Despite a body of work on male perpetrators experiences of intervention programmes, little is known about the intersubjective aspects of the relationships between counsellors and perpetrators. This article explores the intervention context as a social encounter, in which the identities of both parties are implicated, drawing on qualitative interviews with counsellors. We show how social identifications such as age, gender, race and class intersect to produce different possibilities for counsellors and clients, but also how identification involves more than just social similarity. We suggest that a responsive response to counselling male abusers may mean the recognition of the importance of identification across and through social similarity but it may also mean working through psychic identification to overcome difference in the counselling encounter.