I once had a couple who suffered from a total lack of intimacy because the wife felt her husband was a third child she had to manage. Once she began treating him like an adult, I warned her that she would eventually find his new independence annoying and would try to boss him around again by Tuesday. She spent the entire week making sure she did not give him a single instruction, purely to show me that I did not understand her character.

You must watch for the moment when the couple joins together against you. This is the most reliable sign that the work is nearing completion. In the early stages of therapy, the partners compete for your favor or your validation. In the final stage, they should find your interventions irritating or unnecessary. We encourage this irritation. If they complain that you are being too harsh or that you are overcomplicating things, you have succeeded in moving the conflict from the marriage to the relationship between the couple and you. You want them to leave the office and talk about how strange you are on the car ride home. I remember a case where I had been particularly unbalancing by siding with a wife’s extreme spending habits to provoke her frugal husband into taking charge of the checkbook. By the tenth session, they were both annoyed that I kept encouraging her to buy a new car they could not afford. They sat on the same side of the couch and told me that my financial advice was irresponsible. They were finally a unified team, united by their shared opposition to my suggestions.

We do not provide an ending that feels like a graduation. You should end the session when the tension is low and the couple is bored with the process. When the drama of the unbalancing is gone, the sessions become routine. You want them to feel that therapy is no longer an interesting place to be. We achieve this by becoming redundant. You start repeating your previous observations using the exact same phrasing. You offer the same provocations that once caused an explosion, but now they only cause a shrug. I once worked with a family where the daughter’s school refusal was the central issue. I had unbalanced the system by siding with the daughter’s right to be a failure. Once she had been back in school for a month, I told her she should probably take a week off because she looked tired. She told me I was being ridiculous and that she had a math test to study for. Her parents looked at me with a mixture of confusion and pity. That was the moment I knew the case was over. They no longer needed my strategic interference to keep the girl in school. They had developed their own internal pressure.

You must resist the urge to explain your strategy to the couple after the change has occurred. We do not engage in a debriefing where we reveal our techniques. If you explain that you were siding with the husband only to provoke the wife, you undermine the structural change. The change must remain a real experience for them, not an intellectual exercise. If they think the change was a result of your cleverness, they will feel manipulated. If they think the change was a result of their own spontaneous growth, the change is more likely to last. We take the secret of the intervention to our own graves. You allow them to believe that they figured it out on their own. I once had a client ask me if I had been trying to make him angry on purpose. I looked at him with a blank expression and told him that I was simply stating the facts as I saw them. He left feeling that he had overcome his own passivity in spite of my pessimism. This belief in his own agency is far more valuable than an understanding of my specific strategic methods.

We measure success by the absence of the symptom and the stability of the hierarchy. You look for the signs of a couple who can manage their own power struggles without a third party. They speak to each other with a directness that was absent when they first arrived. They make decisions without looking to you for approval. They have learned that a clear victory for one is better for the system than a permanent stalemate for two. When you see a wife tell her husband to sit down and listen, and he does it, you see functional order now.