Straddling the Fence

The man sitting across from me was crying. Not the controlled, eyes-glistening kind of crying you sometimes see from people working hard to feel something in session. This was real grief, arriving without warning in the middle of a story about a movie.

Manuel had been telling me about a scene in How Green Was My Valley, a 1941 film about a Welsh mining family. In one scene, a boy is being bullied, so a character named Daibando teaches him to fight so he can protect himself. As Manuel described it, his voice broke. He was 69 years old, yet he was weeping over a fictional movie scene about a child.

Manuel’s wife, Cecily, was an intelligent, elegant woman in her 60s who’d been my client for ten months, during which she’d described their marriage as the source of decades of suffering. “Manuel is emotionally flat,” she’d told me. “He’s completely unempathic.” She wanted me to meet him to see what she was “dealing with.” It was supposed to be a single session. But instead, it became the start of something I hadn’t planned, hadn’t read about, and didn’t have a name for.

There’s an unspoken rule in psychotherapy that the client’s individual therapist should never become their couples therapist, let alone both partners’ individual and couples therapist all at once. Yet this was exactly the situation I found myself in, straddling the fence between two people’s private worlds, and holding both sides of a marriage at once.

An Experiment Begins

When I first started working with Cecily individually, she told me about her anxiety about death and misery in her marriage. Underneath these concerns was a childhood in which her father had shamed her for her ambition, her mother had colonized her accomplishments, and her siblings had envied her popularity.

Over the next 10 months, I came to know Cecily’s interior world intimately. She felt trapped in a cold and emotionally superficial marriage to Manuel, whom she described as “the warden” because he monitored and regulated her every desire, in spite of their extraordinary means and lifestyle. Cecily said she no longer loved him. “Manuel’s incapable of being a real person,” she said flatly. When I suggested couples therapy, her response was immediate: “absolutely not.”

Despite living together, Cecily refused to be in my office with Manuel. She wouldn’t open up in front of him, and she didn’t trust him. I also suspected that even though she thought that I might be able to help Manuel, she wanted me for herself.

The day after meeting with Manuel, Cecily told me he’d said he wanted to work with me individually. The rules of therapy suggest this would undermine my work with Cecily, but my gut told me otherwise. I discussed it with her, and we negotiated the terms carefully: a 10-session trial period. Transparency had to be complete—I could share anything from either partner’s sessions with the other. Without these parameters, I would simply be two people’s individual therapist, holding information that could compromise my work with both of them. Full transparency meant that neither partner was confiding against the other.

In practice, this meant navigating a constant stream of overlapping narratives. Manuel would email me about a difficult dinner conversation, and the next day Cecily would come in and say, “I don’t know if he told you about last night.” I’d tell her he had, but that I wanted to hear her version of events as well. Both accounts were true, and both were incomplete. My job was to hold both versions simultaneously without adjudicating who was right—and to use the discrepancies between their accounts as the raw material for the work.

As I carried insights, frameworks, and carefully calibrated interventions from one partner’s sessions into the other’s, holding both interior worlds simultaneously felt like an exercise in translation. And since Manuel and Cecily wouldn’t attend sessions together, I was the only person who could see the marriage from both sides of the fence.

Two Clients, One Clinician

As my work with Manuel and Cecily unfolded over the following months, I observed changes occurring within them. Not the content—they had voiced their complaints directly to each other (often cruelly, always ineffectively). Working individually allowed me to interrupt the accusations, examine what they were actually trying to communicate underneath the blame—their feelings, thoughts, and desires—and teach them to say those things instead, without making the other person the villain. “Here’s something to try,” I told them, feeling like I was experimenting as much as they were. “See how it works. Nothing will be considered a failure.” They’d go home, try it out, report the following week what had happened, and we’d consolidate their learning in session.

Manuel began sending me emails between sessions—detailed, sometimes daily accounts of his interactions with Cecily, oscillating between genuine self-reflection and prosecutorial record-keeping. In an early entry, he catalogued over a dozen of her supposed faults: “depressed, uncaring, mean, impossible to please, financially irresponsible…”—the list went on.

The more I worked with Manuel, the more I learned about his past. He’d inherited intergenerational trauma from both of his parents: each had grown up during the Great Depression with almost nothing. His father had sold penny candy on the street corner to help the family survive. That scarcity—real, desperate scarcity—eventually morphed into a rigid set of family rules about affection, performance, and money: never be excessive, never be spoiled, and always be responsible. Manuel had internalized those rules and carried them into his adult life.  Even though he was financially secure, the new reality had never caught up to him.

Meanwhile, his emails in between sessions provided valuable, real-time access to what was happening in the marriage, which allowed me to respond with precisely targeted interventions—a video on reactivity and trauma, a handout on emotions underneath anger, a guide on listening, or an illustration about leaving your comfort zone. All of this aided our work around self-definition (speaking from your own experience), and other-definition (the ability to set aside your own agenda and truly listen to what another person is saying without reacting, being defensive or arguing).

Alongside the psychoeducation, Manuel and I did experiential work—visualizations and dialogues in which he spoke to his parents and brother (all of whom had passed away), as well as to his younger self. He told his father he wanted his attention, guidance, and protection—the kind of fierce, loving presence that Daibando had offered the boy in the movie. He told him about the loneliness he’d felt growing up in a household where his father often sat hidden behind the pages of a newspaper, never offering praise, encouragement, or tenderness. He talked to his brother, whose death the family had never discussed. He apologized for not realizing the severity of his illness, and listened to his experience of growing up in their difficult household.

In Cecily’s sessions, I was doing parallel work—two-chair dialogues, shadow work, resentment inventories, and conversations between her wounded child, her adaptive child, and her healthy adult. She explored her mother’s self-centered anxiety, her father’s intrusiveness, and her yearning to be understood and appreciated. She told me about a time when she was eight years old and tripped and took a hard fall while playing in the backyard with friends—and nobody came to help. Over the years, she’d learned to freeze rather than cry out, to subjugate her needs rather than risk the humiliation of having them ignored.

Meanwhile, I was holding both origin stories simultaneously: a sweet boy whose parents had no curiosity about his inner world, and an ambitious girl who was mocked by her parents and spent hours fantasizing about escaping their dysfunction and control. Both had learned to make themselves smaller, but the shape of the smallness was different: Manuel’s adaptive child had learned to be a “little man, better to be respected than liked” and Cecily’s adaptive child had learned to be a good girl, “to stay a virgin until marriage, marry my high school sweetheart, and raise children.” Adding insult to injury, neither received approval even after succeeding in the narrow paths they’d been assigned. Both learned the same lesson: even when you succeed at being what the world tells you to be, it’s not enough.

The Art of Cross-Pollination

The most powerful feature of parallel therapy is what I call cross-pollination—the movement of clinical insight between two clients. Both Manuel and Cecily had given full permission to disclose what had been said in their respective sessions, but I still had to figure out what to reveal, when, and in what form.

About seven months into our experiment, Cecily started a session by talking about a new business venture she’d been considering. She was animated and enthusiastic. Here was the ambitious, creative woman who’d been buried under decades of resentment. Six years ago she’d founded a similar company that after two years had yet to turn a profit, but when covid hit and the business faltered, Manuel (who’d already invested a significant amount of money in the project) said he didn’t want to write any more checks. Cecily resentfully complied, but the experience solidified her childhood beliefs that someone would always evaluate, control, and ultimately shut down her independent endeavors. “Manuel’s disappointed me so many times,” she told me. “There’s no point in trying.”

From my conversations with Manuel, I knew he was more open to trying again than Cecily believed. I coached her to present her idea directly and honestly, without hedging or pre-apologizing—another experiment.

The next day, Manuel came into our session beaming. “Yesterday was the best day we’ve had in years,” he said. Cecily had told him she wanted to talk about something important, and that she was scared but was going to be brave and take a risk anyway. Then, she reiterated how important it was to give this venture a try. Manuel didn’t just say he was open to it—he thanked her for telling him what she wanted and offered to help any way he could. In our sessions, I’d been able to show Manuel something he’d been unable to see alone: that contrary to his long-held belief that Cecily didn’t understand money and spent it impulsively, she’d actually learned from her “failure.” She’d decided to start this new venture with a small investment in order to establish proof of concept before making a larger financial commitment. Together, they met with their business partners and agreed to proceed.

What neither Manuel nor Cecily knew was that I’d prepared both of them for this moment: I’d given Cecily the tools she needed to take a risk, teaching her how to initiate a conversation about what she wanted. Meanwhile, I’d been helping Manuel learn how to hear someone without getting defensive, ask curious questions, and stay open. Manuel was accustomed to doing the talking, not the listening, and learning to change that took a long time. But by the time Cecily approached him, he was ready to listen differently.

Why It Worked

Four months in, taking stock of the progress Manuel and Cecily had made, I realized we’d done something that no traditional couples therapy session could’ve accomplished. In a joint session, that hard conversation about Cecily’s business would’ve happened in real time, with both partners’ defenses activated, their survival strategies firing, and the therapist trying to manage all of it. Even when couples do make progress in the office, they often report back that what was accomplished in session fell apart later without the therapist’s presence. But our parallel structure solved this problem: each partner was prepared individually before being sent out to try an experiment in real life—in the kitchen, in the car, or over dinner. There was no therapist present to mediate, which meant that when it worked, the victory was all theirs. The breakthrough felt like it belonged to them, because it did.

Meanwhile, working privately with Cecily allowed her to do her own work without being thrown off balance by Manuel. In joint sessions, any display of vulnerability from him would’ve triggered the contempt and resentment she’d inherited from a lifetime of being surrounded by people who resented her success: a terrified mother, a sarcastic father, and socially awkward siblings. When Manuel showed vulnerability, Cecily didn’t feel tenderness, she felt the familiar rage of being asked to sacrifice herself in order to protect the feelings of yet another insecure person. Alone with me, she could express compassion and love for her own wounded child, without Manuel’s needs intruding on the process.

Working privately with Manuel gave him the space to express how he wanted love and protection without being judged for it—something Cecily admitted she’d done in the past. He could tell his father in a visualization that he wanted his attention, guidance, and protection. He could tell his dead brother he missed him and was sorry he hadn’t gotten to know him better. And he could tell his mother he’d wanted to live the life of a little boy, not the life of a little man. Cecily didn’t want to witness this. When we began, her capacity for empathy was very low. What she wanted was for Manuel to acknowledge his vulnerabilities and the pain they’d caused her, and then for him to behave differently. Our private sessions gave him the space to learn to do this without her judging the process.

Seeing each partner individually also gave me space to receive their insight, weigh it, sit with it, and decide how and when to bring it into my work with the other parter—without the risk of appearing to take sides. I was able to use the gap between their two versions of events as clinical material instead of spending the session adjudicating whose memory was correct. Plus, I could be more direct and confrontational with them individually than I could ever be with both in the room.

After the timeline for our experiment had ended, we all agreed that it had been a success, so we decided to keep going. And over the next two years, I watched Manuel and Cecily transform the way they interacted. Manuel went from tracking his wife’s “failures” to, eventually, learning to listen empathically. In one session, he recounted how earlier in the week he’d sat with Cecily while she cried about feeling frightened and depressed. Then, he simply asked if he could hold her, and stayed present without trying to fix anything.

Of course, the road back to trust, friendship, and connection wasn’t smooth, and their differences didn’t disappear. Manuel would have periods of genuine growth—practicing empathy, staying non-defensive, listening with curiosity—and then tell Cecily she needed to change her spending habits so they could save money (when they didn’t actually need to), detonating four months of goodwill. Cecily would announce at a family gathering that Manuel was “a great, sweet guy,” and the next day, when he expressed appreciation for the comment, she’d tell him she hadn’t meant it. But a couple weeks later, she kissed him on the lips for the first time in years, and that evening, when he was on his way home, she sent him a loving text message: “Hurry home—I miss you.” There were occasional ups and downs, but for the most part, their dynamic had shifted for the better.

Rethinking Couples Therapy

So what did I learn from this experiment? The parallel structure emerged from a constraint—a wife who refused to sit in the therapy room with her husband. But what it revealed has changed how I think about couples work. There’s a huge population of committed partners who can’t do their best work in a shared session—not because they’re too guarded or too polished, but because they carry too much anger, contempt, accumulated pain, or mistrust. Their partner’s presence doesn’t just make vulnerability difficult; it makes it impossible. These couples have been hurting each other for so long that the therapy room itself becomes another arena for pain, and understandably, a very unappealing place to enter, no matter how much they want to improve their relationship or how skilled the therapist may be.

Couples therapy, it turns out, can be effective without both spouses together in the room. You can treat the relationship by treating each person’s relationship to themselves—to their wounds, their survival strategies, their inherited patterns—and then by carefully and deliberately creating the conditions for them to practice new ways of being with each other in real life, where it actually counts.

What’s different about this approach is that it captures the best of both worlds while avoiding the pitfalls. It preserves the private therapeutic relationship of individual therapy, which enables people to confront themselves and gives the clinician accurate information from the primary source: the client, not their partner’s account of them. Drawing from couples therapy, it keeps the focus on the relationship. Interventions are practiced in session, tested in real life, and then debriefed individually. You hear two versions of every experiment, and the gap in between them is where you’ll find the clinical gold.

When Cecily told me that Manuel was incapable of feeling anything, I didn’t have to take her word for it. I watched him weep, and I saw him learn to identify feelings he didn’t know he had. His emotional flatness wasn’t a deficit, it was a combination of temperament, schemas, and defenses learned by a boy whose family had taught him that feelings were indulgent, so he’d built a suit of armor around that lesson. When Manuel told me that Cecily would never be satisfied no matter what he did, I didn’t have to accept that either. I’d sat with her while she described never once seeing “the gleam in her mother’s eye.” Her chronic dissatisfaction wasn’t a character flaw, it was a survival strategy, a vigilant scanning for what’s missing that develops when a child learns that what she values will be belittled.

Of course, this work wasn’t without missteps. In one session, Cecily told me that something I’d said sounded like Manuel’s words, not mine. Sure enough, what Manuel had said to me in our last session—what I’d unintentionally communicated to Cecily—had resonated with me. It wasn’t the content that stung for her, it was the experience of her therapist sounding like her husband. In that moment, the fence I’d been so carefully straddling tilted, and she’d felt me land on Manuel’s side. This is a central risk of parallel therapy. The client needs to feel that you’re fundamentally theirs—that you see them, understand them, and won’t betray them by becoming the other person’s advocate. Each partner needs to feel uniquely held and protected, the way a child needs to feel that a parent’s love isn’t diminished by the existence of a sibling.

Are there risks in seeing both partners individually? Of course. But I’d counter that it’s the fear of missteps that keeps clinicians from experimenting, and experimentation is precisely how our field advances. In training, we’re taught how to tolerate ambiguity. All clinical work demands it. I also believe there’s real value in charting new territory, in sitting with the doubt that what you’re doing might fail, but staying with it anyway because you see a glimmer of possibility. Every modality that exists today began with a clinician who, out of necessity, tried something that hadn’t been done before. The safeguard isn’t avoiding the risk. It’s being honest when you stumble, repairing the rupture, and learning from it—exactly what we ask our clients to do in their own relationships.

There’s something I still want that this approach hasn’t yet achieved: my dream is to bring Manuel and Cecily into the same room. Manuel says he’s ready, but Cecily is not. Throughout our work together, I repeatedly took their temperature on this, raising the possibility of joint sessions, gauging their readiness, and always keeping it in the back of my mind. Maybe it’s driven by my own anxiety about doing something so unconventional, a need to reassure myself that the parallel structure was justified and not just avoidance of the harder work. The parallel work has brought Manuel and Cecily closer than either thought possible, but I do believe the ultimate test of what they’ve built would be their ability to sit together, with me, and be vulnerable in each other’s presence. That hasn’t happened yet, but I still hold it as a possibility.

I also want to be clear about something: I’m not advocating that any therapist try this without significant clinical experience and a deep toolkit. I’ve been practicing for decades and have been trained in multiple modalities—the Developmental Model, Discernment Counseling, Schema therapy, Gestalt techniques, Relational Life Therapy, Gottman Method, psychodynamic psychotherapy, IFS, and CBT.

The interventions I used with Manuel and Cecily were valid tools deployed in unconventional ways—visualizations, two-chair dialogues, psychoeducational materials, and initiator-inquirer frameworks—all delivered through a structure that no training program had prepared me for. I was pushing boundaries, not ignoring them. This distinction matters. Years of training and clinical experience earn you the privilege of experimenting with convention and challenging orthodoxy. It allows you to trust your instincts enough to try something new when the situation demands it—and to course-correct when things don’t go as planned.

A colleague joked that this approach should come with a warning label. She’s not wrong. But every modality that changed the field started with a clinician who decided the warning label could wait.

Recently, Manuel emailed me after a dinner date with Cecily. As they walked back to the car, she’d told him, “I like what’s going on. We’re enjoying things. It feels like we’re a team again.” Two years earlier, she couldn’t stand being in the same room as him. Now she was describing partnership. They got there by working apart. I got there by straddling the fence. I think that’s worth paying attention to.