Is there ever a good reason to yell at your kids?

James: Is there ever a good reason to yell at your kids?

Catherine: Maybe if they're actively running into traffic.

James: That's exactly what I thought. If a child is about to run in front of a car, yelling can get their attention. In that case, the goal is safety, not manipulating behavior with shame or fear.

Catherine: Right. You might need to raise the volume of your voice in an urgent safety situation, but you don't need to berate anyone or bring judgment, shame, or harshness to it. It can just be urgency. And if someone is right next to you, yelling may not even be the best response.

In general, though, I'm not a fan of yelling at kids. I think it causes a lot of harm and has no real redeeming benefit. I had a client bring this up recently. He doesn't like the yelling in his home, especially when his partner yells at him, and he sincerely asked whether it was actually bad to yell at their kids. I do think it's bad, and I have a long list of reasons.

One place I start is by asking why we yell at kids in the first place. Most adults can handle all kinds of interpersonal situations without yelling in every other area of life, and then in parenting we act like we have to do it this way. I don't buy that. If you can handle an emergency at work or a conflict with friends without yelling, why are you yelling at your kids?

James: I think we yell at kids because we can get away with it.

Catherine: Often, yes. I think you're naming entitlement, and I do think there's a lot of entitlement in parenting. I also think many people haven't thought much about their decision to yell at kids.

One situation where I've certainly been tempted is with my teenager, who always has headphones on. If I want his attention, I could yell, but that's a line I don't cross with my kids. So instead I walk over and tap his shoulder, or sometimes I call his phone because that's what he's listening to music on anyway. It's easy as a parent to justify not doing the harder thing. Why walk over? Why not just yell up the stairs?

What I object to is the harshness of it. Younger, smaller people need more gentleness, not more harshness. But culturally, there's a lot of conditioning that it's okay to be harsh with kids in ways you would never tolerate from another adult, or even from your child toward you.

James: You've brought that up before, how hypocritical we are about allowing ourselves to do things to our children that we would never allow our children to do to us because we'd call it wrong or disrespectful.

Catherine: Yes. I see that all the time. Parents will not tolerate their kids talking to them the way they talk to their kids. In general, I hold adults to higher standards than children, and I hold parents to higher standards than their own children.

When you're dealing with young, developing brains, it's not realistic or fair to expect them to regulate themselves better than you do. What you're modeling is, "This is how we handle frustration around here. This is how we handle impatience around here." Then the whole household starts following that pattern, and everyone's frustration and anger build on each other.

James: My favorite way to think about this is that we often talk about yelling as if it's just a response. You did something, I felt something, and then I yelled, as though I had no say in the matter.

I think a more accurate way to describe it is this: my behavior is designed to create an emotional response in you. If I yell at you, I'm trying to make you feel bad so I can manipulate your behavior. I really think that's what's happening most of the time.

Catherine: Yes, and one of the reasons I think yelling doesn't work is that it conditions the wrong thing. A lot of parents yell because they want their kids to do chores. But if the kid learns, "I jump up and do chores when someone is angry and yelling at me," then the child isn't developing self-regulation or any real sense of responsibility. The trigger for action becomes aggression.

That always backfires, because then you have to keep reaching for that same trigger over and over. No parent actually wants that. They want the child to do the thing without that level of intervention, but yelling teaches dependence on harshness.

James: I also think a lot of us grew up with physical punishment, and most of us are trying not to raise our kids that way. That gives kids more freedom.

My kids don't have to clean their rooms the way I did. I cleaned my room to avoid physical punishment. My kids don't have that threat hanging over them, so I think it's fair to say they won't be as obedient as I was. There's no threat of physical punishment driving that obedience.

Catherine: Right. You're running into the limits of how much control you get over another person when you're not going to use aggression, verbal or physical. Aggression can force compliance in the short term. But what it doesn't do is help kids develop a genuine sense of responsibility that isn't tied to fear and resentment.

James: It's delicate, because people are naturally wired to seek autonomy, even very young children. When I was growing up, there was a constant threat of physical punishment, so one path to autonomy was doing what I was told in order to avoid something worse.

My children aren't in that situation. If I don't handle myself well and there's no threat of physical punishment, then disobeying me can actually feel like the path to more autonomy for them. I think it's pretty normal for kids not to do what their parents want if they don't gain any autonomy by doing it.

Catherine: That makes sense to me. I've been running a not entirely conclusive experiment with my own kids for years, which is basically: will kids do housework if you don't make them?

I really don't impose many chores. What I've found is that they will help if I'm sick. They will help if I'm genuinely overwhelmed. They will help if we're trying to leave for a trip and I calmly explain, "We can leave as soon as these things are done, and I'd love your help." They do some things most days if I simply ask in a calm way. They'll walk the dog, pick up dishes, things like that.

And as they've gotten older, more and more they just spontaneously clean their rooms. I never made them do that. My theory is that the main thing I'm offering them is a model of non-resentful housework. I don't stomp around the house acting like a martyr and saying people treat me like a maid. I just take care of my stuff and my space as best I can. I think the main thing I'm offering them is the absence of negative emotional intensity around it.

We'll see how it plays out when they're living on their own, but so far that seems to matter.

James: I've had the same experience. I stopped trying to get my kids to clean their rooms several years ago, and all three of the ones still at home eventually started cleaning them on their own.

The longest gap between when I stopped trying to force it and when it started happening on its own was about two years. The others were shorter. They all eventually figured out that they actually wanted a clean room. I don't think I could have accelerated that, definitely not by yelling and probably not by consequences either.

The only thing that seems useful is what you're talking about: modeling what it looks like to maintain a clean, orderly space and making it clear by your behavior that life is better that way, without shaming them. I think most young children don't want a clean room enough to do the work of making one. Some do, but most don't. And it's actually pretty hard for young children to put things in order.

Catherine: I remember being extremely overwhelmed by cleaning my room as a kid. It felt like I didn't know how to do it. I remember being five or six, sitting there surrounded by stuff, and not knowing how to get it from the state it was in to an acceptable state.

That seems developmentally realistic to me. If you've grown up in a very structured environment or a Montessori environment, maybe you've got more skills than I had. But I think we sometimes read kids as lazy or disrespectful when they're actually just struggling with something that is genuinely hard for their young brains.

James: I think we teach kids ten times more through our example than through our words. If I want my child to be kinder, more courageous, or more considerate, talking to them about that will do very little compared to me behaving that way.

That puts me in a hard position because if I want my kids to be more respectful, the best thing I can do is be more respectful to them and to my partner. That's hard for me. And it's useful for me to notice that, because if it's hard for me, it's going to be even harder for my kids.

Catherine: As a rough metric, if your child is a third of your age, it's probably realistic to expect them to be maybe a third as good at emotional regulation. If they have a third of your capacity and they're a third your age, they're probably doing fine.

What doesn't feel good is that parenting puts your own struggles right in front of you. It's a lot easier to externalize that and blame the kids and say they're being disrespectful.

James: Parenting really does demand that I grow myself up. To be a good parent, I have to ask, "What is my impact on my children? What is it like for them to be on the other side of the energy I'm bringing?"

That's the same question I ask in my marriage. But my wife is more capable of giving me collaborative, constructive feedback than my kids are, because there isn't the same power differential. With my kids, I have to do even more work to figure out what it's like to be on the other side of me.

One of my four kids is especially good at telling me. From his early teen years, he'd stop me and say, "No, wait a second, Dad," and point out where I wasn't living up to what I was saying. That was a real gift. Sometimes I had enough presence of mind to say, "You're right," even though it felt terrible. My other three kids couldn't really do that, at least not until they were adults.

Catherine: What you're highlighting is how hard it is to get real feedback from your family about how you're actually showing up, and yet parents often feel entitled to go around giving feedback constantly.

We don't watch our own delivery enough. Am I being respectful to my kid here? If a child says something clumsily and the delivery is off, we might immediately say, "That's disrespectful. You can't talk to me that way." But receiving feedback is hard. We could use more compassion for how hard that is, especially given how much feedback we give kids about their behavior.

James: I run into this with couples. They'll complain that their kids are disrespectful, but I'm sitting there watching the parents be disrespectful to each other. From my point of view, it's obvious their kids will also be disrespectful.

Children's brains are looking for an operating system, and they're going to download whatever operating system is available. If the parents are disrespectful to each other, and probably to the children too, then the children are going to learn disrespect. There's no magic switch where I can treat my child and my partner with disrespect and then somehow expect my child to know how to be respectful to me. That's not possible. Where would they have learned it?

Catherine: I have seen parents who treat the kids a lot better than they treat their partner, and they seem to think that's enough. But it's still a parenting problem if you're treating your partner badly in front of your kids.

James: If my kids are used to dealing with my dysregulation, then they're learning that this is what it's like to be with someone who's supposed to love you. In their future relationships, they may end up on either side of that pattern, either "You need to help me handle my dysregulation" or "I'm going to help you handle yours." In neither case is anyone really responsible for managing their own emotions.

Catherine: Exactly. With yelling, kids wire that into attachment. They're at risk of growing up and either yelling at their partners or being with partners who yell at them, or just treating each other with hostility in general, because their brains have mapped that as a normal part of love and attachment.

James: And the way our brains develop is so hard to change in adulthood. I can give my kids this huge gift by showing them how this is supposed to work so they don't have to spend their thirties and forties rewiring it. It's much easier to learn it straight from a parent than to untangle it decades later.

Catherine: The first time I read Brain Talk, I felt a real urgency to clean up a lot of my parenting and not just my parenting, but my own brain.

It's not that you lose influence when kids reach adulthood. You've talked about how your continued growth has still had a huge impact on your adult kids. When I work with clients who wonder if it's too late to repair the damage they did as parents, I always ask whether it would matter to them now, today, if their own parents really looked at themselves and changed. And people always say yes, it would matter so much.

So no, it's not too late. But there is a special window when kids are living at home and their brains are still developing, and during that time your influence is enormous. More warmth and kindness are like the best inheritance you could give them. It's a gift that can pay dividends for generations.

James: I like calling that emotional wealth. You build emotional wealth in your family and pass it on to your kids.

Catherine: I really like that way of thinking about it too.

James: It accumulates and compounds just like financial wealth. If I save and invest beyond what I need to live on, that money compounds. Emotional wealth works the same way. If I build extra kindness and respect into my family, it compounds over time and across generations. You get people who are more courageous and more kind because the family got set on a path of growth instead of stagnation.

Catherine: I agree. Each of these changes is hard, especially if you're the first generation trying to make them.

If you're the first generation saying, "I don't want to use physical discipline," that's a hard shift. But once you've made it, your kids won't have to struggle not to repeat something that was never done to them. Then they can focus on something else, maybe how they talk to their kids. And the next generation after that might focus on adding even more positive interaction. It really does compound.

James: I like to think of the brain as having a kind of safety mechanism. When I feel under threat, my brain locks down and stops adjusting and growing.

If I yell at my child, I'm putting that child's brain on safety lock. That's the whole point of yelling. I want them to go into survival mode and react to me as if I'm a threat. But a brain in survival mode is not growing. It's reacting. If I put my child there over and over, their development gets pushed behind what it could have been. A lot of that can be recovered later, but it's so much better not to put them there in the first place.

Catherine: Yes. Neuroplasticity is incredibly exciting to me. The fact that we can change our brains in adulthood has changed my life. Even so, it's a lot of work.

I've thrown all kinds of things at my own brain trying to help it outgrow patterns that didn't have to be there in the first place. I wouldn't want that for my kids. As grateful as I am for neuroplasticity in adulthood, I hope they won't need it to the same extent I did.

James: I hope so too. I think you're on a good path.

Catherine: I hope so. It would be nice if they could use their brain's plasticity for creativity and growth instead of needing so much of it just to retrain themselves not to yell at their kids.

James: Exactly. We're always going to be growing. The question is: what rung on the ladder do you want your kids to start on when they're twenty? Do you want them starting at the bottom, or already halfway up?

Parenting is such an unusual responsibility. I can't think of many other situations where someone holds this much influence over another human being. With a young child, it almost feels like accepting an infinite quota of responsibility. Everything I say and do has an immense impact on this little person, and there often isn't anyone there to hold me accountable except me, or maybe my partner if I have one.

I have a friend who's a single dad with a very young daughter, and when he's parenting her, all of that responsibility is on his shoulders. He's the only one there to hold himself accountable. That's a profound responsibility.

Catherine: When I work with people in their seventies, we're still looking at the impact of their early life, especially the impact of their parents. Their parents may be long gone, but that's not the point. Their brains are still shaped around who their parents were and how they were treated. In that sense, the impact of parenting is never really over.

James: It really is a huge responsibility. When I first came into contact with my impact on other people, I felt a lot of distress about it. I don't feel that way as much now. I'm more focused on this: it's okay for me to be who I am right now, and it's okay for me to have been who I was. Going forward, I want to pay a lot of attention to my impact on the people I care about most.

Catherine: And your kids will be mapping that too. They'll map that you care about continuing to grow. The direction matters. You don't have to be perfect. They can tell whether you're moving toward treating them better, and that matters.

James: Yeah. All right, I think we should end there. Thank you so much.

Catherine: All right. Thanks, James.

James: Okay.

Take off the Mask in your Marriage

James Christensen & Catherine Roebuck

James: There's a thing I tell clients who are trying to regain their partner's trust after cheating. One way to regain your partner's trust is to reveal things that are in your mind — things that are going to be hard to reveal, or that your partner might not like to hear. Because those are the messy things you'd be tempted to hide. To gain your partner's trust, you want to get better at revealing more of your mind. Revealing the messy things makes you more trustworthy, even though it might upset your partner in the short term. Does that seem true to you?

Catherine: Yeah, but I think it's missing one piece. You still have to be considerate while you're doing it, because you can just dump your mess on someone over and over. Like, "I was just thinking about how this other person at work is so much more attractive than you, and I'd way rather be with them." That's not going to help. You have to take responsibility for what you're revealing and for what's actually in your mind. The liability I see is that someone could go from hiding everything to revealing everything, but still not dealing with anything.

James: So: I'm going to reveal what's in my mind, and I'm going to take responsibility for changing the things I do that are harmful.

Catherine: Right, and every time you reveal something, you do have to look at why you're sharing this. If you find some kind of problem in your mind and dump it on your partner, but you're not in a place where you're serious about addressing it, this is just going to make your partner's anxiety go up. They're going to think, "This is even worse than I thought."

James: Yeah, it's delicate.

Catherine: It is.

James: As I think about masking, I often consider revealing things to my wife that I never would have revealed before. But I try to pause and think about what the impact will be. Is this worth revealing? The difference is that I didn't even used to consider it, and now I do. I think about whether it's useful to reveal right now, or tomorrow. Sometimes I won't reveal something in the moment, but I'll think about my intentions, the impact, the way of revealing it, the time and the place. In the end, I want to reveal most of what's in my mind. But as you're saying, revealing can be used to harm as well as to help.

Catherine: Totally. And it's not a substitute for dealing with what's in your mind. But I also run into people who have this idea that they're going to go in secret — without confiding in their partner at all — secretly clean up this whole mess in their mind, and then never have to talk to their partner about it. I've had clients who had an affair years ago, coming in saying they're going to work through it but still never tell their partner. I have reservations about that because it's not really fair. You're not giving your partner a choice.

James: I don't think you can clean up an affair without telling your partner. You're still deceiving them. You're allowing your partner to think you've been faithful when you haven't. The deception is still ongoing. You're not really cleaning anything up.

Catherine: That's my view as well. There are people who think differently, who think it's sometimes better not to reveal it. But I think if you're going to continue a relationship — a sexual relationship — and you're going to continue asking your partner to open up to you, holding that kind of thing back isn't going to work.

James: That's interesting that people still recommend that. There's such an emphasis on not hurting someone's feelings, which I think is the wrong emphasis. The emphasis needs to be on caring about the other person and presenting myself in a congruent and authentic way. There are things I've done that have seriously been hurtful to my wife, and if I don't reveal them — the thing is, the harm has been done regardless of whether I reveal it or not. This idea that the harm is in the revelation doesn't line up.

Catherine: I agree, because the harm exists. Most likely, the partner in that situation is walking around with a sense that something happened. They don't really know what the problem is, but there is a problem. There's some reason they don't trust their partner, and it's been this way for years. The idea that they might get angrier when you reveal it — that's not the harm. The harm has already happened. I still think it can be restorative to bring something to the surface and give your partner a choice. If you've really worked through it and you're with a reasonable person, there's a decent chance they'll be able to see what you've done and make their own decision about whether that resolves it for them.

James: I was talking to someone the other day about how they were trying to use an apology to control the other person's feelings. This client said, "I'm sorry for what I did," and then got upset because their partner didn't feel better instantly. But the apology is you taking responsibility for what you did. It doesn't mean the other person is going to feel better instantly. Now you're trying to control their feelings and getting upset at them for not changing how they see you just because you said something. They're actually going to base what they think about you on what you do, not on what you say.

Catherine: Do you see that apology as a mask?

James: It's interesting — when this client told the story, I initially assessed that the apology was not genuine. What happened is Partner A told the story about Partner B apologizing, and I thought it sounded like a general apology. But then Partner B came in and told their side, and I realized it actually probably was genuine. But then they got upset about Partner A not forgiving them immediately, so it seemed like a separate problem — more of a fragility thing.

Catherine: That idea that they're really sorry but they're mad that you don't immediately forgive — that doesn't line up for me. Part of being really sorry about hurting someone is being willing to make real contact with the impact of what you did. Your partner's reaction is the impact of what you did, at least a big part of it. So here one partner is saying they've dealt with it and they're really sorry — putting forward the idea that they've made real contact with their impact. But then their partner shows them that impact and they're like, "How dare you show me that."

James: Yeah. And there's also a disagreement about who's responsible for what. He was saying, "I'm sorry for what happened, but I don't think your emotional response is appropriate." That's fine, but he needs to hold onto that line instead of saying, "I said I was sorry, now you need to stop feeling bad" — which is a whole different thing. I think it's an over-belief in the power of words. The idea that "I said a certain thing, so you need to feel a certain way." Feelings are more often a response to behavior, not to what someone says.

Catherine: The behavior I see here is the apologizing partner actually breaking contact at the very moment they're getting a view of their impact. That makes me not trust how real this apology is. How much have they actually dealt with this? Even if your partner is having an overreaction — you really hurt your partner. Can you handle sitting with them for a few minutes through their overreaction? That seems like a fair thing.

James: Yeah, absolutely. The difficulty — and I face this — one of the most powerful words I learned in my own marriage therapy was the idea of fragility. I'd never been described as fragile before. We men love to think of ourselves as super strong, rock solid, no feelings. "Say whatever you want about me, I can take it." What I learned in marriage therapy is that I am actually quite fragile, especially around my wife. The slightest hint of her disapproval just really gets to me, and that causes a lot of problems because I react intensely. My intense reaction affects her, and we go through this whole dance.

Part of our path of growth was for me to learn to comfort myself when I feel threatened by her criticism. Whether it's valid or not — it's not so much related to how right she is, it's related to the idea that she sees me in a critical light, and that's hard for me to handle. That's something for me to work on. What I tell clients is: can you give your partner permission to see you how they see you, instead of trying to change it all the time? I'm going to handle my own feelings about that — which are intense — but I'm not going to put the responsibility for my emotional response to your criticism back onto you. That's my responsibility.

Catherine: If I go back for a minute to this partner who apologized and then the spouse was overreacting — an overreaction is just a reaction to something historical. It's not necessarily something from this couple; it could be a reaction to something from childhood. Part of taking in the impact of what you've done to your partner is understanding that you did it to a person who was already raw in this area. Say it's some type of deception, and this spouse has some historical reason from childhood that makes deception feel particularly frightening. If I'm going to deal with the impact I've had on my partner, I have to hold in my own awareness that I didn't just deceive someone — I deceived someone who already had a predisposition to really struggling when someone deceives them. This is very tender, and I probably knew that already. If you care and you're serious about cleaning up your impact on people, you have to be willing to make contact with who you did it to.

James: I agree. My impact on my wife is related to my behavior, our history, who she is, and her history before I ever met her. It makes sense for me to take all of that into account and not to blame her for being who she is. I married her the way she is, with her particular sensitivities and tenderness and fragility around certain things. Those things were true before I ever met her, in large part. I chose this person, and when I chose her, I chose her with all of her fragility and frailty and sensitivity.

Catherine: Exactly. If you're going to love someone, you're loving a whole person. There are things about them that predate you, and just because you didn't cause that in them doesn't release you from caring about the fact that it's in them — and that it could really sting if you step on those spots.

James: One thing I've done as I've worked on taking my mask off in my marriage is I've practiced sharing more of what's going on inside me — including my feelings and my thoughts. That's interesting because I often advise couples not to talk about their feelings, but in my case, it has been useful to talk more about mine.

The context is that I went from zero to one, not from nine to ten. I didn't used to talk about my feelings at all. I didn't even really believe I had feelings — I was pretty disconnected from them. Over the last year or so, I've said things like, "I'm feeling really angry right now," which I had never told her before. I would be angry, and I would give no overt indication of it. I wouldn't have an angry face, and I wouldn't do angry actions — not immediately, not what people associate with anger. I would get condescending and manipulative, which is where my anger goes.

What I try to do now is say, "I'm feeling really angry right now." It's helpful to just bring that out. She actually really appreciated it — I remember the first time, she said, "Thank you for telling me that." We were in the car, and I said, "I'm angry right now," and she had this breeze of relief. Not what I expected, but she knew already. I was pretending to be fine all the time when I obviously wasn't. It was helpful for me to take my mask off a little bit in that regard.

Catherine: I love that word, congruence. The opposite of wearing a mask is being congruent — where what you do and what you say and the feeling of being around you and the tone of your voice all line up. That's what's so difficult about being in a relationship with someone who's masking a lot: they don't line up. They're telling you they're fine, but you can tell they're not fine. They're telling you they're not mad, but you can tell they are. You can tell they're hiding something, and they get mad every time you try to talk to them about it. All of this is very stressful.

The congruence is just: can you be real with me? But not in an indulgent way where you're saying, "Now you deal with everything about me that I'm not dealing with." When you told your wife in the car that you were angry, you weren't yelling, you weren't berating her. You weren't venting your anger at her. You were just sharing what was actually going on for you. And when you say you often tell couples not to talk so much about their feelings — I think it's more about the venting. It's about dumping or becoming aggressive with your feelings, using them like weapons, or the idea that because you feel something, your partner has to change.

James: Exactly.

Catherine: I don't think you can love someone without caring about your feelings or sharing them. But a lot of what we actually do in relationships is different from that — it's more like, "I can't handle my feelings, so here they are. You deal with them."

James: Exactly — "It's your responsibility and your fault. My distress is caused by you, and you're going to be the solution to it. I'm not going to do anything about it. I'm not going to calm myself down, I'm not going to comfort myself. That's all on you, and it's all your fault." That's kind of the traditional approach in marriage. And that approach made sense when we were young and dealing with a parent who had the responsibility to take care of us. I don't think it makes sense in adult relationships.

Catherine: Right. Our first attachment experience involves a genuine imbalance where there's an adult and a child, and the adult has more capacity and responsibility to regulate both people's emotions. Then you get into an adult relationship where you're actually on equal footing, but your brain is still wired for a close attachment where you're expecting the other person — this powerful, magical other — to be the one who helps you with all of this, because you still feel kind of small and haven't figured out how to handle it yourself.

The other way it can go is that sometimes you have a parent who isn't able or willing to do a lot of regulation, and you end up — even as a child — regulating them. Some people fall into a pattern of over-functioning and caretaking in their adult relationships, taking too much responsibility for themselves and their partner.

James: There's a tradition in couples therapy — it comes from nonviolent communication, and it's also common in things like Gottman therapy — where the approach is: "I'm going to talk to you about my feelings and my needs. This is what I feel, and this is what I need."

I strongly disagree with that model. What I tell people is: don't talk to your partner about your feelings or your needs. Say, "I want to talk to you about your behavior. This is what I see you doing, and this is what I want you to do." I think that makes a lot more sense because my wife is not responsible for what I feel, but she is responsible for what she does. She's responsible for her behavior.

Even though I do tell her what I feel occasionally, if I really want to deal with a problem in my marriage — and I've already dealt with my side — I think the best approach is to say, "This is what I see you doing, and this is what I want you to do," as opposed to "I have a certain need" or "I have a certain feeling," which just doesn't seem precise enough. What is she supposed to do about it, and why is it her responsibility to make me feel differently in the first place?

Catherine: The thing I wonder about is: where's the vulnerability if you're just talking about their behavior and what you want? I do think talking about your own internal experience — including your feelings and emotions — can be vulnerable. A lot of times it's done in a way that's not actually vulnerable, but it can be. I see that as part of what you want to do when taking off a mask in a relationship: actually showing your partner a vulnerable side.

James: Yeah. It can be vulnerable. The reason I steer people away from it is that they're doing it manipulatively. When I see couples using their feelings to manipulate each other, that's when I'll say, "Let's stop talking about your feelings, because you're using them to manipulate each other." In the future, you can learn to share your feelings in a collaborative way, but right now that's not happening.

So if you want your partner to do something differently, figure out what that is and ask for it directly. Part of the reason we don't do that is because when I do that work and say, "The thing I want my wife to do is this," I'm admitting that it's not my choice — it's her choice. The temptation is to say, "I feel this and I need this," which implies that she has to do what I need and take care of my feelings. I think that's the manipulative implication. I want to go straight to, "I want you to do this," because there's an admission in there that this is what I want, but it's not my choice.

Catherine: And that's actually a more vulnerable position as well, because it's being honest about the limits of your power. I do think there's a lot of benefit in making requests versus complaints. If you say, "I'm feeling abandoned," that's a complaint. But if you say, "I'd really like to spend an hour with you tonight," that's a request — and it's much more inviting. Saying "I'm feeling abandoned" draws your partner right into a dynamic where they're very likely to become defensive. If they're super skillful, they might not, but they're probably not super skillful. You might need to be more precise about what you're actually asking for and be willing to step into the vulnerability of asking.

James: Exactly. Now, there's a flip side. My wife and I — I feel an abandonment panic quite a bit, several times a week. But we've talked about this extensively and have a pretty solid understanding that my abandonment panic is not her responsibility. I'll come to her and say, "I feel an abandonment panic right now," and she knows it's not her job to help me deal with it. If she wants to, she can look at how well she's showing up as a partner, but it's not a request for her to do something about it. There's an acknowledgment between us that this is mine to deal with.

It doesn't lead anywhere good if I bring that panic to her as though it's about her, because it's not really about her. She's not doing anything responsible for the intensity of my feelings. My feelings are really intense, and they're tangentially related to what she does, but not directly. I've been deployed for months in the military and been fine, and then she goes out with her friends one night and I'm dying inside. It doesn't make any sense. I can't hold her responsible for feelings that predate her by quite a bit.

Catherine: Right. And she's actually doing you a favor by bringing them up over and over, giving you lots of opportunities to get precise and clear about what's really going on.

James: There was this one time in therapy. We were sitting right here, and I was going through some really hard feelings during the session. Molly reached over and grabbed my hand, and the therapist said, "Molly, take it back. Don't do that. He needs to figure out how to handle this." Molly sheepishly pulled her hand back. The therapist said, "Let him deal with this for at least 30 seconds before you reach over." She was right — it really is good for me to learn how to handle my own feelings. If I constantly try to outsource that to her, it's not a long-term solution. It doesn't work in adult relationships for someone to be constantly taking a parental role.

Catherine: No, it doesn't work. It leads to burnout and resentment on the side of the person doing it. It typically also leads to resentment on the side of the person receiving it, because it's never actually enough. And there's this powerlessness or panic of, "What if you were to stop?"

James: Exactly. It just prolongs the problem — now I'm even more dependent. But as the marriage gets better, we naturally get more warm and kind and caring, and these things get easier to handle. That's a byproduct of us getting stronger. The strength comes first and the kindness and caring comes second, not the other way around.

Catherine: And then it has a different meaning. It's more about "I'm here and I care," not "I'll solve this for you" — which you can't.

James: Right. It's not "I'm going to keep you from feeling this horrible thing." It's "I actually care a lot about you and I care about my impact on you" — which is different from "I'm going to avoid what I feel when you feel strong things" or "I'm going to accommodate my anxiety by trying to do something about your anxiety."

Catherine: Yeah, that makes sense. So if someone's watching this and thinking, "Okay, I can see it — I wear a mask all the time, at least around my spouse," what do they do? How do you take the mask off?

James: It's been such a hard process for me. I don't even know where to start. This has been really hard for me, and it's really hard for me to help clients with. I think I'm still kind of stumbling through it. What I have told clients is what my therapists have told me: tell your wife what it's like to be you right now. But be careful, because that can quickly turn into manipulation. It's this delicate thing of revealing your inner state to your wife while being really careful not to use it to manipulate her. And that's really hard.

In the past, part of my justification for not revealing was that I've seen this used to manipulate people so often. That was part of my hesitance. But there is a way to say, "I'm feeling really angry right now" or "I'm having an abandonment panic" where it's not designed to manipulate — it's just what's happening.

Catherine: Yeah. Sharing your internal experience, but not making up a story about the other person being the cause or solution to it. Something we've done together is improv classes — just to learn to respond to things in the moment when it's actually moving too fast to manage masking the whole time. It's been a lot of fun and very effective for learning to access and show a range of emotional expression in real time. It was crazy hard at first, but it's gotten easier over time.

James: Improv has been one of the most humbling experiences in my entire life. I did a play in high school and I view myself as someone who's good at speaking, so I thought I was going to go to improv class and shine. I got on stage the first time, they gave me the scenario, and I couldn't say anything. My mind went completely blank. I tried again and again, and I fell on my face consistently. To this day, I've spent hundreds of hours in improv training, and I'm a mediocre performer. It doesn't come naturally to me because it requires me to let go and genuinely respond to what's happening right now without thinking it through first. That's really hard for me.

Catherine: I think a lot of it is building your connection with yourself. There are different pieces — do you even know what's going on for you? And then, can you handle showing it in real time? Figuring out what's even going on for you can be helped a lot by coaching or therapy, connecting with friends who are interested in deeper connection, doing bodywork or yoga — anything that gets you to be present with yourself more.

I also think self-compassion is really important, because you start to come in contact with things you don't like when you look at your own internal experience. The more you're able to face something intense without going into a spiral of judgment, shame, and despair, the more you're able to get to know yourself and tolerate showing what's really going on to other people. Sometimes people will have a bad reaction — they'll shame you or judge you or be harsh with you. That's life. And if you can't handle those reactions inside yourself, you're definitely going to struggle when it comes from outside of you.

James: You're reminding me of one of our mentors who said, "It's okay that you pulled my pants down, because I know how to pull them back up." She was talking metaphorically, of course — someone had done something designed to undermine her in a public setting. That had an impact on me. If I get up on the improv stage and make a fool of myself, it's that same feeling of being really embarrassed in public, which is super hard for me to handle. Can I comfort myself and take care of myself and support myself in that moment? Can I handle the feelings and handle the reality and center myself and be okay again?

Catherine: I think about it as: can I restore my own dignity? Whether it comes from humiliation or from exposing something yourself that you then regret — can you get your feet back under you? Deal with the heat in your face? Deal with the thoughts in your head? Integrate this into the overall sense of being a human who's alive and imperfect?

Building on that is super empowering. You can handle taking more risks and being closer with people when you know how to restore your dignity or take care of yourself after that kind of exposure — or even after an attack. Sometimes people really aren't kind or fair to you. Do you know how to have that experience without turning on yourself as well?

James: It's so critical. We have this defect model in psychology where you have this disorder or that disorder, and it seems so harmful to me because it's like imagining there's some perfect human out there who has no disorders. I don't see it that way at all. We're all trying to help our brains grow into becoming capable of loving and caring — especially in marriage. I don't think any of us are natively capable of having a good marriage, but we can learn to be capable of having a better one.

That's not a defect model, it's a growth model. I'm perfectly fine the way I am, and I want to be a better husband. I'm okay the way I am, and I want to have a better marriage, and there are things I can do about that. It starts with accepting myself just the way I am — a difficult and critical first step.

Catherine: I think marriage puts pressure on everyone to some degree, and it puts much more pressure on you if your early attachment experiences were more hierarchical or difficult. It's an attachment experience that is peer-to-peer — there's not a more powerful other with more capacity who can lift you up. You actually have to show up and expect as much of yourself as of your partner, and that can be a new experience.

There's a huge range in how difficult it is based on where you come from. How much have you ever experienced telling someone you have a problem with something they did and having them just take that in without getting defensive or mean? How much do you know how to do that yourself when someone gives you feedback? How safe was it to let people know what you were feeling in real time, where you came from?

James: I think it's useful to keep in mind that the level of difficulty is significant for everyone. It goes from difficult to extremely difficult. It's an adult attachment experience where I choose a person, and that person moves into the place in my brain of "this is the person who's supposed to love me, the person who's supposed to put me first." That place was formerly occupied by my parents, and because of that, a lot of my brain wiring around that person is inappropriate for an adult relationship. I'm going to expect them to handle themselves a lot better than I handle myself, to be more regulated, more kind, more loving than I am.

As you said, that makes no sense at all, because we marry at our own level of emotional development. If some woman who was way more developed than I am had been out there, she's not going to marry me. I'm going to end up marrying someone who's operating at a similar level. It's not reasonable for me to expect my wife to be a lot more mature, settled, regulated, or kind than I am.

Catherine: Yeah, because that would interfere with attraction.

James: Right. And there's this experience where you meet someone who's significantly more developed, and there's just no attraction there.

Catherine: Or you could admire someone but think, "They're out of my league. I wouldn't want to let them too close because they're going to see what's going on inside me."

James: I had this experience in my twenties. There was a woman I'd liked when we were teens, and we met again in our twenties. I really liked her, but she said, "I used to like you and now I don't." I think she grew up more than I did over those years. She saw me as someone who was kind of stuck, which was true. She had moved on and I hadn't.

Catherine: A last thought about building your tolerance for taking off the mask: I think it's about tolerating the intensity of person-to-person, mind-to-mind contact. One way you can work on that is to give yourself experiences of spending time talking with somebody who can offer you more contact than you can tolerate right now — like a coach or a therapist. You want to give your brain time to map the experience that someone could see more of you and continue to mean well toward you, continue to be fair, continue to have compassion for you. That can actually help you build on it yourself. I think this is transmitted human to human. It's not something you can read in a book — you have to actually experience it.

James: I've been toying with the idea of writing a book, and I'm bumping up against exactly what you said. I don't know how to transmit this in a book. I barely know how to transmit it in person. I would love to find a way to teach a lot of people at once what we're talking about right now, but I'm not sure it's possible.

Catherine: Yeah. I don't think it can be done en masse at the level it can be done in small groups or person to person.

James: I've seen it done with a couple dozen people, and that's the best I've seen. If I imagine that group expanding to 50, 60, or 70, it seems like it's going to drop off because that level of contact becomes basically impossible.

Catherine: Right. It's how many human minds can you track at a time?

James: Exactly. I can maintain contact with 10 or 20 people, but can I really maintain contact with 50 at the same time? Probably not. Okay, should we end there?

Catherine: Yeah. Thanks, James.

James: Thank you, Catherine.

Trauma: a Conversation with Catherine Roebuck

A Conversation Between James Christensen and Catherine Roebuck March 30, 2026

James: The way I think about it is the more intense an experience is—well, maybe a better way to define it is the less capable I am of handling any one thing that happens to me, the more my brain will encapsulate that experience and not connect it to other experiences. So I think of it as an encapsulation or a protective mechanism where the brain says, "This thing happened," and it's sealed off and stored separately from everything else. It's going to have its own special little category, locked up in this little box, and the key gets thrown away.

Not necessarily that I'm not going to remember it—I may or may not remember it—but I'm not going to plug it in. I'm not going to connect it to all of my other life experiences. It's going to be separated out by itself. And I think that exists on a spectrum. The more intense and the more harmful an experience is, or the less capable I am of handling any given experience at any given time, the more encapsulated and protected it gets in my memory. That's kind of the way I think about it. What do you think about that?

Catherine: That makes a lot of sense to me. There's something I read the other day that said the more reactive you are to a trigger, the younger you were when you first encountered that kind of problem.

James: Right.

Catherine: And that lines up with what you're saying, because the younger you are, the fewer options you have for what you can do in the face of something overwhelming. If you encounter something as a baby or a toddler that's very distressing, basically your options are you can appeal to your caregivers by crying and hope that they come through for you. If they don't come through for you—if they're not available or not responsive, or they're the ones actually causing you harm—you don't really have a lot else you can do.

You're out of options really quick when you're young, and so you can have a very big reaction to something if the first time you encountered it, you had very few options. You were super dependent and young because it genuinely was an existential threat at some point, and it'll still be wired that way in your brain. Your brain will wire it up originally as "This is an existential threat if this happens," and even if it's no longer true because you're an adult with other options, if you haven't reworked that, you can still react to it with that level of panic.

James: And panic was the appropriate response when you were young and helpless. That was the best thing you could do. In fact, it was important that you respond to dangerous things with extreme distress or panic and make a lot of noise about it, because that's how you stay alive as an infant and a toddler—by making a big fuss about things you can't handle.

Catherine: Yeah, that can happen. Or at some point, an infant or toddler could also just shut down. It's not always getting loud. Those are kind of your options: you can get loud and ask for help, or you can dissociate and shut down. Those are pretty much what you can do when you're really, really little.

James: But there's not a third option. There's not an option where you engage directly with the problem and do something about it, because there's nothing you can actively do about it when you're tiny and powerless.

Catherine: That's right. And that's most true when you're youngest, but there can also be situations even when you're older where there's not a lot else you can do—where you're facing a threat so big that you can correctly assess, "I won't win a fight. I can't get away. I tried appealing to this person and that didn't work." And so then your option is pretty much dissociation. That's it.

James: Yeah, and that is a useful thing to be able to do.

Catherine: There's research on different types of trauma experiences that finds that if you are able to do something to try to change your circumstances, you're less likely to develop PTSD—even if it doesn't work. If you make an unsuccessful escape attempt, it's still less traumatic to your brain to have tried something than not to have tried. The helplessness is one of the things that really seems highly linked with trauma. When you're in a situation where there actually is nothing you can do, that's one of the things that can lead to your brain handling it as trauma.

And like you said, just encapsulating it—it gets recorded differently from your normal experiences. It gets stored more as imagery and sensory data, and it doesn't necessarily have a story attached to it or words attached to it.

James: The way I think about it is it lacks context. And so the way I tend to think about healing from trauma is I'm going to help my brain create new connections, or build bridges between this very difficult thing that happened to me—usually while I was young—and my current life, where I'm capable of dealing with something like that.

If someone tried to pull something like that on me today, there's a whole list of things I could do about that and I would do about that. My ability to handle difficult situations in my life now is a hundred times greater than it was when I was, say, two years old.

Catherine: Yeah, exactly. So you were saying the way you get better from trauma is by putting it in context?

James: Yeah, it's adding context. I think of it as building physical neuronal connections in the brain. I don't know whether that really happens, but it makes a lot of sense to me that if my brain encapsulated this memory and sealed it off, then one thing I can do about it is help the brain make more connections between all the things that have been true about me at various stages in my life.

So there was a time when I was tiny and vulnerable and dependent, and there is a time now when I'm not tiny, not vulnerable, not dependent. And I would like to be able to respond to difficult people in my life now from the correct context of "This is a difficult person, and I'm a powerful person who can handle difficult people." Whereas when I was young, I could not handle difficult people and there was basically nothing I could do—nothing effective.

I could make some noise or dissociate, but there was nothing effective I could do to take good care of myself in that moment. And my brain likes to respond to difficult people in my life now with the response that was appropriate to the past, when I was less powerful.

Catherine: Brains are pretty complicated, and I'm not an expert on them, although I wish I were. But my guess is that there is something that happens on a neural connection level. If you think about someone who's gone through a pretty difficult childhood and they've had many traumatic experiences, there are all of these different places in their brain where a memory or information is encapsulated. As you're going about your day trying to function, your brain is going to keep hitting walls, keep hitting blocks, and it has to take these quite roundabout paths.

I think it's just much more work to function and to think and to connect with other people when you're working around all of these isolated things in your brain. As you process trauma, you put it in context. You get a clearer picture of what was really going on, why it was such a big problem, and why it's not as much of a problem now. You're able to take much more direct paths. That's how I think about the jump in functioning that can happen when people start to deal with their traumatic memories—it's actually making it possible for your brain to function much more efficiently.

James: That makes sense. I've never thought of it as being a direct path, but it's like if there were giant potholes in the road and then you patch the potholes. Or if there was a gate cut through a fence—instead of going around the fence, now there's a gate and I'll open the gate and go directly. That's an interesting metaphor.

Catherine: That's how I think about it.

James: I think of two different paths which are related, but I think it's useful to categorize: inner child work and inner adult work. Both of those are useful as ways to improve the connectivity in the brain, improve the brain's ability to hold correct context, and to not perceive things in the wrong context.

So if a difficult person enters into my life, or I have to deal with a difficult person—that's not, for me as an adult, a survival situation. But it will feel like a survival situation. When I'm dealing with a difficult person, I might get physically shaky, I might start sweating, my heart might start pounding, it might be hard for me to talk. I see those as responses where my body is saying this is a survival situation, which I think is not the appropriate response given the context I'm in, but it is how my body responds.

Do you think of it in terms of inner child work and inner adult work, or is there a third category? Do you not use those categories at all? How do you think about this?

Catherine: I think those are great, and I love that you're bringing up inner adult work especially, because there is a lot of emphasis in therapy on the wounded child and taking care of the wounded child—which matters, don't get me wrong, life-changing stuff—but you could get a little stuck in it. There was someone we went to a training with—Steven Gilligan—and he talked about how when he's working with someone, he'll notice whether they're more connected with their wounded child or their powerful adult internally when talking about an experience.

He'll try to balance it, to get them to connect with whichever side they're less connected with in the moment. If someone comes in talking about trauma but they're doing it from this place of "Well, it didn't affect me and everything's fine now," then he tries to get them to have some compassion for what it was really like when they were five.

James: Yeah. And in the end, I think both of these pathways end up creating more connection. The way I think about it is that our brains, as they develop, we add onto the brain but we don't ever delete from the brain—once again, I'm just guessing, but that makes sense to me. The parts in my brain that developed when I was four and five years old are still there. I've added new parts since then. And what I want is more connectivity between the old parts and the new parts.

Catherine: I mean, we forget a lot of daily things. Most people don't remember their daily life throughout their life. In that sense, things do get kind of deleted from the brain, or they just get grouped into a routine—like "I understand that I got the bus every day, but I don't remember every time I took the bus."

James: Yeah, I'm not thinking so much about memory as about levels of functioning. I had developed a way of dealing with the world when I was five years old, and I really think that pattern is still in my brain. That programming's still there, and it shows up sometimes.

I also think that since I'm now almost fifty, I've developed a lot of more effective ways of dealing with difficult situations. But I don't think the old ways went away. They're still there. When I start acting in a childish way, it's because the part of my brain that developed when I was a child has taken control of my behavior. That's kind of how I think about it.

Catherine: Yeah, I agree with that framing. That makes a lot of sense. And so the inner adult work—sometimes you'll encounter someone who is handling most things in their life with the level of resilience they had at six, and they just have a hard time really seeing the truth that they have more options now.

You can do work where you basically update your brain. "Hey, let's look around at our resources now. Let's look at our options now." When you were ten, you maybe didn't have a choice about whether you stay in the room when someone's yelling at you. But now that you're forty-five, you do have a choice. Maybe you don't have to stay there.

The inner adult work—you really just have to be open to both connecting with your capacity and connecting with your vulnerability. And I do think there's so much to be said for the connection aspect of this—you're just building more paths in the brain so it's not stuck with one way to handle things, like "All I can do is get upset."

James: So tell me how you do inner child work with your clients or with yourself.

Catherine: With clients or with myself, I try to focus on visualizing, because of how difficult memories are stored. There are a couple of ways memories are stored. One is data, which doesn't tend to change over time. Another is narrative—the story we tell about what happened—which changes as you tell it.

If a client tells me a story about getting lost as a child, they have one story that maybe a parent told them and now they tell it. If I have them visualize this, I'll say, "Okay, go back to the moment you realized you couldn't see your mom. Look at the scene. Can you see the room around you or the area where you are? Do you see yourself?"

One thing that often hits people is that they look young. The way they've thought about themselves in a memory is often as older than they actually were. When you start thinking about it—do you know a five-year-old? How little is a five-year-old? A lot of people I work with are parents, and they'll have a lot of compassion for their kids and awareness of how little their children are, but when thinking about their own childhood, they felt quite mature.

Then you go into what's this five-year-old feeling? What is this like for them? Instead of just skipping to what happened in terms of "How did you end up getting reunited?" you're trying to go into what was the experience on a sensory level—what could you see, what could you hear, what were you feeling, what was your internal feeling?

People will spontaneously experience some compassion for their young self when they start connecting with that—compassion that was absent when they're just telling the story as data and analysis, just saying words without really feeling anything about it. When they start to look at the scene and connect with their felt sense, that's often the first time someone actually sits with that lost, scared kid and takes in what it was like for them.

James: So you would consider that a kind of inner child work?

Catherine: Yeah, I do. And there are things you can do that go further than that, where you can start paying attention to what did you want, or what did you need in that moment? What would have made this better for you? That's also helping you connect with the experience of what it was really like, and what kinds of support a child in that situation would need, and what it was like that you didn't get that.

But a lot of what I do really just goes to that point of making contact with yourself. And I see it as you're making contact between one part of your brain and another part of your brain, using this metaphor as a way to work with your brain.

James: Yeah, because you can't tell someone, "Would you please connect neuron A to neuron B?" That doesn't work. But you can say, "What did you look like when you were five? How tall were you when you were five?"

Catherine: Right. And if there's someone else involved—which in many traumatic memories there is, because trauma is mostly interpersonal—trauma is more about how the people who saw what you were going through reacted than it is about what you were going through a lot of the time.

James: This is so important. It's about the context as a whole. It's about the world you were living in—what was true about the environment you were living in that you as a small person could do very little to change. You're living in this environment, can't really do anything about it, and it's not very well suited to you in some way. It doesn't provide the kind of support you need. Children need immense amounts of support, and in some way this environment is not providing you the kind of support that you need. So you have no choice but to respond to it in the best way you can, even though it's not very effective.

Catherine: Yeah. So if you go back to a memory where you're little and you have a parent that's disciplining you in a somewhat harsh way, part of that—if you look at the scene—you're going to become aware that your distress was clear. And so then you're not just dealing with "What did it feel like to have a parent hit you?" You're dealing with "What did it feel like to have a parent see your distress and keep going?"

James: So you're looking at the information about what was going on in my parent's mind while they were doing this thing.

Catherine: Yeah. How were they relating to you? What were they thinking about you that made this work for them, that they could keep going? And you can push yourself to imagine: if I were a parent and this were my child and I saw their distress, what would I have to do inside myself to be able to continue the thing that's causing them distress?

James: What would I have to be? How would I have to be thinking about my child in that moment? Am I looking at this child and saying, "This is a person I care about, this is a person I don't want to suffer"? Or am I thinking, "It's okay with me if this person suffers. It's okay with me if this child experiences distress. That doesn't bother me right now"?

Catherine: Well, it could be that, or it could go even darker: "I own you. You deserve this. This will show you." There are all kinds of things that could be happening, but that's the thing that kind of blows your mind—when you're going through a traumatic experience and you understand, though you couldn't put it into words, how this person is relating to you to be able to continue treating you this way. That's the thing that is overwhelming to the system.

There's some research with Hurricane Katrina survivors that found the thing that predicted how likely it was that they would develop PTSD was their interpersonal interactions with other people. Were they in a situation where they needed help and somebody saw that they needed help and could have helped them and didn't? That's the thing that caused the trauma. It's very different if your leg gets broken because a tree falls versus your leg gets broken by another human being on purpose. Those are going to have really different impacts on your brain.

James: Yeah, of course. Why is it beneficial to go into "What was my parent thinking while they were being mean to me?" Why does that help?

Catherine: I think it helps you locate the problem. One thing trauma does is leave you with a feeling of "There's something wrong with me." Because you're getting the message "I deserve this." But what could a little child do to deserve abuse? Nothing. So you're left with this twist in your mind, something very difficult to work with—a feeling of fundamental shame or inadequacy or wrongness.

When you push yourself to look at the scene and to map the mind of your antagonist, you can correct the record in your own brain of what was the problem here. Was it that I was the kind of child that deserves this? Or was it that my parent was the kind of person that liked to do this?

James: Children are, by definition, innocent. Parents don't get the same treatment. You and I are both parents, and we know that it wouldn't be fair to say we've been innocent as parents, even though we wouldn't consider ourselves bad parents. But claiming innocence would still not be accurate. Specifically, in an interaction where I am angry at a young child, the young child is just by definition innocent. Children do age-appropriate things, developmentally appropriate things, which are inconvenient, unpleasant, and hard to handle.

If I come into a situation and say, "You are being a bad child and I am being a good parent"—which is something that happens every day in most families—that's just not true. It's turning the world upside down. In reality, you have a child who's being innocent, even if I'd like that child to stop that behavior. There's a certain innocence to the behavior, and the parent's behavior is just not that innocent. As adults, especially as parents, we carry a level of responsibility that children just don't carry.

Catherine: Yeah. A lot of times when parents become harsh with their kids, what's going on is the kid is dysregulated and the parent is dysregulated. The kid is overwhelmed and the parent is overwhelmed. But one of these people has a lot of power and agency in their life; the other has very little.

One place I see this play out is theme parks. If you watch families in theme parks toward the end of the day, you're going to see kids melting down and parents melting down. But the parents have had the option all along to call it on the day and go back to the hotel and cool down. They've passed their own limits and their kids' limits, but the kids didn't have that power. The parents are in a much better position in every possible way to manage a situation so it doesn't go to the point of harshness.

You'll see a parent yelling at a child for yelling. The child is innocent—they're just displaying their actual level of overwhelm and a completely developmentally reasonable inability to self-soothe. And the parent is saying, "Well, I'm only acting out because of your bad behavior." They're justifying whatever they're doing with the kid's behavior. But it's putting more responsibility on the child for how things go—saying the kids are the ones who decide—and that's not reasonable. The parent has decades of life experience, a fully developed prefrontal cortex, money, options. The kid is pretty much at the mercy of the parents.

James: I do want to add one more idea about inner child work. I have found it useful to do an inner child rescue, which is a very common practice in trauma treatment. An inner child rescue basically consists of imagining myself as an adult going back to a difficult memory from my childhood, and I, as an adult, am going to offer my younger self the kind of love and support and protection that I needed in that moment.

Once again, I'm visualizing it. It's purely imaginary—time travel isn't real—but it's a helpful way for me to build these connections within my brain between the very young and vulnerable part of me and the more powerful part of me that's also capable of comforting a child.

Catherine: I think inner child rescues are beautiful. My guess is that the way they work is you've got something in your brain where you encounter a problem that's familiar because it reminds you of something that happened when you were young. Your brain only knows that this is a problem. It doesn't know that there's a solution, because when this was originally encoded, there wasn't a solution. It didn't get solved. It didn't get handled well.

So you go in and complete the stress cycle or finish the story in a way that the next time this trigger comes up, instead of your brain going, "Oh no, there's a big problem"—and that's where the story ends—it goes, "Oh, there's a big problem. And there's someone here who can help me with this. It's me." So it's a much less distressing experience, because you build trust in yourself and confidence in your own ability to respond. And then you don't panic the next time it's triggered.

James: That has been my experience. I've done many inner child rescues and they have consistently helped me respond in a more productive way to the sense of panic that arises.

For me, an inner child rescue often ends with me looking at my younger self, this little boy, and saying—that's going to make me cry—but saying, "I will always be here for you, and if you call, I will answer." The way I think of him calling is when I feel that distress arise. When I as an adult feel the kind of panic associated with being a small person in a scary world, I try to remember in the moment: this is the part of my brain saying "Help! I don't know how to deal with this." And there's another part of my brain that says, "Well, I do."

I want to make that connection in the moment, but my brain doesn't naturally behave that way. Naturally, this younger part of my brain says, "I've got this. We're going to throw a fit, or dissociate, or take some sort of extreme action—get angry or manipulative—we're going to take these childish actions." As opposed to the fact that a lot of the time as an adult, the best response is, "Let me think about this for thirty seconds." As an adult, there are so many situations where you can just sit there and do nothing and say, "I'm in a difficult situation. I'm going to sit here and do nothing until I figure out what to do about it." But the younger part of the brain wants instantaneous action right now. And often, doing something is not the best plan in the moment.

Catherine: That's exactly what's happening. We were talking earlier about kids being innocent and parents not being innocent. But there is a way that all that's going on most of the time in the mind of a parent who doesn't handle themselves well is they're having a childish response. They haven't had the support or resources or a way to think about it to be able to handle it better yet. They do have the capacity to get there—and they should be in therapy—but you can have compassion for other people's reactivity as well when you think about it as, "Yeah, this is their inner seven-year-old saying 'I know how to handle this.'"

We all just come up with these strategies when we're young and use them until we replace them on purpose. They don't necessarily get updated organically. You have to think about it. You have to watch what you're doing and think about your impact and think about whether you have other options at this point in your life. And yeah, a lot of the time, one option you have is you could slow yourself down and do nothing for a couple of minutes, and then see what you can come up with in that time.

James: All right, let's transition into inner adult work then, because this is actually getting pretty close. Can you describe—if you were going to explain inner adult work to someone, what would you say?

Catherine: One thing I like to do is just talk things through with people so they can make sense of the problem with what they're doing. For example, I had a client reach out about a difficult interaction he'd had. His wife had said, "This is emotional manipulation." And he asked me, "Is that what I'm doing here? Am I being emotionally manipulative?"

I work with a lot of people who are very logical thinkers and I really like to work that way. So I offer a framework for how you could evaluate: is this emotional manipulation? For me it's "Am I using intense negative emotion to try to get what I want?" If you're working with someone's inner adult, you can evaluate through that logical lens. "All right, that actually is what happened here." First step is recognizing the problem in a concrete way, and then once you're not okay with what you've been doing, you can push your brain on what else you can do. What's coming to mind for you for inner adult stuff?

James: My favorite way to frame this is: as a child, it made sense for me to pay more attention to others' impact on me than to my impact on others, because I was young and dependent and I really needed to pay attention to what other people were doing to me. As an adult, I'm in a position in life where it actually makes a lot more sense for me to pay more attention to my impact on others.

This is especially true in the family. If I want to live a good life and be happy, the single most important thing for me to do as a married man is to pay attention to the emotional impact I have on my wife. That is not something that comes naturally to me. What comes naturally is to pay a lot of attention to the emotional impact she has on me. That doesn't help me very much because I can't directly change that. It's fine to be aware of it, but if I spend a lot of my time and attention on what impact she's having on me and how much I don't like that, then I'm basically spinning my wheels. What I really need to do is set that aside and focus on: What is it like for her to live with me? What is it like for her to be married to me? That's the most important thing for me to look at. But it's very much an adult way of dealing with the world, and it doesn't come naturally to most people in my experience, and definitely not to me.

Catherine: I think that's really good. Another reason it makes sense for adults to look at what they're doing is that they have choices. If you're with someone who is really not treating you well and doesn't want to change, you're probably not going to get very far trying to appeal to them. At some point you've got to deal with the reality: I'm an adult choosing to be in this dynamic. So I should look at what am I doing that keeps the dynamic going?

Another way to think about it is: what bad behavior on my side makes it easy for this other person to justify what they keep doing to me? It's not to say that you don't hit a limit where you just have to decide whether a situation's workable for you. You look at your side and work on your side. If you hit a point where you're like, "No, I've done so much on my side and I don't have the power to change this dynamic," then you accept that and work on the reality you're in.

James: You make your choices based on what you see is best for you. In some situations, leaving a relationship is part of the solution. That's what you're talking about, isn't it?

Catherine: You could leave, you could change the level of contact you have.

James: The other way I like to think about this is: all of the things my wife is likely to do this year, including all the things I don't like, they fall within the circle of what I can handle. I call it my "circle of okayness." My brain doesn't like to think of it this way. My brain likes to think, "There's this and this that she does, and I really don't like it, and that's a survival problem for me." It sounds silly to say it that way, but my brain really does respond to her behavior as if it were a survival problem when it's not.

I like to push myself on this. I will say things like, "If my wife never changes, will I be okay?" And the answer is yes—I will find a way to be okay. That's very much my responsibility as an adult, to find a way to be okay in whatever environment I find myself in. It is not a good idea for me to think of myself as dependent on my wife changing.

I know there are circumstances—I'm not in one—but there are people in circumstances where it's really difficult to find a way out of a difficult relationship. For me, it's important to think of my life as something I can handle. It's not a survival situation, which means it makes more sense for me to focus on my impact on her and focus less on her impact on me.

Catherine: I'd add one more focus: your impact on yourself. In a situation where it really is untenable, you have to look at your impact on yourself. Keeping your focus on the details of the mistreatment is probably not going to be the answer. You're up against practical challenges of how to extract yourself, which could be about your own brain having a very difficult time detaching, or other obstacles.

As an adult, you have a huge impact on yourself. You have so much agency, so much power to determine who you interact with and how much you interact with them and what kind of contact you have. If you determine that this person has a bad impact on you and you don't see that changing, then you have to look at what you need to do to take good care of yourself.

That still means taking your focus off of an obsession with tracking and venting about the stuff they're doing. Not that you go blind—there's some level of awareness that is healthy and important. But I'll have clients who come in and what they'd like to do for an hour is just list off the bad things their partner did that week, and then do the same the next week. Sometimes I'll say, "Let's start with a blanket assumption that your partner's not handling themselves well. Let's look at how you are handling yourself. Let's look at what you're actually doing in this. You're an adult. You can change your life, and you can change your relationships."

James: I encounter that a lot also, where someone's putting a lot of energy into trying to convince me their partner is doing bad things. I'll just stop them and say, "You know what? I agree with you. In fact, I think you see your partner really accurately, and I'm glad you do. So I would like you to stop trying to convince me that you're right, because I'm already on your side here. I want to talk to you about what you're going to do in this situation. How are you going to handle this?" That's a kind of inner adult work, I guess.

Catherine: Another thing I think about with inner adult work is getting connected to your values—making decisions based on values and not based on how another person is going to react or what they tell you you can and can't do.

I see this show up when someone says, "I can't. I'm not allowed. They won't let me." That's usually about a partner, sometimes a parent. It's like, okay, they can put pressure on you. But this is about you making a decision for yourself based on your own values and moving into a peer-to-peer position: "We're both adults here. You can tell me what you want or don't want. You can put pressure on me, you can criticize me. But whether I am honest with you is not decided by whether you're going to get mad. It's decided by whether I value being honest."

James: In the end, obviously it's easier for me to be honest with you if you're not going to yell at me. But it's still my choice. That's what you're talking about: can you take full responsibility for all of your behavior, no matter how your partner responds to it?

Catherine: And I do think you can make requests. You could say, "Hey, I really want to talk to you about something important. It's going to be pretty hard for me to get through this, and I expect it'll be pretty hard for you to hear. If you're willing to try to hear me out, it would mean a lot to me." You can make requests.

James: Have you ever seen a Time Timer? It's a little visual clock, and you could say, "I'm going to put two minutes on this clock, and my request is that you just listen to me for two minutes. Then after I've talked for two minutes, I'll give you two minutes." It seems structured and a little artificial, but if every discussion ends up with two people stepping on each other and talking over each other, it's important to get to a place where I can speak, then there's a pause, then you can speak, then there's a pause. If that helps you get there, then it helps you get there.

Catherine: One of the things that can be hard about seeing yourself as an adult is relating to your parents adult-to-adult. I think the reason it's hard is that your relationship was laid down initially when there was a genuine power imbalance—you were a child, they were an adult. Getting your brain to handle contact adult-to-adult, where you're not afraid of them, you're not deferring to them, and you're also not trying to be ultra-harsh to exert power over them—just trying to do this in a peer-to-peer way.

I think that's one of the things that has the biggest impact on your brain: when you start to relate to your parents as "We're both adults, we're both grown up. I'm in charge of my life. I can tell you the truth and you can have your reaction. But you're not my guardian anymore."

James: It sounds a lot easier than it is. It's actually really difficult. And it impacts your ability to talk to your partner like an adult. If I can't talk to my parents in an adult-to-adult way, it's unlikely that I can talk to my partner in an adult-to-adult way, because that same programming that shapes how I talk to my parents is going to show up in how I talk to my partner.

Catherine: That makes sense, because this is your main attachment figure. When we get into romantic relationships, we're following attachment patterns that started in childhood—an important other that we're really attached to.

James: So it's really useful to imagine talking to one of your parents about something they would get defensive about. I think it's a really useful exercise: to visualize what would be the most direct and most powerful way—without being mean—to say, "Mom or Dad, I want to talk to you about this thing that you did that had a negative impact on me."

Most parents of adult children will get defensive in that scenario. They don't want to be held responsible for the worst impacts they had on their children. They'll start making moves to make it seem like the adult child is in the wrong, or they weren't really responsible for their behavior, or it's not okay for the adult child to be bringing this up for some reason.

Catherine: There's a dynamic that's part of the defense reaction: "Hey, you're breaking a family rule. I get to tell you when you do something I don't like, but you don't get to tell me when I do something you don't like."

James: And that rule was established in the first place because the parents were fragile and insecure. A parent who's fragile and insecure in their thirties and forties is probably going to be fragile and insecure in their sixties and seventies. They're probably going to have that same defensive reaction: "You don't get to do this to me," and they're going to make some moves to keep you from doing it.

Catherine: I agree.

James: So that would be inner adult work. The last thing to talk about is the connection between the two. The more inner adult work I do, the more effective my inner child work will be. And this actually ties back to what you said about Steven Gilligan at the very beginning—we need both. I need that tender connection to the young parts of my brain, and I need the connection to the strong and powerful parts of my brain.

Catherine: It makes me think about a therapist I had about fifteen years ago. I was talking about a very difficult situation I was in and she would say, "Look at your hands and remind yourself these are not child hands." Like, "I can handle this." But I'd look at my hands and think, "I don't know what I'm doing. I've never handled this." I wasn't looking at the hands of a woman who knows how to do this.

So yeah, you have to build up. If you're going to become less reactive and the reactivity is coming from a wounded child place, to really become less reactive, you have to build trust and competence to handle your life. The stronger your inner adult, the calmer your inner child. They really do go together.

James: Absolutely. And this is a mistake I think happens a lot in the world of therapy—skipping over the strong adult part and trying to go straight to the wounded child. But who is the wounded child going to turn to if there is no strong adult there?

Catherine: In that situation, people try to turn to their partner usually, but their partner is usually not really willing to consistently take care of them. My view is that because you're with yourself all the time and you're not with anyone else all the time, the only really reliable source of someone who could help you out anytime you're triggered is going to be yourself. There are other people—therapists, coaches, friends, your partner—who can help you sometimes. But if you want someone who's on call and always available, which is what any scared child part is going to want, it actually has to be you.

James: It does have to be you. It really does. And there's also a fairness question: is it reasonable for me to ask my wife to be supportive and patient with me in a way that I'm not capable of being supportive and patient toward myself?

Catherine: I do think that's fair. In general, I think it's good to look at what you want from other people through the lens of "Do I have this to offer?" Not that everything is perfectly symmetrical, but these fundamental things—wanting someone to be warm, patient, nonjudgmental—asking for it before you can offer it is often asking too much. Partly because you'll just be too hungry for it before you have it to give. If you're not giving it to yourself, you're always going to want more of it than they have the capacity to offer.

James: I think we should end there. That was a very good, strong last sentence.

Catherine: Great talking to you, James.

James: It was so good. Thanks for this amazing conversation, and let's have many more.

Catherine: See you soon.

Don’t be a Doormat

When I want my wife to change, my brain reaches for the same tool every time: emphasize my distress. The logic feels airtight—if she could just see how much this hurts, she'd change.

But think about what that communicates. When I ramp up my distress to get a response, I'm saying: My okayness is in your hands, and you're failing. That's not a request. That's an emotional control lever. And some part of her recognizes it and thinks, I can see you're using your pain to run me, and I refuse to be run.

Relatioship Coach Catherine Roebuck put it sharply: if your partner gives in to a request made from judgment and coldness, what have they won? Nothing. They've confirmed that giving in sets them up for more of the same. To protect their sense of self, they almost have to say no.

This instinct isn't a character flaw—it's our oldest survival strategy. As infants, ramping up distress until someone responded was our only tool. But what worked on a caretaker responding to a helpless baby has the opposite effect between adults. Your partner already knows you're upset. The issue is they don't want to be controlled by your upset.

What Actually Works

Before I bring a request to my wife, I have to figure out: if she says no, am I going to be okay? If I haven't settled that, she'll sense that her answer carries the full weight of my emotional wellbeing—and that pressure alone will make her want to say no.

But if I've genuinely gotten to a place where I can accept either answer, the request arrives without a threat attached. I'm not asking her to save me. I'm asking her to consider something, and she's free to choose. That freedom is what makes it possible for her to choose yes.

Sometimes people honestly examine this and find out: No, I really won't be okay. That's not a problem with the exercise—that's the exercise working. If your okayness truly depends on your partner's response, the focus needs to be on building your own foundation, not making a more persuasive appeal.

The Third Way

When she’s responding to a partner’s request, Catherine makes herself come up with three possible responses before picking one. The first two are almost always childhood coping strategies—comply or rebel. The third option is the first one that's actually yours, coming from values instead of reflexes. Something like: I'm going to tell you what I honestly think, in the kindest way I can. That's infinitely harder than caving or blowing up. But it's the only response that keeps both connection and autonomy intact.

Always saying no is just as reactive as always saying yes. Either way, someone else is determining your behavior. Real autonomy means slowing down long enough to figure out what you actually want.

I have to feel solid in myself before I can reach out with kindness to someone else. That's the foundation. There's no shortcut around it.

What does Emotional Abuse look like?

Emotional abuse is intentional. 

When we hurt each other's feelings, we're usually doing it on purpose. 

If I crash my car three times a week, you’re not going to call it an accident. 

And if I hurt my wife's feelings three times a week, that's also not an accident.

In adult relationships, each person is responsible for their own feelings and their own behavior. 

So if I hurt my wife's feelings, I'm not responsible for how she feels. But I am responsible for what I did. That's why it's so important to understand the intention behind the behavior. 

Here's how I help couples end emotional abuse:

1. Let go of false innocence. When you hurt your partner, you're probably doing it on purpose. You won't be able to change anything until you acknowledge the intentionality of your behavior. Pause before you speak to determine the emotional impact you are about to have.

2. Learn to see your partner clearly. Yes, they're hurting you on purpose. Try to figure out why. What did they get from it? How is it protective to them? Try to see your partner as a person, not just as an abuser.

3. Do your family history. The abusive patterns that show up in your marriage have probably been in your family for several generations. When you can see these patterns in your parents and grandparents, it makes them easier to deal with them in yourself. You don't get to choose the environment your brain is trained in, and your partner doesn't either.

4. Offer yourself warm acceptance. There's a part of you that is capable of deep, compassionate love and acceptance. There's another part of you that craves the warm acceptance of being good enough. When you feel your inner critic rise up, see if you can develop it in the arms of your love. Don't try to make it go away. Just offer it a warm embrace

5. Find a way to be okay.  Ask yourself this question: will I find a way to be okay if my partner doesn't change? The answer to that question needs to be yes, because you are the one who's responsible for making sure that you're okay. Don't make your partner responsible for your okayness.

6. Focus on how you impact your partner. Since you're going to be okay, you can safely focus your attention on how you impact your partner instead of focusing on how they impact you. Instinctively, your brain will want to focus on your partner's impact on you. But that doesn't get you anywhere. Shift your focus to how you impact your partner because that's what you can change. You have more power than you know.

7. Hold yourself to the same standard you hold your partner to. It's easy to see your partner clearly, and hard to see yourself clearly. Pay attention to the emotional impact you have on your partner and the emotional impact you have on yourself. That's what you can change and that's where your power lies in your relationship.

Abusive relationships don't have to stay that way. A good couples therapist can help you enter the cycle once and for all. 

What is Differentiation?

You've probably had the experience. Your partner says something — maybe it's a passing comment about how you loaded the dishwasher, or a heavier remark about your relationship with your mother — and suddenly you're flooded. Your chest tightens. You snap back, or you go quiet and withdraw. Later, when the storm passes, you wonder: Why did that get to me so much?

The answer, according to some of the most influential thinkers in couples therapy, has a name: differentiation. Or more precisely, the lack of it.

Differentiation is one of the most important concepts in relational psychology, and yet most couples have never heard the term. Developed by psychiatrist Murray Bowen and later applied to intimate relationships by psychologist David Schnarch, differentiation describes something deceptively simple: your ability to hold onto yourself while staying emotionally connected to the people you love.

That might sound easy. It isn't. And understanding why it isn't — and what you can do about it — might be the single most transformative thing you ever learn about your relationship.

Where the Idea Comes From

Murray Bowen was a psychiatrist working in the mid-twentieth century who noticed something striking in his clinical work with families. He observed that in many troubled families, the members seemed emotionally fused — unable to think independently, constantly reacting to one another's anxiety, and locked in repetitive patterns of conflict or distance. He called this emotional fusion, and he proposed that the antidote was what he termed differentiation of self.

For Bowen, differentiation meant the capacity to distinguish between your thinking and your feeling, and to choose your response rather than simply reacting. It also meant the ability to maintain your own sense of identity — your values, beliefs, and direction in life — even when the people around you pressure you to conform or when the emotional temperature in the room rises.

Bowen saw differentiation as existing on a spectrum. At the lower end, people are highly reactive. Their emotional state is almost entirely determined by the people around them. They either absorb others' anxiety like a sponge or they cut off from relationships entirely to protect themselves. At the higher end, people can stay calm and clear-headed in the midst of emotional intensity. They can be close to others without losing themselves, and they can be separate without feeling abandoned.

Crucially, Bowen believed that your level of differentiation was shaped primarily in your family of origin. The patterns you learned growing up — how your family handled conflict, closeness, anxiety, and autonomy — became the template you carried into your adult relationships. But he also believed that differentiation could be developed over a lifetime with conscious effort.

Schnarch Brings It Into the Bedroom

David Schnarch took Bowen's concept and placed it squarely at the center of intimate relationships. In his landmark book Passionate Marriage, Schnarch argued that most couples misunderstand what makes relationships work. We tend to believe that a good relationship is one where our partner validates us, soothes our insecurities, and makes us feel good about ourselves. Schnarch called this "other-validated intimacy" — and he said it was a trap.

When you depend on your partner to regulate your emotions and prop up your sense of self, you become exquisitely sensitive to their every mood and reaction. If they're happy with you, you feel secure. If they're critical, distant, or simply preoccupied, you feel threatened. You end up organizing your life around managing their emotional state, and you lose access to your own.

Schnarch proposed an alternative: "self-validated intimacy." This doesn't mean you don't care what your partner thinks. It means your fundamental sense of worth and identity doesn't depend on their approval. You can hear difficult feedback without crumbling. You can share something vulnerable without needing them to respond in a particular way. You can tolerate the discomfort of disagreement without either caving in or escalating into a fight.

This is differentiation in action. And Schnarch argued that it isn't just helpful for relationships — it's the engine that drives genuine intimacy and desire. Paradoxically, the more you can hold onto yourself, the closer you can actually get to your partner.

What Low Differentiation Looks Like in a Relationship

If you've ever wondered why you and your partner keep having the same argument, or why small issues seem to trigger outsized reactions, low differentiation is often the underlying cause. Here are some of the ways it tends to show up.

Emotional reactivity. When your partner expresses displeasure, you don't just hear their words — you feel them in your body as a threat. You might lash out defensively, shut down and stonewall, or scramble to fix whatever you think is wrong. The common thread is that your response is automatic rather than chosen.

Fusion. You struggle to tell where you end and your partner begins. You might take on their moods, feel responsible for their happiness, or experience their problems as your own. Boundaries feel selfish or dangerous. You may have trouble identifying what you actually want, separate from what your partner wants.

Pursuit and withdrawal. One partner pushes for more connection, more talk, more reassurance. The other pulls back, needing space and autonomy. The pursuer interprets the withdrawal as rejection; the withdrawer experiences the pursuit as suffocation. Both are reacting to the same underlying anxiety about closeness and separateness, just in opposite directions.

Chronic accommodation. You give in to keep the peace, swallowing your opinions and preferences to avoid conflict. Over time, this breeds resentment — and your partner senses the inauthenticity even if they can't name it. The relationship starts to feel hollow.

Intolerance of differences. Disagreements feel like threats to the relationship rather than natural expressions of two separate people. You might pressure your partner to see things your way, or feel deeply unsettled when they hold a different perspective on something that matters to you.

None of these patterns make you a bad partner. They make you human. Almost everyone struggles with differentiation, because almost everyone grew up in a family where some degree of emotional fusion was normal. But recognizing these patterns is the first step toward changing them.

What Higher Differentiation Looks Like

A more differentiated relationship isn't one without conflict or discomfort. In fact, it often involves more honesty, which means more friction — at least initially. But the quality of that friction changes. Instead of reactive clashes driven by anxiety, you get genuine encounters between two people who are willing to be known.

In a more differentiated relationship, you can tell your partner something they don't want to hear — not to be cruel, but because you respect them enough to be honest. You can listen to their perspective without feeling like your own is under attack. You can sit with the tension of unresolved disagreement without rushing to smooth it over.

You can also be genuinely close. When you aren't terrified of losing yourself in the relationship, you can actually relax into intimacy. You can be vulnerable without it feeling like a transaction where you're owed comfort in return. You can desire your partner as a separate person rather than needing them as an extension of yourself.

Schnarch described this as being able to "hold onto yourself" in the midst of emotional pressure. It means self-soothing rather than demanding that your partner soothe you. It means tolerating discomfort for the sake of growth. It means choosing integrity over comfort.

How Differentiation Grows

Here's the part that most people find both encouraging and uncomfortable: differentiation doesn't grow through harmony. It grows through what Schnarch called the "crucible" of relationship — the inevitable moments of gridlock, misunderstanding, and emotional pain that every long-term partnership produces.

When you hit a point of genuine impasse with your partner — a place where neither of you can get what you want without the other giving something up — you have a choice. You can collapse into old patterns of reactivity, accommodation, or withdrawal. Or you can use the crisis as an opportunity to grow.

Growing means doing the hard thing. It might mean speaking a truth you've been sitting on for years, knowing your partner will be upset. It might mean hearing your partner's truth without defending yourself. It might mean tolerating the anxiety of not knowing whether the relationship will survive this particular passage.

This is not comfortable work. But Bowen and Schnarch both argued that it's the only real path to maturity — both as an individual and as a partner. Relationships don't exist to make you happy, at least not primarily. They exist to make you grow. And growth, by definition, involves moving beyond what's familiar.

There are some practical ways to begin this work in your own life.

Notice your reactivity. Start paying attention to the moments when you get triggered. Instead of acting on the impulse immediately, pause. Name what you're feeling. Ask yourself what the feeling is really about — is it about the dishwasher, or is it about feeling unseen?

Practice self-soothing. When you're flooded with emotion, resist the urge to demand that your partner fix it. Instead, find ways to calm your own nervous system — breathing, walking, journaling, or simply sitting with the discomfort until it passes.

Take a position. Identify something you believe or want that you've been hiding to keep the peace. Find a way to express it clearly and without hostility. Be prepared for your partner to disagree, and practice tolerating that disagreement.

Stay in the room. When conversations get hard, notice your impulse to flee — whether physically, emotionally, or into distraction. Practice staying present even when it's uncomfortable.

Get curious about your family of origin. Reflect on how your family handled closeness, conflict, and autonomy. Notice the patterns you inherited. You don't have to blame your parents — but understanding where your relational habits came from gives you more freedom to choose differently.

Why This Matters

In a culture that often treats relationships as a source of comfort and completion — find your other half, your soulmate, the person who "gets" you — the concept of differentiation offers a radically different vision. It suggests that the purpose of an intimate relationship is not to make you feel whole, but to challenge you to become whole on your own, while remaining deeply connected to another person who is doing the same.

This is harder than the fairy tale. But it's also more honest, more durable, and ultimately more rewarding. Couples who do the work of differentiation often report that their relationship feels more alive, more real, and more intimate than it ever did when they were trying to merge into one.

Differentiation doesn't mean becoming distant or emotionally detached. It means the opposite — it means being close enough to truly see your partner and brave enough to let them truly see you. Not the curated version. Not the accommodating version. The real one.

That's what differentiation is. It's the willingness to be yourself in the presence of someone who matters to you, even when being yourself is the hardest thing you can imagine. And it might just be the most important skill your relationship will ever ask you to develop.

Infidelity Statistics: How Common Is Cheating in Marriage? (2026 Research & Data)

Few topics in relationships generate as much anxiety, curiosity, and confusion as infidelity. Whether you're worried about your own marriage, recovering from betrayal, or simply trying to understand the landscape of modern relationships, having accurate data matters. This comprehensive guide examines what research actually tells us about cheating in marriage—and what it means for couples today.

How Common Is Infidelity in Marriage?

The headlines would have you believe that infidelity is an epidemic destroying half of all marriages. The reality, while still significant, is more nuanced.

According to data from the General Social Survey, approximately 20% of married men and 13% of married women report having had sex with someone other than their spouse while married. This finding has remained remarkably consistent across multiple studies and decades of research.

The often-cited claim that "half of all marriages experience infidelity" is overstated. When we look at rigorous research, approximately 20-25% of marriages experience physical infidelity at some point during the relationship.

However, when we expand the definition to include emotional affairs—romantic connections that don't involve physical intimacy—the numbers climb significantly. Research suggests that 45% of men and 35% of women have engaged in some form of emotional infidelity during their marriage. This distinction matters because 64% of couples report that an emotional affair can be just as damaging, or even more harmful, than a physical one.

Who Cheats More: Men or Women?

The data consistently shows that men are more likely to cheat than women, though this gap has narrowed over time.

Overall rates:

• Men: 20% report extramarital sex

• Women: 13% report extramarital sex

But these averages hide important variations across age groups.

Infidelity by Age

Among younger married adults (ages 18-29), women are actually slightly more likely to cheat than men (11% vs. 10%). This represents a significant shift from previous generations.

The gender gap reverses and widens with age:

• Ages 30-39: Men begin cheating at higher rates

• Ages 50-59: Peak infidelity years—28% of men and 17% of women report cheating

• Ages 70+: Men report the highest rates (26%), while women's rates decline to around 6%

This age pattern suggests that infidelity isn't simply about opportunity or character—it's influenced by life stage, relationship duration, and generational attitudes toward marriage and sexuality.

The Rise of Emotional Affairs

Perhaps the most significant shift in infidelity patterns involves emotional affairs—intimate connections that may not involve physical contact but create the same sense of betrayal.

Research reveals striking numbers:

• 91.6% of women admit to having had an emotional affair at some point

• 78.6% of men report the same

The workplace remains the most common breeding ground for affairs of all types. Studies show that 31% of affairs begin with coworkers, and the likelihood increases dramatically with corporate rank:

• Non-management employees: 9% report workplace affairs

• Middle management: 24%

• Upper management: 37%

This pattern likely reflects increased travel, long hours, and the intense bonds that form during high-pressure work situations—factors that create both opportunity and emotional vulnerability.

Social media has introduced new complexities. While there isn't strong evidence that overall infidelity rates have increased dramatically, the nature of emotional affairs has changed. Digital communication makes it easier to maintain secret connections, blur boundaries, and rationalize inappropriate relationships as "just friendship."

What Causes Infidelity?

Understanding why people cheat is essential for prevention—and for healing when affairs do occur. Research points to several consistent factors.

Relationship Factors

The strongest predictors of infidelity relate to the quality of the primary relationship:

• Lack of emotional intimacy: Partners who feel emotionally disconnected are more vulnerable to seeking connection elsewhere

• Sexual dissatisfaction: Though notably, this predicts male infidelity more strongly than female infidelity

• Unresolved conflict: Chronic resentment and unaddressed issues create distance

• Poor communication: Couples who struggle to discuss needs, feelings, and concerns are at higher risk

This is why developing strong communication skills is one of the most protective factors against infidelity—and why addressing communication patterns is central to effective couples therapy.

Individual Factors

Some individual characteristics are associated with higher infidelity rates:

• Attachment style: Those with avoidant or anxious attachment patterns cheat more frequently

• History of infidelity: Past cheating is one of the strongest predictors of future cheating

• Attitudes toward infidelity: Those who view cheating as somewhat acceptable are more likely to engage in it

• Opportunity: Travel, work situations, and social environments that provide opportunity and anonymity

The Differentiation Factor

Research in differentiation-based approaches to couples therapy suggests that poorly differentiated individuals—those who struggle to maintain their sense of self while in close relationships—may be more vulnerable to affairs. When people depend on their partner for validation and self-worth, they become susceptible to seeking that validation elsewhere when the relationship hits inevitable rough patches.

This understanding forms the foundation of the Crucible Approach to couples therapy, which focuses on helping partners develop the internal stability needed to weather relationship challenges without seeking escape through infidelity.

Can Marriages Survive Infidelity?

This is the question that haunts both betrayed partners and those who have strayed. The research offers a complex but ultimately hopeful picture.

Overall Survival Rates

Multiple studies find that 60-75% of couples stay together after discovering an affair. This may surprise those who assume infidelity automatically ends a marriage.

However, "staying together" isn't the same as "thriving." When researchers use stricter definitions focused on genuine reconciliation—characterized by restored trust, emotional intimacy, and mutual satisfaction—the numbers look different. Some studies suggest that only 15-20% of couples achieve meaningful reconciliation five years after discovery.

The difference between these statistics highlights an important truth: surviving infidelity requires more than simply not divorcing. It requires genuine healing and rebuilding.

The Critical Role of Professional Help

This is where the data becomes particularly relevant for couples facing this crisis. Research consistently shows that professional intervention dramatically improves outcomes:

• A 2012 AAMFT survey found that 74% of couples who underwent therapy after infidelity were able to recover and rebuild their relationship

• Studies show that 60-80% of couples who work with a skilled therapist can rebuild trust and emerge with stronger marriages

• Among the couples who stay together and do the work, 70% report higher marital satisfaction post-therapy than they had even before the affair

Compare this to couples who try to handle infidelity on their own: research suggests only 35-45% successfully reconcile without professional help.

Disclosure Matters

One of the most striking findings involves the impact of honest disclosure:

• Couples who disclosed the affair and addressed it in therapy had a divorce rate of approximately 43% at five years (meaning 57% stayed together)

• Couples who hid or minimized the affair had a divorce/separation rate of approximately 80% by five years (only 20% stayed together)

The implication is clear: while disclosure is painful, secrets are more destructive in the long run. This is one reason why skilled therapists help couples navigate the disclosure process carefully—balancing honesty with appropriate boundaries about details.

Factors That Predict Successful Recovery

Not all couples who seek help after infidelity will succeed. Research has identified several factors that distinguish couples who rebuild from those who ultimately separate.

What Helps Recovery

Forgiveness is the single strongest predictor of relationship stability after infidelity. Studies show that 80% of partners who genuinely forgive remain married after five years. This doesn't mean forgetting or excusing—it means releasing the desire for revenge and choosing to move forward.

Other factors associated with successful recovery include:

• Both partners viewing the affair as a shared problem rather than solely the unfaithful partner's fault

• The unfaithful partner taking full responsibility without making excuses or blaming the betrayed spouse

• Complete transparency moving forward, including access to phones, accounts, and schedules

• Willingness to examine what wasn't working in the relationship before the affair

• Professional guidance from a therapist experienced in infidelity recovery

What Hinders Recovery

Conversely, certain patterns make recovery unlikely:

• Ongoing contact with the affair partner

• Minimizing the betrayed partner's pain

• Demanding immediate forgiveness or "getting over it"

• Refusal to discuss the affair or answer questions

• Blaming the betrayed partner for the unfaithful partner's choices

The Path Forward

If you're reading this article because infidelity has touched your relationship, the statistics offer both caution and hope.

The caution: infidelity causes real damage. It shatters trust, creates trauma, and fundamentally changes a relationship. Recovery isn't guaranteed, and it requires sustained effort from both partners.

The hope: most couples who commit to the healing process, especially with professional support, can not only survive but ultimately build stronger relationships. The affair, while devastating, can become a catalyst for addressing long-standing issues and creating deeper intimacy than existed before.

The research is clear that couples who work with experienced therapists have significantly better outcomes than those who try to navigate this crisis alone. If you're in the Roseville area and facing infidelity in your relationship, reaching out for professional support is the most evidence-based step you can take.

Prevention: Protecting Your Marriage

For couples who haven't experienced infidelity but want to protect their relationship, the research points to several protective factors:

1. Maintain emotional intimacy: Regular, meaningful conversations about feelings, dreams, and concerns

2. Address problems early: Don't let resentments build; seek help at the first signs of persistent conflict

3. Nurture your sexual connection: Physical intimacy matters, and both partners should feel comfortable discussing needs and desires

4. Develop strong communication skills: The ability to navigate difficult conversations is protective

5. Build individual strength: Partners who maintain their own identity, friendships, and interests are less vulnerable to seeking validation elsewhere

6. Create transparency: Openness about friendships, work relationships, and online activities builds trust

These aren't guarantees—no relationship is affair-proof. But couples who actively invest in their connection create relationships where infidelity becomes less appealing and less likely.

Conclusion

Infidelity affects roughly one in five marriages—significant, but not the epidemic some portray. When it does occur, the majority of couples can recover, especially with professional help. The research consistently shows that honest disclosure, genuine forgiveness, and skilled therapeutic support create the conditions for healing.

Whether you're working to affair-proof your marriage or navigating the painful aftermath of betrayal, understanding these statistics can help you make informed decisions about your relationship's future.

The numbers tell us that hope is reasonable—but that hope must be paired with action, honesty, and often professional guidance to translate into lasting recovery.

James Christensen is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist specializing in couples therapy in Roseville, California. He helps couples navigate relationship challenges including communication issues, trust repair, and recovery from infidelity.

Sources: Institute for Family Studies, General Social Survey, American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, Couples Academy, The Marriage Restoration Project

Why Women Are Twice as Likely as Men to File for Divorce

Research consistently shows that women initiate approximately 70% of all divorces in the United States. When you narrow the focus to college-educated couples, that number climbs even higher. This isn't a new trend—it's been documented for decades. But what's driving it?

As a couples therapist who has worked with hundreds of couples navigating relationship challenges, I've seen these patterns play out in real time. The reasons women file for divorce more often than men are complex, layered, and often misunderstood. Let's explore what the research tells us—and what it means for couples who want to stay together.

The Research Behind the Numbers

A landmark study from Stanford University found that women initiate 69% of all divorces. Among college-educated women, that figure rises to nearly 90%. These numbers have remained remarkably stable over time, suggesting this isn't a temporary cultural shift but something more fundamental about how men and women experience marriage differently.

Several large-scale studies have attempted to explain this gap. The findings point to a combination of factors: unmet emotional needs, unequal distribution of household labor, differences in relationship satisfaction, and shifting cultural expectations around marriage.

Emotional Labor and the "Mental Load"

One of the most significant factors driving women to end marriages is the invisible burden of emotional labor. This includes remembering birthdays, scheduling appointments, managing household logistics, anticipating family needs, and maintaining social connections. Research shows that even in households where both partners work full-time, women still perform the majority of this cognitive and emotional work.

Over time, this imbalance creates exhaustion and resentment. Many women describe feeling like they have two full-time jobs—one at work and one at home. When attempts to communicate these frustrations go unheard or dismissed, the emotional toll compounds.

The problem isn't just the work itself. It's the feeling of being unseen and undervalued. When one partner consistently manages the invisible workload while the other remains oblivious to it, a deep sense of loneliness can develop—even within the marriage.

The Loneliness of Emotional Disconnection

Feeling alone while married is one of the most painful experiences couples face. Many women who file for divorce describe years of feeling emotionally disconnected from their partners before making the decision to leave.

This disconnection often looks different from the outside than it feels on the inside. A couple might appear functional—they pay bills together, raise children, attend social events. But beneath the surface, one or both partners feel like roommates rather than romantic partners.

Women tend to be more attuned to these emotional undercurrents. Research shows that women generally have higher expectations for emotional intimacy in marriage and are more likely to notice when those expectations aren't being met. This heightened awareness can become both a strength and a burden.

When women try to address emotional disconnection and feel consistently shut down or dismissed, they may eventually stop trying. This withdrawal often precedes the decision to file for divorce, sometimes by years.

Unequal Division of Household Responsibilities

Beyond emotional labor, the physical division of household tasks remains unequal in most marriages. Despite significant progress toward gender equality in the workplace, studies show that women still perform roughly 65% of household chores and childcare duties, even when both partners work similar hours outside the home.

This imbalance extends beyond simple task completion. Women often carry the responsibility of delegating, supervising, and following up on household tasks—adding another layer of invisible work to their already full plates.

Research published in the American Sociological Review found that perceived unfairness in household labor is one of the strongest predictors of divorce. When women feel their contributions are taken for granted or that their partners aren't pulling their weight, relationship satisfaction drops significantly.

The Evolution of Women's Financial Independence

Historically, many women stayed in unhappy marriages because they lacked financial independence. Leaving meant facing poverty, social stigma, or losing custody of children. The economic barriers to divorce were simply too high.

That calculus has changed dramatically. Today, women earn approximately 47% of all household income in the United States. More women hold college degrees than men. More women are starting businesses, advancing in careers, and building financial security independent of their spouses.

This economic shift hasn't caused women to file for divorce more often—it has given them the freedom to leave marriages that aren't working. Financial independence removes one of the primary barriers that kept previous generations of women trapped in unfulfilling or even harmful relationships.

Higher Expectations for Relationship Quality

Marriage has evolved from an economic arrangement to an institution based primarily on emotional fulfillment. Today's couples expect their marriages to provide companionship, emotional support, intellectual stimulation, sexual satisfaction, and personal growth—all at once.

Women, in particular, tend to hold higher expectations for what marriage should provide. They're more likely to seek out resources like couples therapy, read relationship books, and actively work on improving their marriages. When these efforts feel one-sided or unsuccessful, disappointment sets in.

This isn't about women being more demanding or difficult to please. It's about recognizing that modern marriage is supposed to be a partnership of equals—and feeling profoundly let down when reality falls short of that promise.

Communication Patterns and Conflict Styles

Research on marital communication reveals consistent differences in how men and women approach conflict. Women are generally more likely to bring up problems and push for resolution. Men are more likely to withdraw, stonewall, or avoid difficult conversations.

Dr. John Gottman's extensive research on couples identified "stonewalling"—emotional withdrawal during conflict—as one of the most damaging behaviors in relationships. When one partner consistently shuts down during disagreements, the other partner often feels abandoned and unheard.

Learning how to stop arguing constructively is essential for any marriage to thrive. But when only one partner is willing to engage in the hard work of conflict resolution, the relationship becomes increasingly one-sided.

The Role of Infidelity

While both men and women cheat, the aftermath of infidelity often plays out differently depending on who strays. Research suggests that women are more likely to end their marriages following either their own affairs or their husband's infidelity.

For women, affairs often signal a deeper dissatisfaction with the relationship. Whereas men more frequently compartmentalize infidelity from their feelings about their marriages, women who cheat often do so because they feel emotionally disconnected from their spouses.

When women discover their partners have been unfaithful, they're also more likely to view the betrayal as a fundamental breach of trust that cannot be repaired. Learning to rebuild a relationship after infidelity requires both partners to commit fully to the repair process—and women may be less willing to offer that commitment after being betrayed.

The Decision Doesn't Happen Overnight

One crucial pattern I've observed in my practice: women rarely decide to divorce impulsively. The decision typically develops over years of accumulated disappointment, failed attempts at communication, and gradual emotional withdrawal.

Many men are blindsided when their wives ask for a divorce. But when you listen to the women's side of the story, there's almost always a long history of attempts to address problems that went unheard.

This disconnect can be heartbreaking. The husband genuinely didn't see it coming. The wife feels she's been signaling distress for years. Both experiences are valid, and both point to a profound failure of communication somewhere along the way.

If you're in this situation—whether you're the spouse whose partner wants a divorce or the one considering leaving—understanding this dynamic can help you either repair the relationship or navigate the separation with more compassion.

What This Means for Couples Who Want to Stay Together

Understanding why women file for divorce more often isn't about assigning blame. It's about identifying patterns that can be addressed before a relationship reaches the breaking point.

For couples who want to strengthen their marriages, here are some research-backed approaches:

Address emotional labor imbalances. Have explicit conversations about the invisible work in your household. Who tracks the family calendar? Who remembers to buy birthday gifts? Who notices when supplies are running low? Making this work visible is the first step toward sharing it more equitably.

Prioritize emotional connection. Feeling close to your partner requires ongoing attention and effort. Schedule regular time for meaningful conversation. Ask questions that go beyond logistics. Show genuine curiosity about your partner's inner world.

Learn to fight well. Conflict is inevitable in any long-term relationship. The goal isn't to avoid disagreement—it's to handle disagreements in ways that strengthen rather than damage your bond. This often requires learning new skills and practicing different approaches to difficult conversations.

Take complaints seriously. When your partner expresses unhappiness, resist the urge to become defensive or dismissive. Their concerns are valid, even if you don't fully understand them. Listening with an open heart can prevent small problems from becoming relationship-ending issues.

Consider professional support. Working with a skilled couples therapist can help you identify blind spots, improve communication, and address underlying issues you may not be able to solve on your own. The best time to seek help is before problems become entrenched.

The Path Forward

Women file for divorce more often than men for many interconnected reasons: emotional disconnection, unequal labor distribution, financial independence, higher expectations for relationship quality, and different approaches to communication and conflict.

None of these factors is destiny. Couples who understand these dynamics can work proactively to build stronger, more equitable partnerships. The key is taking action before resentment builds to the point of no return.

If you're reading this because you're worried about your own marriage, take that concern seriously. The fact that you're seeking information is a positive sign—it means you care enough to try to understand what's happening.

Whether your goal is to repair your relationship or to navigate a difficult transition, you don't have to figure it out alone. Reaching out for professional support is a sign of strength, not weakness.

Your relationship is worth fighting for—but that fight requires both partners to show up fully, listen deeply, and commit to the ongoing work of building a partnership where both people feel valued, seen, and loved.

James Christensen is a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in couples therapy in Roseville, California. He helps couples navigate communication challenges, rebuild after betrayal, and create stronger, more fulfilling relationships.

Divorce Statistics Every Couple Should Know in 2026

You've probably heard that half of all marriages end in divorce. It's one of those statistics people throw around at dinner parties like it's settled science. But is it true? And more importantly — if you're reading this as someone in a struggling marriage — what do these numbers actually mean for you?

As a couples therapist who has spent years working with couples in crisis, I find that most people misunderstand divorce statistics in ways that either make them fatally complacent or unnecessarily hopeless. The real data tells a more complicated and more useful story than the headlines suggest.

Here's what the numbers actually say — and what they don't.

What Percentage of Marriages End in Divorce?

The short answer: approximately 40-45% of first marriages in the United States will end in divorce. Not 50%.

The "50% of marriages end in divorce" claim originated as a projection made in the late 1970s, when divorce rates were climbing rapidly after no-fault divorce laws swept the country. Demographers looked at the trend line and extrapolated forward. The problem is that divorce rates peaked around 1980-1981 and have been declining ever since. The projection never materialized.

Paul Amato's 2010 review in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that 43-46% of marriages were predicted to end in dissolution. The Institute for Family Studies (2025) estimates approximately 40% for today's first marriages. Researcher Shaunti Feldhahn, author of The Good News About Marriage (2014), argues the actual figure may be even lower, pointing out that 71% of ever-married Americans remain married to their first spouse.

But here's what matters if you're sitting in my office: population-level statistics don't predict individual marriages. Your odds depend enormously on factors you can actually influence, which I'll get to below.

US Divorce Rate by Year

The American divorce rate has been declining for four decades. Here's the trajectory:

The crude divorce rate (divorces per 1,000 people in the population) hit its all-time peak of 5.3 in 1981. By 2023, it had fallen to 2.4 — a 55% decline. The more meaningful refined divorce rate (divorces per 1,000 married women) peaked at 22.6 in 1979-1980 and fell to 14.4 by 2023, a 35% drop.

Period Crude Rate (per 1,000 pop.) Refined Rate (per 1,000 married women) 1981 5.3 (peak) — 1979–1980 — 22.6 (peak) 1990 ~4.7 ~19.0 2000 4.0 ~18.0 2008 3.5 20.5 2015 3.1 ~16.0 2019 2.7 15.5 2020 2.3 14.0 (40-year low) 2022 2.4 14.6 2023 2.4 14.4

Sources: CDC/NCHS National Vital Statistics System; Loo (2024), NCFMR Family Profile FP-24-11

Philip Cohen at the University of Maryland documented an 18% decline in divorce rates between 2008 and 2016 alone, driven primarily by younger cohorts marrying later and more selectively (Cohen, 2019, Socius).

The COVID-19 pandemic created an unusual dip in 2020 — divorce counts dropped 16%, the largest single-year decline since at least 2000. But this was mostly about court closures and the practical impossibility of separating during lockdowns, not about marriages suddenly improving. Rates partially recovered by 2022.

The overall trend is clear: marriage in America has become more selective, and when chosen deliberately, more stable. People who marry today are older, more educated, and more financially established than the couples driving the 1980 peak. This is genuinely good news — but it masks a growing divide between who's thriving in marriage and who isn't.

Second Marriage Divorce Rate

This is where the data gets messy.

You've probably seen the commonly cited figures: 60-67% of second marriages and 73% of third marriages end in divorce. These numbers appear everywhere, including from the Gottman Institute and the American Psychological Association. But there's a problem with them.

The most recent rigorous data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), published in September 2024. The BLS tracked individuals born 1957-1964 through age 55 and found that only 39.1% of second marriages had ended in divorce by that point — substantially lower than the 60-67% figure you see cited everywhere.

The commonly cited higher figures likely trace back to a 2002 CDC report (Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage in the United States, Vital Health Statistics Series 23, #22) that is now over two decades old.

Here's what I'd say is the honest summary:

Marriage Order Estimated Divorce Rate Data Reliability First marriage 40–45% High — multiple recent sources agree Second marriage 39–67% Medium — recent and older data conflict significantly Third marriage ~73% Low — based primarily on 2002 data, small samples

Sources: BLS Monthly Labor Review, September 2024; CDC Vital Health Statistics Series 23 #22 (2002); Institute for Family Studies (2025)

As a therapist, I'll tell you what I see clinically: second marriages often fail for a specific reason that statistics alone can't capture. People leave their first marriage believing the problem was their partner. They find someone new and carry the same unresolved patterns into the next relationship. The issue was never the other person — it was what you were unwilling to confront in yourself. This is exactly why differentiation-based therapy matters, and why doing the internal work before or during a marriage is more protective than simply finding a "better match."

Who Initiates Divorce More — Men or Women?

Women initiate approximately 69-70% of divorces. This finding is one of the most robust in all of divorce research, and it has remained remarkably consistent for over 80 years.

The landmark modern study comes from Michael Rosenfeld at Stanford University, who analyzed data from the How Couples Meet and Stay Together (HCMST) longitudinal surveys (2009-2015). Among 92 divorces tracked, 69% were wanted more by the wife (Rosenfeld, 2017, Social Networks and the Life Course, Springer). Earlier research by Margaret Brinig and Douglas Allen, analyzing over 46,000 divorce decrees, found approximately two-thirds were initiated by women (Brinig & Allen, 2000, American Law and Economics Review). Even in the 1940s, William Goode's Detroit sample showed 69% wife-initiated divorces.

Some sources cite that among college-educated women, the initiation rate climbs to approximately 90%, though the sourcing on that specific figure is less well-documented than the overall 70% number.

Why Do Women Initiate Divorce More Often Than Men?

This is where Rosenfeld's research gets really interesting — and clinically relevant.

Rosenfeld specifically tested whether women are simply more "sensitive to relationship difficulties" than men. If that were true, women would also initiate non-marital breakups at higher rates. They don't. Among cohabiting couples, 56% of breakups were initiated by women — not statistically different from 50%. Among non-cohabiting couples, the split was essentially even at 53%.

The gender gap in initiation is specific to the institution of marriage itself, not to relationships in general. Several factors contribute:

Lower marital satisfaction among wives. Married women consistently rate their relationship quality lower than married husbands (4.46 vs. 4.61 on a 5-point scale in Rosenfeld's data). Among non-married couples, this gender gap disappears entirely.

Unequal domestic labor. Women perform approximately two-thirds of housework even when both partners work full-time (Bianchi, Robinson & Milkie, 2006). Research by Frisco and Williams (2003) found that marriages where wives felt they did more than their fair share were significantly more likely to end in divorce.

Custody expectations. Brinig and Allen's research found that the anticipation of receiving custody was the single strongest predictor of who files for divorce.

Economic independence. Women's increased labor force participation provides viable exit options from unsatisfying marriages that previous generations of women didn't have.

From a clinical perspective, what I see repeatedly is this: women tend to be more attuned to the emotional temperature of the marriage. They raise concerns earlier and more often. When those concerns go unaddressed for years — when their partner dismisses, minimizes, or simply doesn't engage — they eventually conclude that the marriage cannot give them what they need. By the time many couples arrive in therapy, the wife has been trying to get her husband's attention about the problems for a long time, and he's genuinely shocked to learn she's considering leaving.

This isn't about blame. It's about the cost of emotional avoidance in marriage.

How Education Affects Divorce Risk

Education has become one of the strongest predictors of marital stability — and the gap is widening.

The BLS (2024) found that more than 50% of marriages among those without a high school diploma end in divorce, compared to approximately 30% for college graduates. That's a 20-percentage-point gap. According to Census data, 78% of college-educated women married for the first time between 2006-2010 can expect their marriages to last at least 20 years.

NCFMR data shows this education divide has become starker over time. In 1940, the share of ever-married women who were separated or divorced was roughly equal (~3%) regardless of education level. By 2022, the lowest percentage of ever-married women currently separated or divorced was among those with a bachelor's degree or higher (16%), compared to 22-23% for those with less education (NCFMR FP-24-11).

Why does education protect marriages? It's not the diploma itself. Higher education correlates with later marriage age, higher income, better communication skills, and greater capacity for the kind of self-reflection that sustains long-term relationships. College-educated couples are more likely to marry deliberately rather than sliding into marriage through circumstance.

Pew Research (2025) put it clearly: the married population has shifted toward adults with higher education as people with lower education have become less likely to marry at all. This compositional shift is a major driver of the declining overall divorce rate.

How Age at Marriage Affects Divorce Risk

When you marry matters enormously.

Research by Nicholas Wolfinger (Institute for Family Studies, 2015) using National Survey of Family Growth data found that prior to age 32, each additional year of age at marriage reduces divorce odds by 11%. Marrying in the late 20s drops divorce risk to approximately 14% within the first five years. Waiting until ages 30-34 drops it to approximately 10%.

The flip side: 48% of those who marry before age 18 are likely to divorce within 10 years, compared to 25% of those who marry after 25. Approximately 60% of couples who marry between ages 20-25 will eventually divorce.

Interestingly, Wolfinger also found that after age 32, divorce odds actually increase by about 5% per year. The sweet spot appears to be the late twenties to early thirties.

This isn't just about maturity. People who marry later tend to have finished their education, established financial stability, and developed a clearer sense of who they are — all of which create a stronger foundation for the demands of marriage.

Gray Divorce Is the One Rate That's Rising

While overall divorce rates have fallen dramatically, one demographic is heading in the opposite direction: adults over 50.

Research by Susan Brown and I-Fen Lin at Bowling Green State University found that the gray divorce rate doubled between 1990 and 2010, rising from 4.87 to 10.05 per 1,000 married persons aged 50+ (Brown & Lin, 2012, The Journals of Gerontology Series B). By 2019, 36% of all divorces occurred among adults over 50, compared to just 8% in 1990. For women aged 65 and older, divorce rates tripled from 1990 to 2022.

Pew Research (2025) found that the gray divorce rate rose from 3.9 in 1990 to 11.0 in 2008 per 1,000 married women over 50, and has leveled off around 10.3 through 2023.

NCFMR data (FP-24-12) shows that the median duration of marriages ending in gray divorce is approximately 23 years — these are long marriages ending late. Researchers characterize gray divorce as largely a Baby Boomer phenomenon, driven by longer life expectancy, changing expectations for personal fulfillment in later life, and the fact that many of these couples married young during an era of higher divorce rates generally.

The financial consequences are severe. Women's household income drops approximately 41% after divorce versus 23% for men (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2017). Maintaining pre-divorce living standards after a gray divorce requires a 30%+ increase in income (St. Louis Federal Reserve, 2024). About 20% of women fall into poverty following divorce.

Does Living Together Before Marriage Prevent Divorce?

Most people assume that cohabiting before marriage is a sensible "test run." The data says it's more complicated than that.

Approximately 70% of married couples now live together before the wedding. Research by Scott Stanley and Galena Rhoades (Institute for Family Studies, 2023) found that 34% of marriages ended among those who cohabited before becoming engaged, versus 23% for those who waited until engagement or marriage to move in together. That's a 48% higher likelihood of dissolution for pre-engagement cohabitors. Serial cohabitation — living with two or more partners before marriage — was associated with a 60% higher divorce risk.

The critical nuance: the risk comes from pre-engagement cohabitation specifically. Couples who move in together only after getting engaged show no increased divorce risk compared to those who wait until marriage. The issue isn't living together — it's why you're living together.

Stanley's research identified what he calls "sliding versus deciding." Couples who slide into cohabitation for convenience — splitting rent, spending most nights together anyway — often slide into marriage the same way, without ever making a deliberate choice. Couples who decide to cohabit as a conscious step toward a shared future behave more like couples who waited.

This distinction matters clinically. The question isn't "did you live together first?" It's "did you choose this relationship deliberately, or did you drift into it?"

Divorce Rates Vary Dramatically by Race, Geography, and Other Factors

Not all populations experience divorce at the same rates.

By State

The South consistently has the highest divorce rates — 10 of 14 states in the top quartile are Southern, and not a single Southern state falls in the bottom quartile. In 2022, Arkansas had the highest refined rate at 23.27 per 1,000 married women. Vermont had the lowest at 9.2. The Northeast consistently shows the lowest rates, with New Jersey (10.41) and Rhode Island near the bottom (NCFMR FP-23-24; NCFMR FP-25-31).

In 2024, Oklahoma had the highest rate at 9.7 per 1,000 population, while Washington, D.C. recorded just 4.9.

By Season

University of Washington researchers Julie Brines and Brian Serafini (2016) analyzed 14 years of filing data and found consistent peaks in March and August. Filings drop 30-35% during November and December — the holiday season feels culturally inappropriate for ending a marriage — then jump approximately 33% from December to March. August's spike coincides with the end of summer vacation and the approach of the school year.

January has earned the nickname "Divorce Month" because it's when people who decided over the holidays begin contacting attorneys.

How Effective Is Couples Therapy at Preventing Divorce?

The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy reports that over 75% of couples who undergo counseling report improvement in their relationship, and 90% report improved emotional health. Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) shows 70-75% recovery rates for distressed couples.

But there's an important caveat: timing matters enormously. Research suggests the average couple waits six years after serious problems begin before seeking help. Many arrive at therapy as a last resort, when one partner has already made an internal decision to leave. At that point, therapy often becomes a managed exit rather than a genuine attempt at repair.

The couples who benefit most from therapy are the ones who come in while they still have something to work with — before resentment has calcified, before emotional withdrawal has become permanent. If you're reading this article and wondering about your own marriage, the fact that you're looking for information is itself meaningful. Don't wait another six years.

Where Do Divorce Statistics Actually Come From?

If you're the kind of person who wants to know whether the numbers are trustworthy, this section is for you.

Three primary federal data systems track marriage and divorce in the United States:

The CDC/NCHS National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) collects data through cooperative arrangements with states, which submit monthly counts. However, NCHS suspended detailed divorce data collection in January 1996 due to budget constraints. More importantly, five states don't report divorce data to the federal government at all: California, Hawaii, Indiana, Minnesota, and New Mexico. Since those states represent approximately 25% of the US population — and California alone accounts for about 12% — national divorce statistics are always somewhat incomplete.

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) surveys approximately 3 million households annually and compensates for NVSS limitations by asking about marital transitions regardless of state. Since 2008, the ACS has enabled divorce rate calculations for all 50 states. Most current demographic research relies heavily on ACS data.

The National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR) at Bowling Green State University synthesizes data from both sources and produces the most widely cited refined divorce rate analyses (the "Family Profiles" series referenced throughout this post).

The bottom line: divorce statistics are reasonably reliable for identifying trends and broad patterns, but exact figures should always be treated as estimates rather than precise counts. Any single statistic you encounter — especially one that sounds shocking — deserves scrutiny about its source, sample, and date.

What These Statistics Mean for Your Marriage

Numbers describe populations. They don't determine individual outcomes.

If you're college-educated, married after age 25, and in your first marriage, your statistical divorce risk is far below the headline "50%" figure — probably closer to 25-30%. If you're in a second marriage and skipped the hard internal work between relationships, the numbers are less encouraging.

But statistics are about risk factors, not destiny. Every marriage exists at the intersection of two people's willingness to grow. The couples I see who beat the odds aren't the ones who started with perfect compatibility or easy circumstances. They're the ones who decided that their own growth mattered more than their comfort — who were willing to face the hard truths about themselves rather than endlessly cataloging their partner's failures.

The most important statistic isn't in any database. It's whether you're willing to do the work.

Frequently Asked Questions About Divorce Statistics

What is the current divorce rate in the United States? The crude divorce rate in 2023 was 2.4 per 1,000 population, and the refined rate was 14.4 per 1,000 married women — both near 50-year lows. The overall lifetime probability of a first marriage ending in divorce is approximately 40-45%.

What percentage of second marriages end in divorce? Commonly cited figures range from 60-67%, but recent BLS data (2024) found only 39.1% of second marriages had ended in divorce by age 55. The true figure likely falls somewhere in between, and the commonly cited higher numbers may be outdated.

Do 50% of marriages really end in divorce? No. This figure originated as a projection from the late 1970s that never materialized. Current estimates for first marriages are closer to 40-45%, and significantly lower for college-educated couples who marry after age 25.

Who files for divorce more — husbands or wives? Women initiate approximately 69-70% of divorces, according to multiple studies spanning eight decades. Michael Rosenfeld's Stanford research found this gender gap is specific to marriage — in non-marital relationships, breakup initiation rates are roughly equal between men and women.

Does couples therapy work? Research shows that over 75% of couples report improvement after therapy, and Emotionally Focused Therapy shows 70-75% recovery rates for distressed couples. Timing is critical — couples who seek help earlier see significantly better outcomes than those who wait until the relationship is in crisis.

What is gray divorce? Gray divorce refers to divorce among adults aged 50 and older. This rate doubled between 1990 and 2010 and now accounts for roughly 36% of all US divorces. It's largely a Baby Boomer phenomenon and carries particularly severe financial consequences, especially for women.

Does living together before marriage increase divorce risk? Living together before getting engaged is associated with a 48% higher likelihood of divorce compared to waiting until engagement or marriage. However, moving in together after engagement shows no increased risk. The key factor appears to be whether cohabitation was a deliberate decision or something couples drifted into.

What age is best to get married to avoid divorce? Research suggests the late twenties to early thirties is the optimal range. Before age 32, each additional year reduces divorce odds by about 11%. After 32, odds increase slightly — about 5% per year.

James Christensen is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist specializing in couples therapy at Roseville Couples Counseling in Placer County, California.

Sources cited in this article:

• Amato, P. R. (2010). Research on Divorce: Continuing Trends and New Developments. Journal of Marriage and Family, 72(3).

• Bankey, A. (2025). First Divorce Rate by Age and Race/Ethnicity. NCFMR Family Profile FP-25-06.

• Bianchi, S. M., Robinson, J. P., & Milkie, M. A. (2006). Changing Rhythms of American Family Life. Russell Sage Foundation.

• Brinig, M. F., & Allen, D. W. (2000). "These Boots Are Made for Walking": Why Most Divorce Filers Are Women. American Law and Economics Review, 2(1).

• Brown, S. L., & Lin, I-F. (2012). The Gray Divorce Revolution. The Journals of Gerontology Series B, 67(6).

• Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2024). Marriage and divorce: patterns by gender, race, and educational attainment. Monthly Labor Review, September 2024.

• CDC/NCHS. National Vital Statistics System, Marriages and Divorces data.

• Cohen, P. N. (2019). The Coming Divorce Decline. Socius, 5.

• Feldhahn, S. (2014). The Good News About Marriage. Multnomah Books.

• Frisco, M. L., & Williams, K. (2003). Perceived Housework Equity, Marital Happiness, and Divorce in Dual-Earner Households. Journal of Family Issues, 24(1).

• Goode, W. J. (1956). After Divorce. Free Press.

• Loo, J. (2024). Divorce: More than a Century of Change, 1900-2022. NCFMR Family Profile FP-24-11.

• NCFMR. (2024). Marriage Duration at Time of Gray Divorce. Family Profile FP-24-12.

• NCFMR. (2025). Refined Divorce Rate in the U.S.: Geographic Variation, 2024. Family Profile FP-25-31.

• Pew Research Center. (2025). 8 Facts About Divorce in the United States.

• Rosenfeld, M. J. (2017). Who Wants the Breakup? Gender and Breakup in Heterosexual Couples. In Social Networks and the Life Course. Springer.

• Stanley, S. M., & Rhoades, G. K. (2023). Cohabitation, Engagement, and Divorce. Institute for Family Studies.

• U.S. Census Bureau. (2024). How Does Your State Compare With National Marriage and Divorce Trends?

• U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2017). Retirement Security: Women Still Face Challenges.

• Wolfinger, N. H. (2015). Want to Avoid Divorce? Wait to Get Married, But Not Too Long. Institute for Family Studies.

Do You Need a Therapist for Codependency?

You've probably heard the term "codependent" thrown around. Maybe someone called you that. Maybe you've started wondering if it applies to you.

The word gets used loosely—sometimes as an insult, sometimes as a catch-all for anyone who cares a lot about their partner. But actual codependency is a real pattern that causes real suffering. And yes, therapy can help. But let's start with what we're actually talking about.

What Codependency Actually Means

Codependency isn't just being attentive to your partner or wanting them to be happy. It's when your sense of okayness depends on managing someone else's emotions, behaviors, or problems.

Here's how it tends to show up:

You lose yourself in relationships. You're not sure what you want, what you like, or who you are outside of taking care of someone else. When your partner is upset, you're upset. When they're happy, you can finally relax. Your emotional state is a mirror of theirs.

You feel responsible for other people's feelings. If your partner is in a bad mood, you assume it's your job to fix it—or your fault it happened. You walk on eggshells. You edit yourself constantly to avoid triggering a reaction.

You can't tolerate their discomfort. When your partner is struggling, anxious, or unhappy, you feel compelled to do something about it. Sitting with their pain without trying to fix it feels impossible.

You say yes when you mean no. You abandon your own needs to keep the peace. You don't speak up when something bothers you. You've gotten so good at accommodating that you've lost track of what you actually want.

You stay in situations that aren't good for you. You make excuses for bad behavior. You tell yourself things will change. You feel unable to leave even when you know you should.

Where Codependency Comes From

Most codependent patterns start in childhood. If you grew up with a parent who was emotionally unstable, addicted, depressed, or unpredictable, you probably learned to monitor their moods carefully. Your safety depended on it.

You became skilled at reading people. You learned to anticipate problems before they happened. You discovered that taking care of others was a way to feel valuable—maybe the only way you felt valuable.

These were smart adaptations. They helped you survive. But what works in a chaotic childhood home doesn't work in an adult relationship. The hypervigilance that kept you safe as a kid now keeps you exhausted and resentful as an adult.

The Real Problem With Codependency

The word "codependency" makes it sound like the problem is caring too much. That's not quite right.

The real problem is that you haven't developed a solid sense of yourself. You don't feel okay on your own, so you try to create okayness by controlling your environment—especially the people in it.

This is exhausting for you and suffocating for your partner. Relationships need breathing room. They need two people who can stand on their own feet, tolerate discomfort, and stay connected without fusing together.

When you're codependent, you're not really connecting with your partner. You're using them to regulate your own anxiety. That's not intimacy—it's dependency.

Signs You Might Benefit From Therapy

Not everyone who relates to the word "codependent" needs a therapist. Some people read a book, recognize themselves, and start making changes on their own.

But therapy is worth considering if:

Your patterns are affecting your relationship. Your partner feels smothered, controlled, or like they can't be honest with you. You keep having the same fights. You've tried to change but keep falling back into old habits.

You've been in a series of unhealthy relationships. You keep choosing partners who are unavailable, addicted, or emotionally volatile. You're starting to see a pattern.

You don't know who you are outside of caretaking. You've spent so long focusing on others that you've lost connection with your own wants, needs, and identity.

You're dealing with anxiety or depression. Codependency often comes with chronic anxiety (from hypervigilance) or depression (from self-abandonment). These are worth addressing.

You want to but can't seem to set boundaries. You know what you should do, but you can't make yourself do it. Something deeper is holding you back.

What Therapy for Codependency Looks Like

I don't spend a lot of time analyzing your childhood, though we might talk about it. The focus is on who you are now and who you want to become.

The work centers on developing what I call a quiet mind and calm heart—the ability to manage your own anxiety without needing your partner to soothe you or needing to manage their emotions.

This means learning to:

Tolerate discomfort. Your partner can be upset without you falling apart or rushing to fix it. You can sit with tension instead of immediately trying to resolve it.

Hold onto yourself. You can stay connected to what you think, feel, and want—even when your partner disagrees or disapproves. You stop abandoning yourself to keep the peace.

Self-soothe. When anxiety spikes, you have ways to calm yourself down that don't involve controlling someone else.

Set boundaries. You can say no. You can disappoint people. You can let them have their reaction without making it your problem to solve.

This is what therapists call differentiation—becoming solid enough in yourself that you can be truly close to another person without losing yourself in them.

Individual or Couples Therapy?

Both can work. It depends on your situation.

Individual therapy makes sense if you're not currently in a relationship, if your partner isn't willing to participate, or if you want dedicated space to focus on your own patterns.

Couples therapy makes sense if your codependent patterns are playing out in your current relationship and your partner is willing to work on things together. Often both people have complementary patterns—one overfunctions, one underfunctions—and the system needs to shift, not just one person.

Sometimes people start in couples therapy and realize they need some individual sessions too. That's fine. We figure out what works.

You Can Change This

Codependency can feel like your personality. It's not. It's a set of learned patterns, and learned patterns can be unlearned.

The people I work with often say something like, "I've always been this way." And that might be true. But "always" doesn't mean "forever."

You can learn to feel okay without managing everyone around you. You can have close relationships without losing yourself. You can care about people without making their emotions your responsibility.

It takes work. But it's possible.

If you're ready to start, schedule a free first session. We'll talk about what's going on and whether therapy makes sense for your situation.

James M. Christensen, LMFT — Couples therapy in Roseville, CA, and throughout California via telehealth.

Building Bridges in Your Brain

When I was 15, my dad took my mom, my sister, and me out to his favorite fancy restaurant.

My dad has a ton of social anxiety, and my role in the family was to be the class clown so that we could all relax a little bit. So we're sitting there in this fancy restaurant, and I decided to take my napkin off of my lap and tuck it into my shirt collar.

When my dad saw it, he started to get all upset. He was making all these gestures, trying to get me to take my napkin out without saying anything. I didn't understand what he was doing, and I froze. He panicked. It was all super awkward and uncomfortable.

Every time I feel vulnerable, embarrassed, and anxious—like right now—it reminds me of how I felt sitting in that fancy restaurant.

So I want you to picture two different parts of my brain. The first part is the part that was developing around the time I was sitting in that fancy restaurant. The second part is the part that has developed since then—a part that's more capable of staying grounded, being calm and compassionate, and dealing more effectively with difficult people.

When I feel anxious and panicky like I do right now, it's because that less mature, less developed part of my brain is taking over. It's lost touch with the more grown-up and grounded part of my brain—the part that understands that no matter how badly I embarrass myself in front of all of you, everything's going to be okay. The part that understands I don't have to deal with an angry father anymore.

I can't make the less mature part of my brain go away. It's going to be there forever. But what I can do is help it connect more fully with the more grown-up and grounded part of my brain.

One way to make these connections is to imagine going back into that restaurant as an adult. I picture that scene—the restaurant, the table. I'm sitting here. My sister's right there. My mom is over there, and my dad's over there, panicking. I freeze the scene so nobody's moving. Then I walk in the door. Not my 15-year-old self, but my 49-year-old self walks in, and I bring with me all of my life experience, all the therapy I've done, and everything I understand about why that situation was so hard on me.

I take my dad aside and say, "I want you to pay attention to the impact you're having on your son right now. You're focusing on the impact he has on you because you're so anxious, but you should be focusing on the impact you're having on him."

Then I take my younger self aside and say, "None of this is your fault. You're just trying to manage your dad's anxiety, like everyone else in your family. It's not your fault that he doesn't know how to calm himself down."

I encourage him, once time gets started again, to pay attention to how dad's anxiety affects him and everyone else in the family.

Then I promise him that I will always be available to protect him, stand up for him, and comfort him when he faces difficult challenges.

The reason that promise is true is that what I'm really talking about is two parts of my brain. One part that was developing when I was 15 years old. Another part that has developed since then—a part much more capable of staying calm, staying grounded, and standing up to someone like my dad.

Since that part of my brain really does exist, the promise I made is actually true.

What needs to happen is for the younger, less evolved part of my brain to maintain contact with the stronger, more evolved part. And I can make that happen by imagining these time-traveling scenarios.

Try It Yourself

So who's ready to build some brain connections?

If you want to, lean back in your chair, close your eyes, and take a deep breath.

Choose some difficult event from your childhood. Doesn't really matter which one.

See if you can picture that event in your mind. Imagine moving the camera around the space where it happened. Look at it from three or four different angles.

See if you can feel what your younger self felt in that moment.

Now imagine that the scene freezes and your adult self walks in.

Take some time to let your younger self try to understand what is happening. See if you can earn their trust and acceptance.

Now, what can you do to offer safety and comfort to your younger self?

Is there somewhere you can go where you won't feel so threatened?

Can you offer some kind words or a hug?

Take a moment to let the scene play out.

Now, before you leave, tell your younger self that you are always available to help.

This is in fact true because the part of your brain that can offer comfort and compassion and protection is actually there all the time. What you're doing right now is building the bridge between that part of your brain and the younger, less capable part.

Take one more deep breath. Wiggle your fingers and your toes. Open your eyes. Come back into the room.

This is one way to help your brain forge new connections between the less evolved and more evolved parts of you. As a general rule, a more connected brain is a healthier brain. You will be more able to maintain a good frame of mind consistently throughout pleasant moments and difficult moments in your life.

This process usually takes a long time, and the more you lean into the energy of kindness and acceptance towards the less evolved parts of your brain, the less influence those parts will have over the way you manage yourself in general.

Like a small child who is distressed, the one thing that can make these less evolved parts of your brain feel better is a sense that there is a calm, kind, and accepting adult who is here to protect them.

When you offer that energy to the parts of your brain that evolved when you were small and helpless, you help them let go of their need to try to protect you by steering your actions in your daily life.

A Comparison of David Schnarch's books Passionate Marriage and Intimacy & Desire

Passionate Marriage (1997) and Intimacy & Desire (2009) are David Schnarch's two most popular works. This article breaks down what each book offers and how they complement each other.

Passionate Marriage introduces differentiation as a concept, establishes why marriage is a "people-growing machine," and offers a comprehensive framework for understanding intimacy, conflict, and personal growth within committed relationships. If you're new to Schnarch's work, start here.

Intimacy & Desire takes everything from Passionate Marriage and applies it specifically to sexual desire problems—the most common presenting issue couples bring to therapy. It goes deeper on the mechanics of desire, introduces the High Desire Partner/Low Desire Partner framework, and offers more explicit guidance on sexual techniques and practices.

Think of it this way: Passionate Marriage teaches you the philosophy of differentiation-based relationship work. Intimacy & Desire shows you exactly how that philosophy plays out in the bedroom.

Passionate Marriage

Core Concepts

Differentiation gets its most thorough treatment here. Schnarch defines it as the ability to maintain a clear sense of self while remaining emotionally close to others—"standing on your own two feet" even in the midst of intense relationship dynamics. This isn't emotional distance or selfishness; it's the capacity to balance autonomy and connection simultaneously.

The reflected sense of self versus the solid sense of self emerges as a central tension. Most of us derive our identity from how others respond to us (reflected sense). Schnarch argues that mature intimacy requires developing an internal compass that doesn't depend on constant partner validation.

"Holding onto yourself" becomes the book's mantra—maintaining composure, integrity, and self-regulation when marital conflict heats up. This isn't about winning arguments; it's about not losing yourself in the process of loving someone.

Signature Techniques

Passionate Marriage introduces several practices that have become hallmarks of Crucible Therapy:

Hugging Till Relaxed teaches couples to stand on their own feet, hold each other, and stay until both bodies calm down. It sounds simple, but it reveals everything about how each partner handles closeness, anxiety, and self-soothing.

Eyes-Open Orgasm challenges couples to maintain eye contact during peak sexual moments. The discomfort this creates is precisely the point—it forces partners to be fully present and vulnerable rather than retreating into private fantasy or disconnection.

Broader Scope

Passionate Marriage covers the full landscape of marriage: intimacy as risk, the difference between comfort and growth, the predictable patterns that develop when two anxious people try to calm themselves through each other. The final chapter, "Sex, Love, and Death," expands the frame to life's ultimate questions—how loving deeply prepares us for loss and mortality.

Intimacy & Desire is a Deep Dive on Sexual Desire

The Central Framework

The High Desire Partner (HDP) and Low Desire Partner (LDP) dynamic gets systematic treatment here. Schnarch's key insight: in every couple, one partner has relatively higher desire and one has relatively lower desire. These are positional roles, not permanent personality traits. And crucially, the low desire partner always controls when and if sex happens.

This framework removes the pathology from desire differences. It's not that something is "wrong" with the LDP or that the HDP is oversexed. It's a universal dynamic that every couple navigates.

Going Deeper on Why Desire Fades

Intimacy & Desire examines the specific mechanisms that kill desire:

Borrowed functioning—when partners rely on each other to regulate their emotional well-being rather than developing internal stability.

Mind-mapping—partners constantly reading and anticipating each other's reactions, which can become mind-games and power plays.

Normal marital sadism—the uncomfortable truth that even loving couples inflict small cruelties on each other, often around sex. The partner who withholds, the cutting remarks, the passive-aggressive "forgetting."

The Devil's Pact—unspoken transactional agreements couples make early on that later poison desire (trading security for sex, for instance).

The Four Points of Balance

While hinted at in Passionate Marriage, the Four Points of Balance get their fullest expression in Intimacy & Desire:

1. Solid Flexible Self – knowing who you are and what you value, especially under pressure

2. Quiet Mind–Calm Heart – the ability to soothe your own anxiety rather than depending on others

3. Grounded Responding – staying calm and not overreacting when your partner is upset

4. Meaningful Endurance – tolerating discomfort for the sake of growth rather than seeking immediate relief

Schnarch argues that our capacity for sexual desire is directly limited by our development in these four areas. Weak Four Points = limited desire capacity.

More Explicit Sexual Guidance

Intimacy & Desire goes places Passionate Marriage only gestured toward:

Tender Loving Sex gets a full chapter—not as a technique but as a quality of engagement, a combination of vulnerability and full presence that can be intensely erotic.

Oral sex receives detailed attention in Chapter 14 and Appendix B, with practical guidance on overcoming discomfort, managing gag reflexes, dealing with taste and smell concerns, and using these intimate acts to deepen connection rather than just achieve sensation.

Ticklishness and noxious touch might seem like minor issues, but Schnarch devotes a full chapter to them, recognizing that these physical sensitivities often reflect deeper anxieties about intimacy and control.

Shared Themes Across Both Books

Despite their different emphases, both books hammer home the same core principles:

Marriage is a crucible for growth. Conflicts and desire problems aren't signs of failure—they're the mechanism by which committed relationships push us to develop. As Schnarch puts it, marriage is a "people-growing machine."

Personal development is the path to better relationships. Both books insist that working on yourself is the most effective way to improve your marriage. You can't make your partner change, but you can raise your own level of differentiation, which shifts the entire system.

Intimacy requires risk. Neither book coddles the reader. Real intimacy means being known—warts and all—which requires courage. The safety we often seek in relationships can become the very thing that kills passion.

Two-choice dilemmas are inevitable. Both books name the no-win situations that arise in every marriage: speak up and risk conflict, or stay silent and betray yourself. These dilemmas are the "grindstones of differentiation"—painful but necessary.

Critical mass moments catalyze change. Both books describe how couples often stay stuck until things become unbearable. The crisis point—when the pain of staying the same exceeds the fear of change—is when real transformation happens.

Which Should You Read?

Read Passionate Marriage if:

• You're new to differentiation-based approaches

• You want to understand the "why" behind Schnarch's work

• Your relationship struggles extend beyond desire (intimacy fears, conflict patterns, feeling emotionally fused)

• You're a therapist wanting to understand Crucible Therapy's theoretical foundations

Read Intimacy & Desire if:

• Desire discrepancy is your specific issue

• You've already read Passionate Marriage and want to go deeper

• You need practical, specific guidance on rebuilding sexual connection

• You're comfortable with explicit sexual content and want concrete techniques

How They Fit Together

The two books function as a natural sequence. Passionate Marriage establishes the architecture—what differentiation means, why marriage challenges us, how intimacy and growth interweave. Intimacy & Desire then applies that architecture to the specific territory of sexual desire, adding practical tools and explicit guidance that the first book only sketched.

If you read Intimacy & Desire without Passionate Marriage, you'll understand the techniques but may miss the deeper reasons they work. If you read Passionate Marriage without Intimacy & Desire, you'll grasp the philosophy but may struggle to apply it concretely when desire problems surface.

Together, they form a comprehensive manual for couples who want more than just problem-solving—who want their relationship to be a vehicle for becoming more fully themselves.

A Note on Schnarch's Other Works

Schnarch wrote other books as well, including Constructing the Sexual Crucible (a clinical text for therapists) and Brain Talk (applying neuroscience to relationship dynamics). But Passionate Marriage and Intimacy & Desire remain his two essential texts for couples and clinicians alike.

Both books reward multiple readings. The concepts sink deeper each time, and you'll notice different passages depending on where you are in your own growth process. That's appropriate—differentiation isn't something you achieve once. It's a lifelong practice of holding onto yourself while staying connected to those you love.

James Christensen is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist specializing in Crucible Therapy at Roseville Couples Counseling. He works with couples throughout Placer County, including Roseville and Rocklin.

The Paradox of Self-Acceptance

My therapist says that respect is accepting a person exactly the way they are. If that is true, then self-respect means accepting myself exactly the way I am.

When I consider that thought, a little red warning flag pops up in my mind and says, "But if you do that, James, then you'll never change and become the person you want to be."

It's like I have this deeply instinctive suspicion of self-acceptance. I imagine this future version of myself, fat, lazy, lying on a couch in my underwear, all because I accepted myself just the way I am.

In reality, I think the opposite is true. I think self-acceptance actually leads to growth, and self-judgment leads to stagnation.

The Defensive Posture

When I perceive that someone is judging me, I start to feel defensive. When I judge myself, I also feel defensive. And when I feel defensive, my brain locks down and doesn't invest in growth.

A defensive posture is one of protection and caution. It's not a time when the brain is likely to take a chance, try something new, let go of old patterns and old habits.

Most of us maintain a self-judgmental attitude that constantly triggers this defensive posture, making it hard for our brains to change and adapt.

Like any normal person, I also face judgment from my wife, my kids, and a few other people. But in the end, it's my own self-judgment that is most pervasive and perhaps most harmful.

But if that's the case, how can I ever change it? If my own self-judgment is making it hard for my brain to change, how could I ever become less judgmental?

Embracing the Inner Critic

One way to work with this is to imagine that my inner critic is a separate person that lives inside me. This isn't really true, of course, but it's a useful way to think of the different patterns that exist in my brain.

When I hear my inner critic speak up, I can pause, take a moment, then imagine myself reaching out in love and compassion to that inner critic.

This feels a little bit different from just trying to love myself, which is a hard thing to do. Instead, I imagine that this inner critic is someone who really needs a hug, and I visualize myself offering a warm hug to this grumpy part of me.

In the end, this actually is an act of self-compassion. It just feels more approachable in the moment than if I just said, "I should love myself."

So I think of this inner critic, and I turn to him, and I accept him just the way he is, even though he's criticizing me. I might even thank him for his assistance in the past. He helped me get motivated to do some hard things when I was young. I didn't have any better way to motivate myself back then.

The thing is, compassion always trumps criticism, and when my inner critic senses my compassion, he realizes his services are no longer needed, and he starts to relax.

This Morning

When I woke up this morning, I felt a heavy burden of all the things I need to do. I also felt a deep sense of not being good enough. I know that feeling so well. It's been with me my whole life.

But as I lay in bed, I thought, what if that feeling isn't really accurate? What if I'm actually starting out today with my head already above water? What if I'm already good enough and everything I accomplish today is just icing on the cake?

In that moment, something shifted inside my brain. In an instant, I perceived myself in a warm light as someone who has already done well and will probably continue to do well, but doesn't really have to. I perceived myself for a moment as someone who doesn't have to earn his worthiness.

On a normal morning, I would roll out of bed and try to make myself do something useful instead of seeking entertainment of some kind. This morning, everything was different. I wasn't really tempted to check the news or even read my emails. I felt drawn to do the most valuable thing I could with my time, and that's what I did.

It wasn't even that hard because I wasn't putting any energy into defending the idea that I was good enough, for today at least. I felt like that debt had been paid.

How to Stop Arguing: 10 Communication Tips That Actually Work

If you're searching for ways to stop arguing with your partner, you've probably already tried a few things that didn't work. Maybe you've tried talking more. Maybe you've tried talking less. Maybe you've tried explaining your position more clearly, only to find that clarity didn't help at all.

The truth is, most relationship communication problems aren't really about communication. They're about something deeper. But there are communication skills that can help—if you understand what they're actually for.

Here are my top 10 tips, starting from the bottom.

10. Allow Disagreement

Most arguments boil down to a simple problem: I can't allow my partner to disagree with me, and I can't allow my partner to disapprove of me.

This happens because of ego fragility. If I'm fragile, it's not okay with me if she disapproves of me. If I'm fragile, it's not okay with me if she disagrees with me. So I put all this effort into trying to control her, trying to get her agreement and approval.

The better way to handle things is to allow her to disagree and disapprove—and then figure out what kind of person I want to be and what I'm going to do about that. Because I care about her, I'm going to be interested in her feedback. But I'm never going to make her the person who gets to decide whether I'm good enough.

This isn't the default way we're programmed. The default is to seek approval and agreement from someone else, usually our partner. If I want to fix this, I have to do the work of looking in the mirror at the end of the day and asking: What kind of person do I want to be? Am I going to be the one who decides whether I'm good enough or not?

9. Take Out the "Screw You"

If I'm going to say something to my wife, I first need to pause, take a deep breath, calm down, and ask myself: is there a "screw you" embedded in this message?

I could say, "I want you to do this thing" or "I don't want you to do this thing." But if I'm angry, it comes out as "I want you to do this thing... and screw you, by the way." That's how I feel in the moment.

If I deliver that message, she's going to get the "screw you" part, and whatever I was really trying to say won't make much difference. If I want to have a positive impact, I need to take out the "screw you," calm myself down, and deliver just the message I really wanted to deliver.

This works in reverse too. If my wife is talking to me and she's angry and has embedded a "screw you" in her message, I can do the same work—extracting the "screw you," figuring out the central point, and taking that in without paying too much attention to the hostility. Obviously her work is to take it out first, but if she doesn't, I can do it for her.

8. Don't Talk About Your Feelings

Feelings change all the time. They change with the moon, the weather, the sunrise. They come and go. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad. And my feelings are not my partner's responsibility.

If I'm talking to my partner about my feelings, it's tempting to imagine that she needs to fix what I feel, or that she's responsible for what I feel. That's just not true. As an adult, I'm always responsible for taking care of my own feelings.

It's much wiser to talk to my partner about her behavior. If I want her to change something, I should do the work of figuring out what I would like her to do differently—and then talk to her about that instead of talking about how I feel.

7. Confront Yourself First

Before I approach my wife to talk about our relationship, I ask myself a question: Does this come from the best in me?

There's a really good part of me—a part that cares about my wife, a part that really wants a good marriage. There's also a part of me that kind of likes to make people feel bad, do mean things, be a little selfish. If I bring my worst part to my wife, it's going to inspire her to bring her worst self. Then we spiral into a bad pattern.

Before I initiate a relationship conversation, I calm myself down, think through what I want to say, and ask: Does this come from the best in me?

If it doesn't, I pause. I calm down. I journal, talk to somebody, get some advice. I wait until I can bring the best of me to my wife.

This includes when I have something difficult to say. If I need to confront my wife about something, that's fine—as long as I confront myself first. Am I trying to hurt her feelings? Am I trying to control her? Am I trying to get her to make me feel better? Am I putting a responsibility on her that should really be mine? Am I asking her to do something I'm not willing to do? Am I pretending I'm better than her?

All these questions help me confront myself first. I'm not saying don't confront your partner. I'm saying confront yourself first, then decide whether you still need to confront your partner.

6. Turn Your Complaints into Requests

A complaint is about the past. It's full of negative energy. It's whiny and it doesn't help you get what you want.

A request is about the future. It's full of positive energy and focused on what you want your partner to do.

We usually start by complaining: "This is what you always do. You never do this. You're not good enough." That will never get me what I want in my relationship. What might help is if I do the work to ask: What could my partner do differently in the future that might make things better?

Then I reach into myself and ask: Can I express this request in a friendly way? Can I get to a place where I actually care about my partner, where I want us to be happy together? I bring the best of me to my partner and then make the request: "I would like you to..." or "I want you to..." or "I would prefer that you..."

That's how you turn a complaint into a request.

5. Share Your Perception

Your perception is how you see the world—especially how you see your partner. This is part of what's called revealing your mind to your partner. You have a certain idea in your head about who your partner is, how they behave, how they treat you, even how they feel about you. Share that.

Your perception might be: "I noticed that your friends are always a higher priority than I am." Or: "The last few times we talked, it ended with you yelling at me." Or: "The last few times we talked, it ended with you storming out."

These are observations. I'm saying, "This is how I see you." I'm not trying to pound you down or pretend I'm better than you. I'm not trying to convince you that my perception is right and yours is wrong. I'm just saying this is my perception. I realize it's probably different than your perception of yourself, but this really is how I see you.

4. Share Your Preference

Preference is powerful because nobody else gets to define what I want. My preference is always mine to define.

A trap I see couples fall into: instead of saying "I want you to do this," they say "You should do this" or "If you were a good partner, you'd do this" or "God wants you to do this" or "If you were normal, you'd do this."

They're reaching outside themselves and saying some external authority is speaking for them. The problem is that if I don't share my preference, everything's up for debate. If I tell you what I want, that's not up for debate—I get to determine what I want. As soon as I frame it as something other than my preference, you get a say in whether I want it or not.

All I have to say is: "I prefer that you not yell at me." That's the end of the story. It's not about whether yelling is right or wrong. It's just my preference.

The other thing about stating a preference is that I'm acknowledging you're the one who gets to choose. It's my preference and it's your choice. You get to choose how you act, and I get to choose how I prefer you act. Learning to clearly state your preference is one of the most powerful things you can do to improve communication in your relationship.

3. Don't Defend Yourself

When you defend yourself to your partner, you're making it seem like your partner is the one who determines whether you're good enough. Whether your ideas are valid. Whether your preferences are valid. None of that is true. But every time you defend yourself, you make it seem like it is.

Here's what you do instead. You say, "I prefer that you do things this way." Your partner says, "I don't want to do that." You don't defend yourself. Because if you defend yourself, you make it seem like your partner gets to decide whether your preference is good enough.

If I express what I see and what I want, and my partner disagrees, now we're clear on where we stand. That's the purpose of communication: to reveal my mind clearly and kindly. This is what I think. This is what I want. And I let my partner do the same.

The solution to relationship problems isn't really a communication problem—it's a problem of developing the capacity for caring about each other. If I want a successful relationship, I have to care a lot about my wife and she has to care a lot about me. That's different than communication.

Don't try to solve a behavior problem with communication. It doesn't work.

2. Use Fewer Words

The most powerful way to express any idea is to express it in the fewest words possible. If I say something in 40 words when it could have been said in four, I just diluted my message by ten times.

The most powerful way for me to communicate with my partner is to think ahead of time about what I want to say, figure out how to say it, say it—and then be quiet.

If I say what I want and then start explaining it, justifying it, saying it again, repeating it, I make the message less powerful. I make it seem like I don't really know what I want.

There's a part of my brain that thinks if I just say it one more time in a slightly different way, my partner is going to suddenly agree with me. That's not true. If your partner disagrees, they're probably going to disagree for a while. Saying the same thing with slightly higher emotionality is definitely not going to change their mind.

Say the one thing you need to say. Say it once. Then be quiet. Allow your partner to disagree. When you say fewer words, the words you say are more powerful.

1. Slow Down

Everything I just talked about is only possible if I slow myself down enough to think before I talk.

If I respond immediately to what my wife just said, I don't give my brain enough time to catch up with my mouth. So the single most important key to relationship communication—the one that matters more than everything else—is: slow down enough to do the other things.

Slow down enough to think. Slow down enough to confront yourself. Slow down enough to share your preference and your perception. Take a breath. Take a break. Get a glass of water. Do some jumping jacks. Do anything other than immediately respond to what your partner just said.

If you jump in and respond immediately, I guarantee you are not saying the most effective thing you could have said. I don't know anyone who can bring their best self to relationship conflict running at full speed. The only way to have better relationship communication is to slow yourself down so you can do all these things and bring your best self to your relationship.

When Communication Isn't the Problem

Here's what I want you to take away from this. Most of these tips aren't really about communication at all. They're about personal growth. They're about developing the ability to hold onto yourself while being close to another person. They're about learning to care about your partner more than you do right now.

If you're stuck in patterns of arguing and nothing seems to help, couples therapy might be the next step. The kind of work I do isn't primarily about teaching communication skills—it's about helping each person develop the capacity to be in a real relationship. Communication gets better as a side effect.

If you're in the Sacramento area—Roseville, Rocklin, or anywhere in Placer County—I offer a free first session so you can see if this approach is right for you. I also work with couples worldwide via Zoom.

The goal isn't to stop arguing. The goal is to become the kind of person who can be truly close to another human being. When that happens, the arguments take care of themselves.

How to rebuild your Relationship after Infidelity

For the faithful partner:

1. Accept reality

2. Focus on the present

3. Don't be mean

4. Don't control

5. Don't ask too many questions

6. Try to see your partner as an equal

⠀1. Accept Reality

The first step to rebuilding trust is to accept what has happened and how you feel about it. What do you feel in your body when you think about what has happened? Could you imagine feeling that feeling for half an hour? Give yourself permission to feel that feeling of intense discomfort, usually in your chest or your stomach, occasionally for the rest of your life. Try saying this out loud: I give myself permission to feel this way, off and on, for the rest of my life. The distress you feel after you discover infidelity is a warning signal that is left over from childhood. When you were very young, your brain was hyper-focused on making sure an adult was there to take care of you because you needed that for survival. When your caretaker was mean or neglectful, you felt the distress that you're feeling right now. The person who's supposed to love you and care for you is not doing it properly. When you were young, the single most important thing was to make sure that someone was there to take care of you. Your brain was organized around the reality that you were going to die if someone wasn't there for you. When you discover infidelity, that warning system gets activated. You feel like your partner's behavior directly threatens your ability to survive. The distress you feel comes from a part of your brain that was designed to protect you when you were extremely young. The best way to deal with this distress is to welcome it, embrace it, and comfort it the way you would comfort a very small child with love, tenderness, and complete acceptance. If you try to avoid the pain or push it away, it will only get more intense until you finally open your arms and welcome it into your life. This pain and distress will not last forever. It mostly needs to be welcomed and integrated into your soul. If you are willing to really feel the things you need to feel, you will eventually move through the pain and distress and get to a place of okayness and peace.

2. Focus on the Present

Your brain is going to want to rehearse and rehash everything that you thought was real but wasn't real. There will be a temptation to ask a million questions of your partner, to want to know exactly what happened and when and why and how. This is a normal part of recovering from infidelity, but it doesn't really solve anything. When your brain starts rehashing the past, it is actually trying to deal with the present in an ineffective way. When you focus your attention on the past, you are focusing on something that cannot change. Try to think about what will have to change to keep your partner from cheating on you in the future. Your partner may say that they will never cheat again. You will need to see this on a behavioral level before you will be able to trust it. Infidelity requires two things: a lack of caring and a willingness to deceive. This is why Crucible Therapy focuses on developing the capacity to care rather than on communication skills. If your partner cared about you a lot more than they did, there would have been no infidelity. If your partner had not been willing to deceive you, there would have been no infidelity. When your brain starts rehashing the past, it is probably responding to things that are still present in your relationship. You are subconsciously aware of your partner's lack of caring and willingness to deceive. These things aren't going to change overnight. It takes a lot of effort to learn how to care more and to be less deceptive. The hardest part of your work is learning that you face similar challenges to your partner, Your own lack of caring and willingness to deceive cause problems in the relationship, even though you weren't the one who cheated

3. Don't be Mean

Like other mammals, we get aggressive when we feel threatened. That is exactly what happens when you discover infidelity in your relationship. In the days and weeks after you find out about infidelity, you will be tempted to say that are designed to hurt your partner's feelings. If you care a lot about your partner, you will not allow yourself to do that. You may find that you actually don't care enough about your partner to hold yourself to a standard of kindness and respect. In most relationships, there are similar levels of caring on both sides. Your partner's lack of caring led to infidelity. Your lack of caring might lead you to be mean. I've seen this play out a hundred times in my couples therapy office.

4. Don't Control

You may be tempted to prevent future infidelity by trying to control your partner's behavior. This is a bad idea for two reasons:

• If your partner is going to cheat again, you want it to happen sooner rather than later. Your best bet is to give them complete freedom and watch what they do.

• People hate being controlled. If you allow yourself to be controlling, you will nudge your partner towards rebellious behavior, which could include more infidelity.

5. Don't ask too many questions

You might want to ask a lot of questions in an attempt to understand why your partner did what they did. These questions are important, but in the end, you're going to have to figure out most of the answers for yourself. Try answering these questions on your own:

• What did your partner get from the affair? Validation is a lot easier to come by in a new relationship than in an old relationship. Affairs offer a kind of new relationship energy that is not easily accessible in mature relationships.

• How did your partner justify the affair in their mind? This often involves some kind of victim positioning.

• How much did your partner care about you when they were having the affair? The answer, of course, is not very much. You will get better answers to these questions by figuring them out on your own than by trying to get the answers from your partner. You may find that you see your partner more clearly than they see themselves.

6. Try to see your partner as an equal.

It's tempting to see your partner as inferior since they are the one who cheated, not you. Realistically, there are probably things that you do on your side of the relationship that are just as damaging as what your partner has done. There is a cultural norm that cheating is the worst thing you can do in a relationship. But in reality, it's just one of the many ways that we hurt each other. If you want your relationship to succeed, it's just as important for you to change your behavior as it is for your partner to change their behavior.

For the Unfaithful Partner:

1. Earn your own self-respect

2. Focus on behavior, not words

3. Reveal your mind

4. Learn to care more

1. Earn your own self-respect

It's going to be a while before your partner approves of you. That gives you an opportunity to learn to rely on your own self-respect instead of needing your partner to approve of you. When you wake up in the morning, ask yourself, what kind of a partner do I want to be today? What matters most is how you handle yourself today, not how you handled yourself in the past. This is what therapists call self-confrontation—the ability to look at the difference between who you are and who you want to become. At the end of the day, look in the mirror and ask yourself how you did today in your relationship. Be honest, and be kind. It's normal to feel anger, resentment, disappointment, and even hatred towards your partner. What you are trying to do is to help your brain move towards caring and kindness as a way of living. That process starts by exercising caring and kindness towards yourself. If you feel overwhelming waves of shame, grief, and guilt, practice exercising kindness and caring towards those feelings. See if you can find where the feelings appear in your body, usually in your chest or in your stomach. Offer kindness and caring to your distress the way you would calm and comfort a very small child. This is this is how you develop a quiet mind and calm heart—the ability to manage your own anxiety without relying on your partner to soothe you. When you handle yourself well in your relationship, give yourself credit for what you have done. Be honest about how your partner is behaving. If they are being mean or controlling, acknowledge that fact without trying to change it. Try to imagine your circle of okayness. How much of your partner's behavior lands within that circle of okayness? If they continue to treat you the way they are treating you now, are you still going to be okay? It's normal to crave your partner's approval. When you don't get it, notice what you feel in your body and offer kindness to that feeling. Write down a summary of how you want to handle yourself in your relationship and then hold yourself to that standard. When you fall short, be kind to yourself without making excuses.

2. Focus on behavior, not words

You may be tempted to try to make things better by talking to your partner, but there's not much you can say that will actually help. Before you speak, think about what your intention is. Are you trying to gain your partner's approval? Are you trying to make your partner feel better? What emotional impact will your words have? Every time you promise to behave a different way, your partner has to face the fact that they can't trust you. If your partner is asking a lot of questions, do your best to answer them, but only once. If you've already given your best answer to a question, just say, "I've already given you the best answer I have to that question." Your partner would be upset at that. It's best to not engage in the fantasy that there's something you can say that's going to make them feel better. If your partner asks you why you did, you can say "I did it because it felt good," or "I did it because I wanted to get validation." You could also say something like, "I did it because I didn't care about you enough to not do it." But none of these answers are going to really satisfy your partner. Don't answer the why question more than once or twice. If your partner keeps asking, say, "You're asking me a question that doesn't have a satisfactory answer." Think about why your partner is asking these questions. They might be imagining that there's something you could say that would make them feel better. They might be asking you questions that are designed to make you feel ashamed and guilty.

3. Reveal your mind

Infidelity requires you to hide your thoughts and feelings from your partner. After the infidelity has stopped, that pattern of hiding and masking will still be in place. Learning to reveal your mind is one of the core skills developed in Crucible counseling. Ask yourself several times a day, "What am I thinking that I'm not revealing to my partner?" Does it make sense to reveal some of that to my partner? Think about the effect it will have. Will it make your partner feel bad? Will it be difficult for them to hear? What reasons do you have for not revealing it? What do you stand to lose? This is a delicate process because revealing thoughts and feelings can be used as a way to manipulate your partner. Think through your intentions and the impact you are going to have before you reveal things. Eventually, your partner will trust you more if you reveal things in your mind that are not pleasant to hear. If you're willing to be authentic with your partner, you will regain their trust more rapidly than if you carefully guard your thoughts and feelings.

4. Learn to care more

The foundation of a better relationship is to learn to care about each other more than you have in the past. This isn't about showing care, it's about actually changing the way your brain works so that you become more interested in your partner's well-being. It's not a yes or no question, it's an infinite spectrum. David Schnarch explores this idea in depth in Passionate Marriage—learning to care more is a lifelong process, not a switch you flip. Infidelity happens in relationships where two people don't care about each other enough to not cheat. Even if you're the only one who was unfaithful, your partner's level of caring is probably similar to your own. Their lack of caring would be revealed in things other than infidelity. When I talk to my clients about caring more about their partner, they usually say something like, "But I do care," and that is true. I'm talking about learning to care more than you already do. Caring is built on a foundation of personal strength and okayness. If you were standing on a snowy hillside and your partner asked for a hand, you would set your feet first to establish a firm foundation before you offer to support your partner. Caring works the same way. Your ability to care about your partner is limited by your ability to feel like you are going to be okay. This is what differentiation is all about—becoming strong enough in yourself that you can be truly close to another person.

If your relationship has been impacted by infidelity, couples therapy can help.

A therapist's Escape from Narcissism

About three years ago, I began to accept that I was unusually narcissistic. I say it that way on purpose because I don't like to use the term "you're a narcissist" or "you're not a narcissist." Realistically, it's more of a spectrum. Everyone is somewhere on that spectrum, and three years ago, I finally accepted that I was way towards the bad side of it.

I was more narcissistic than almost all of the people I knew. There were very few people I encountered daily who were more narcissistic than I was. As you can imagine, that was causing all sorts of problems in my life. It was tearing apart my marriage, it was causing problems in both my military and therapy careers, and it was making it impossible for me to have the kind of life I wanted.

This has three parts. The first part is how and why a person becomes narcissistic. What does narcissism protect against? What purpose does it serve? Why is it so useful? Why did my brain decide this was the way to handle the world? The second part is the three components of narcissism: fragility, superiority, and indifference. And the third part is my journey out of this narcissistic way of being towards a more kind and courageous way of being in the world.

Narcissism is a defense mechanism against the feeling of personal insufficiency. Personal insufficiency just means that I don't feel like I'm good enough. I don't feel like it's okay for me to be me. It's like there's something wrong with me.

Most people struggle with this feeling, but for me and for other narcissistic people, this feeling is so intense that my brain is willing to put in a ridiculous amount of effort to get away from it. Different people find different ways of defending against this sense of personal insufficiency, but the way my brain decided to deal with this was by becoming narcissistic and developing these three attributes.

As I've worked on becoming less narcissistic, the price of that is I have to feel this sense of insufficiency. I have to deal with the fact that, deep in my soul, there's a sense that it's just not okay for me to be me. There's no solid ground. So, if I have to face the fact that I'm contributing as much to the problems in my marriage as my wife is, theoretically it seems like that should be okay, but it doesn't feel okay. My brain is so used to putting things together as everything is her fault and none of it is my fault. It's really hard for my brain to handle the idea that we're both equally contributing to the problems. It's not just her fault; I have normal developmental challenges just like she does.

That's true at work, too. If I'm working with a client and they're not making progress, my brain wants to frame it as the client's fault, not mine. When I was in the military, if I got in some sort of ego battle with another officer, my brain wanted to put it together that it was all the other person's fault.

All of this comes down to the idea that my brain really struggles to think of myself as a person who makes mistakes. I really want to think of myself as a person who doesn't make mistakes. It sounds silly to even say that—everybody makes mistakes—but for most of my life, I have not been able to think of myself that way. The only way for me to be okay was to be perfect, to not make mistakes, to be superior to other people. That's how I developed this habit, this pattern of thinking, behaving, and treating people in a narcissistic way.

When you're dealing with a narcissistic person, I hope this can help you have some compassion for them. The reason they behave the way they do is they're trying to protect themselves from the feeling of not being good enough. For me, that feeling is so intense it feels like I'm falling into a pit of blackness. It feels like I have no ground to stand on, like I'm just falling backward and I'm going to be falling forever.

What I have learned to do in recent years is allow myself to feel that sense of not having ground to stand on, of not having a sense of being okay or good enough. Because if I don't allow myself to feel that, then my brain is going to find a way out of it, which is the same kind of behavior that has caused all these problems in the first place.

Now, I want to talk about the three components of narcissism: fragility, superiority, and indifference. You can use the acronym FSI if it helps you remember them. This is important because we use the term narcissism all the time in society, but it's rare for people to actually understand what they're talking about. It's mostly just used as an insult or a way to put somebody down. What it actually is is a complicated defense mechanism against a very real pain that is hard to handle, and it does have a wildly negative impact on other people. So obviously it's something to be dealt with, but I think it's important to understand its components, why a person becomes narcissistic, and what you can do to become less narcissistic or help someone else do so.

The first component is fragility, which means that it's really hard for me to handle critical feedback. Any kind of criticism feels like hot lava. It's just super difficult.

There were times in my military career where one of my commanders would call me into his office and say, "Hey James, I need to talk to you about something. This is what you've been doing, this is how you've been performing, and it's not good enough. You need to do better." It would hit me so hard I would just crumble inside. I actually broke down and cried several times as a 35-year-old military officer because it would just destroy me to be viewed by an authority figure as not having measured up. I could not handle the idea that I was a normal person who made normal mistakes and needed to improve. That was just not okay for me.

My mind was so good at creating a fantasy where that wasn't true. In my fantasy world, I was always doing everything perfectly. I was never making mistakes. When there were mistakes, it was always someone else's fault. But when I had to face the reality of this person in charge of me—and sometimes it was even someone I admired—seeing me in a negative light, it was so devastating that I would break down and cry, or I would make up some story in my mind about how their view wasn't accurate. "There's no way this can be true. It has to be a better explanation. It's not fair," and so on.

That's fragility. It's really at the core of narcissism and underlies everything else. So when you're dealing with a narcissistic person, I just want you to remember how fragile they feel all the time. Any criticism you offer them is going to feel like hot lava. This is not an excuse for being fragile—fragility destroys every relationship a person will ever have—but it is a real experience that narcissistic people have. It's really hard to handle feedback.

One thing I've done to try to deal with my own fragility is to just sit with the feeling that comes when I get criticized. So if I receive some sort of criticism from my wife or from my therapist, I try to sit with what it feels like. And I'll be honest, it still feels really bad to me. It feels less bad than it used to, but it's still pretty intense. The pathway I see of dealing with that is asking, "Can I sit with that feeling instead of using my old tricks to get out of it? Can I sit in the discomfort of being criticized instead of trying to push it away through some sort of manipulation?"

The second component is superiority, which is kind of the flagship component of narcissism. When I think of the word narcissism, the first thing that comes to mind is this idea that I'm better than everybody else. And that has been my experience through most of my life; I have always thought of myself as superior to the people around me.

A couple of stories come to mind. One is when I was a young helicopter pilot in Montana in my twenties, assigned to protect a nuclear convoy. I was on guard duty, flying my helicopter to watch out for bad guys, and I was supposed to coordinate my takeoff time to relieve another helicopter crew. There was a person back at base running the whole show, and I talked to this other officer on the phone who said, "Hey, it's time to take off." But I had talked to a member of my crew who said it wasn't time. Realistically, my crew member is not in charge of me; the person on the phone is. This should have been a really easy decision.

But I felt threatened by this person on the phone telling me that I was wrong, that my perception of reality was incorrect. He wasn't exceptionally mean about it, but I felt so uncomfortable with the idea that he didn't think my perception of reality was accurate. So I didn't take off. I delayed my takeoff based on this other information.

That act of insubordination ended up getting me busted down to copilot for a month, which is what I deserved. In the military, when someone tells you, "Hey, take your crew and take off," you do it. I remember my commander pulled me aside and said, "So, did you hear Captain so-and-so tell you to take off?" And I was like, "Yeah, I did." And he's like, "Okay." That was all he needed to know. I had received the order and I had decided to disobey it.

In my mind at the moment, it seemed so important for me to prove that I understood the situation better than the person on the other end of the phone. This was ridiculous because he was on the other end, he knew where all the helicopters were and he knew what was happening. I had very little information. But my brain couldn't handle the idea that someone else understood the situation better than I did. That was a really hard thing for me to handle. So that's an example of how my sense of superiority made it hard for me to do my job.

It also caused problems in my marriage. I always thought I was better than my wife, which you can imagine how much fun that was for her. I would try to construct or manipulate reality in a way that made it seem like that was accurate, so I would always try to push her down to elevate my status. In the end, it is just really unpleasant to be around a person like that.

I remember when I showed up for my first day on the job as a therapist. I was working in this county mental health clinic and there were maybe half a dozen therapists there, and I was pretty convinced that I was the best therapist on the job, even though it was literally my first day. But that was just the way my brain constructed reality. It seems kind of ridiculous, but it really was my experience. To me it seemed normal at the time. It's the way it had always been since I was a teenager. I was convinced that I was always the smartest person in the room.

The third component of narcissism is indifference, which just means not caring about people. This affected me most in my roles as a husband and a father. I've been married for a long time and have four children. To be a good husband and father, I have to care about my wife and children. That was always really hard for me; it just didn't come naturally. I was good at putting on a show and making it seem like I cared, but there was very little actual caring going on under the surface.

Over the past three years, I have put a lot of effort into thinking about what would be different. How would I handle myself differently if I cared a lot more about my wife than I did? I've had to really push myself on this because it does not come naturally to me. Performative caring comes naturally to me. I can look good on paper, I can make it seem like I care about her, but she sees through all of that, and my kids see through all of that.

So, what does it look like to actually be invested in another person's wellbeing? What does it look like to actually care about a person? It's not codependence; it's not "I'm going to sacrifice all of my happiness for your happiness." It's not that at all. It's, "I am going to care about myself and I'm also going to care about you." It's something I've had to learn by looking at people who do this well, people who are very caring, and trying to emulate that and help my brain adjust to this new pattern.

Of the three, this one is probably the hardest to explain. If you are naturally a very caring person, it comes naturally. If you grow up in a family where people care about each other a lot, it probably comes naturally to you. If you didn't, it probably doesn't, and it's going to be hard to learn. As a couple's therapist, I talk to my clients about this constantly because there's an infinite spectrum of caring. I can always learn to care more about my wife than I do. This is a journey I'm very much still on, but I see it as the most important part of creating a better marriage: What does it look like for me to care more about my wife tomorrow than I did today?

So fragility, superiority, and indifference are the three components of narcissism. When I'm talking to someone about these things, I don't ever talk to them about being narcissistic. It's not useful. But I do talk to people about being fragile, or superior, or not caring enough, because you can really only work on one at a time. Any one of those topics can be overwhelming all by itself. None of my therapists ever just said, "James, you're narcissistic." That's not helpful. What is helpful is saying, "You know, I noticed that when you talked about your wife, you take a very superior tone and it seems like you're talking about her as if she's not nearly as good as you are." I'm addressing one component of narcissism, and that's what's helpful to someone.

That's how my therapist helped me, which is part three: how I became aware of my narcissism and what I've been doing about it since.

I'm pretty lucky in this regard because the more narcissistic a person is, the less likely they are to know about their narcissism. Narcissism incorporates a kind of blindness where it's really hard for a narcissistic person to look at themselves and see themselves accurately. That goes along with the components. If I'm fragile and superior, it's going to be really hard for me to receive any kind of critical feedback from anyone, and then to see any other person as worthy to give me feedback in the first place. The indifference plays into that too. If my wife would come to me and say, "Hey, the way you're treating me is really hurtful," because I didn't really care about her very much, her complaints didn't matter enough to me to actually do something about it.

My wife and I worked with quite a few couples therapists over the years. Eventually, we ended up working with one particular therapist who established early on that she cared about me as a person and wanted me to get better. She was not hesitant to be critical of me, but she balanced her criticism with a level of caring that was sufficient for me to be able to take it in, just a little bit. And she was super persistent. She would offer me a piece of critical feedback, and I would bat it away or get around it or withdraw. She would just back up, reconsider, and offer it again in a slightly different wrapper. She would never give up.

The core component here is that she was basically immune to the ways that I usually manipulated people. To be narcissistic, you have to be good at manipulation because you have to get other people to play along with your narcissism. Most narcissistic people end up living with a group of people who adapt to them because whenever you challenge a narcissistic person, they take that really hard and might react in certain ways or get manipulative. My way of dealing with challenges was mostly manipulation and avoidance. I avoided conflict with my wife. I put on a really good show of pretending to be a good husband, but if she did bring any kind of problem to me, I would find a way to make it seem like she was wrong and I was right.

So we ended up with this couple's therapist who was really good at dealing with my particular ways of manipulating people. We had been to other couple's therapists in the past, but honestly, I was usually in charge of those sessions, even though I wasn't the therapist. I was pretty good at manipulating the way the sessions would go to make it seem like my wife was the problem and I wasn't, even though we were both contributing.

We ended up with this therapist who didn't fall for that. From the very early days, she focused mostly on me. No matter what I did, I would use all of my tricks and get super manipulative and clever to try to make it seem like my wife was the one with the problem, and she just never fell for it. She would come back over and over and over again to, "James, this is what I see you doing right now. This is the move I see you making." She would talk to me constantly about what I was doing in the session, the ways I was trying to get out of the criticism she was offering, the ways I was trying to make my wife feel bad or back off.

Piece by piece, she held up evidence after evidence in a way that was really difficult for me to get around. None of this was pleasant. It was really, really hard for me. I got pushed up against this feeling of falling, of not having solid ground to stand on. But there isn't really any other way. The whole reason I became narcissistic in the first place was to avoid feeling this deep sense of personal insufficiency.

One thing she offered me was she would say, "James, can you think of yourself as a normal person who makes normal mistakes? Or can you think of yourself as a person who's facing normal developmental problems?" And the answer was no, I couldn't. But I was eventually able to see that to the extent that I cannot accept that reality, I will never be able to change and have the kind of marriage that I want.

That last part is important because the motivation matters. For me to make the changes I needed to make, I had to care deeply about something. I had to want something so bad that I was willing to make the sacrifices necessary to obtain it. What I wanted was a happy marriage, and I wanted to be a good father. I wanted to not pass down to my children these same things that have made my life so hard. Because I had that motivation, I was able to stick to this path of dealing with these really difficult things.

This is a path that I'm very much still on. I'm not done with this process; I probably never will be. But I do feel like I have a path. I found a path and I can keep walking on it, and I have found people who can help guide me. So basically, I have motivation, I have guidance, and I can just keep going. What that means is that I have a lot of hope for the future. That I will continue to become more caring, less fragile, and less superior. I will be able to see people as equals, as just like me, instead of trying to constantly construct a reality where everybody is worse than me in some way. I can learn to care a lot more about people. I can be less judgmental and more openhearted.

As I've walked away from some of my narcissistic tendencies, I've found that I have a lot more energy left to focus on things other than defending my ego. Narcissism is so intense and complicated, and it takes a lot of energy to constantly spin reality into something that supports my ego. Instead of trying to create a reality that makes me seem superior or innocent or perfect, I can deal with the fact that I'm just a person who makes mistakes like everybody else, and that's okay.

I still get these upwellings of feelings of "I'm not good enough." I still feel like I'm falling sometimes. But I've learned to accept that feeling and feel it instead of trying to twist reality into some sort of fantasy that gets me out of it.

My brain will probably always have these tendencies to a certain extent. I've been living this way for decades, and it's not likely that these patterns will ever completely leave my brain. But I've become aware of them enough that I can see myself doing it and stop it before it gets too bad—not always, but most of the time. I've made enough changes in my life that my marriage has improved dramatically. I'm better at my job than I used to be, and I don't have to spend so much energy creating a false reality that supports my ego.

Instead, when those feelings of insufficiency come up, I've learned to just make room for them and feel them. I've also learned to see myself with a lot more compassion and accept this idea that I'm a normal person who makes normal mistakes. I don't have to be better than everyone. I don't have to be perfect. I don't have to be innocent. I can be guilty sometimes. Not that I'm trying to do bad things, but just that like everyone else, I make mistakes. That has allowed me to put so much less energy into defending my ego, which leaves me a lot more energy to do the things that I want to do in life.

The Love Trap

Image by Gemini

When you’re falling in love, you have intense feelings that make it easy to treat each other well. But when those feelings fade, you don't treat each other as well as you're used to. That's how you get caught in the love trap. 

Getting Out of the Trap

You can get out of the trap by starting a new relationship, but you'll end up in the same pickle in a couple of years.  If you want to stay out of the love trap, you have to learn how to love someone because you choose to love them. You can't just let your feelings be your guide if you want to stay in love. 

Some feelings are from the past

I get anxious when my wife is upset at me. My chest gets tight, and I don’t feel OK. There's a reason I feel that way, and it doesn't have a lot to do with my wife.

There was a time when I was two feet tall and I needed someone to take care of me, so body has a built-in warning system that says, "Watch out, the person who's supposed to take care of you isn't taking care of you." That warning system is still active, even though I'm an adult now. 

Reconnect with Reality

When my warning system activates, I'm less likely to treat my wife well. When I reconnect with reality, I become a much better husband. 

I ask myself three questions that help me reconnect with reality:

1. What am I worried about?

2. If that happens, will it be okay?

3. Since I'm going to be okay, can I make room for how I feel right now?

Falling in love versus being in love. 

Reconnecting with reality is part of being in love. When I’m connected with reality, I can choose to treat my partner well even when I don't feel like I'm going to be okay. I'm letting my values drive my behavior instead of letting my feelings drive my behavior. 

This doesn't mean that long-term relationships are devoid of feelings. In fact, the opposite is true. As my wife and I have gotten better at treating each other well, some of the feelings we had when we first fell in love have returned. And this time, we know how to keep them around. 

A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide to Edwin Friedman's "A Failure of Nerve"

Edwin Friedman, a rabbi and family therapist, spent decades watching leaders fail not because they lacked information or skills, but because they lacked the nerve to stand firm when everyone around them got anxious. This book applies family systems theory to leadership and argues that the same emotional patterns that wreck families also wreck organizations, communities, and nations.

Introduction: The problem isn't what you think it is

Friedman opens with a diagnosis that most leaders won't want to hear: the endless search for better leadership data—books, seminars, studies, techniques—is itself a symptom of the problem. Leaders chase information because they lack the nerve to act on what they already know.

The core reorientation Friedman demands:

• Imagination is emotional, not cerebral. You can't think your way to breakthrough.

• Anxiety exists between people, not inside individual minds.

• Decisiveness matters more than being fully informed.

• A leader's well-defined self isn't selfish—it's essential.

• Stress comes from your position in relational triangles, not from hard work.

• Crisis and sabotage can actually be signs you're leading effectively.

Friedman isn't interested in what you know. He's interested in who you are. That distinction runs through every page.

Chapter 1: Imaginative gridlock and the spirit of adventure

Friedman uses the Age of Exploration as his central metaphor. Medieval Europe was stuck for a thousand years—not because people lacked intelligence, but because they couldn't imagine anything different. Then explorers like Columbus broke through, and everything changed. The Renaissance and Reformation followed.

Three signs your system is gridlocked:

1. The treadmill of trying harder. You keep doing the same thing with more intensity, assuming failure means you didn't try hard enough or use the right technique. Europe obsessed over finding routes East while ignoring the West.

2. Searching for new answers to old questions. Real breakthroughs don't come from better answers—they come from reframing the questions entirely.

3. Either/or thinking. Europeans debated whether it was 3,000 or 10,000 miles to Japan. They never considered a third possibility: another continent in between.

Here's what the explorers understood that stuck organizations don't: the barriers weren't navigational. They were emotional. The maps that kept Europe small weren't drawn on paper—they were "born of mythology and kept in place by anxiety."

Friedman identifies three emotional barriers that block modern leaders: the belief that data is more important than decisiveness, the belief that empathy will make irresponsible people more responsible, and the belief that selfishness is a greater danger than having no self at all.

Chapter 2: A society in regression

Friedman makes a provocative claim: despite all our technological advancement, American culture is regressing emotionally. We've become so chronically anxious that our society has gone into what he calls "a regression that is toxic to well-defined leadership."

He uses a powerful metaphor. Imagine a room filled with gas fumes. When an explosion happens, everyone blames the person who struck the match. But the real problem is the fumes. Chronic anxiety is the gas that makes any spark into a conflagration.

Five characteristics of chronically anxious systems:

Reactivity. People can't stay calm. They respond with passion, aggression, even viciousness to minor provocations. Anxious systems lose the ability to be playful or optimistic.

Herding. The group values togetherness over progress. Members become intolerant of anyone who stands apart. Worse, systems pressure everyone to adapt to the least mature members. Leaders who don't accommodate the most difficult people get accused of being cruel.

Blame displacement. Members position themselves as victims. As anxiety increases, people blame leaders for failing to provide safety and happiness—things no leader can actually guarantee.

Quick-fix mentality. The chronically anxious have a low pain threshold. They want symptom relief, not fundamental change. They can't tolerate the discomfort that real growth requires.

Lack of well-differentiated leadership. This is both cause and effect. Undifferentiated leaders lose their vision, become reactive, and cave to criticism—which feeds the cycle.

These five patterns pervert everything healthy: personal discipline, the identification of strength, the embrace of challenge, patience for growth, and the preservation of individual integrity.

Chapter 3: Data junkyards and data junkies

This chapter attacks the cultural obsession with information-gathering. Friedman calls it an addiction—complete with "self-doubt, denial, temptation, relapse, and withdrawal."

The two-sided myth driving the addiction:

• "If only we knew enough, we could fix anything."

• "If we failed, it's because we didn't use the right method."

Leaders feel guilty they haven't consumed enough data. They're overwhelmed and seduced by information. And none of it helps, because emotional processes are inextricable from thinking—and no amount of data addresses emotional maturity.

Friedman argues that the data obsession creates several toxic effects: it focuses on pathology rather than strength, it invites anxiety by cataloging everything that could go wrong, and it treats outcomes as roulette games rather than accounting for the response capacity of the people involved.

The resolution isn't more information. It's reorienting toward self-definition, self-regulation, and non-reactivity—while staying connected to the people you lead.

Chapter 4: The fallacy of empathy

This is Friedman's most provocative chapter. His claim: empathy has become a power tool used by the weak and immature to sabotage leaders.

He observed something consistent across families, institutions, and communities: whenever someone introduced the subject of empathy into a meeting, it was usually someone who felt powerless trying to force those with power to adapt to them. Empathy became a weapon disguised as virtue.

Friedman divides the chapter into two parts.

Part one: Hostile forces. In any environment, the people who create hostility are invasive. They can't self-regulate. They function like viruses or cancer cells—perpetually invading the space of others, unable to learn from experience. Here's the uncomfortable truth: empathy has no power to change them or make them more responsible. Leaders who tilt toward empathy often have an "unreasonable faith in being reasonable."

Part two: The leader as immune system. A leader's survival in hostile environments depends more on their internal response than on the external threat. Your self-definition, your calm, your integrity—these function like an immune system that stops invaders from sickening the organization.

Many battles are won simply by not giving up, staying true to your calling, remaining connected to reactive people without becoming reactive yourself, and requiring them to take personal responsibility. That last part is key. Empathy without accountability enables dysfunction.

Chapter 5: The fallacies of self

The cultural confusion Friedman addresses here: we've conflated selfishness with having a strong self. In popular thinking, focusing on yourself is prideful, narcissistic, immoral. But Friedman argues the opposite: the failure of nerve and the desire for quick fixes result from weak or absent selves, not from overly strong ones.

A well-defined self gives leaders the capacity to:

• Initiate and stand alone

• Recognize and step back from emotional triangles

• Avoid the futility of trying to force others to change

• Stay calm during sabotage

• Stop reacting like "one more emotional domino in the system"

Self-differentiation isn't a state you achieve—it's a lifelong process. It means charting your own course from an internal guidance system rather than constantly adjusting to where everyone else is.

Friedman uses a domino metaphor. Imagine organization members as dominoes standing upright. When anxiety hits and one domino falls, the chain reaction begins. The question: can you, as a leader, remain upright while staying connected? That's differentiation—not withdrawing, not reacting, but being present without being knocked down.

He also distinguishes "aggressive" from "aggressionistic." Aggressive leadership—driven by strong imagination and clear vision—is healthy. Aggressionistic leadership—hostile, invasive, reactive—is what weak selves resort to when they can't tolerate challenge.

Chapter 6: Take five

Friedman considered this the keystone chapter. He distills what explorers and adventurers had in common—the qualities that separated those who broke through from those who stayed stuck.

Five leadership qualities:

1. A capacity to get outside the emotional climate of the day. Unusually clear vision. The ability to separate yourself from the anxiety and reactivity surrounding you.

2. A willingness to be exposed and vulnerable. Not afraid of standing out, being held responsible, being rejected. Proceeding without a safety net.

3. Persistence in the face of resistance and rejection. Not passive endurance—active, continued pursuit of the goal despite opposition.

4. Stamina in the face of sabotage along the way. Friedman makes an important observation: sabotage usually comes not from enemies who opposed you initially, but from colleagues whose will was sapped by unexpected hardships. The threat is from inside.

5. Being "headstrong" and "ruthless"—at least in the eyes of others. When forced to choose, these leaders chose vision over camaraderie. They were willing to be disliked.

What unified those who went first? Desire, decisiveness, and nerve—not data or technique.

Friedman adds five insights about a leader's presence: your major effect comes from how your presence affects emotional processes, not from your words or strategies. Your main job is understanding yourself. Communication depends on emotional variables. Stress results from taking responsibility for others' relationships. And hierarchy is a natural systems phenomenon—not something to apologize for.

Chapter 7: Emotional triangles

Friedman believed mastering this concept could unlock leadership effectiveness. An emotional triangle is any three members of a relationship system—or any two members plus an issue or symptom.

Why triangles form: Two-person relationships are inherently unstable. The instability increases when the partners are poorly differentiated, when chronic anxiety pervades the atmosphere, and when well-defined leadership is absent.

We triangle not only with people but with problems (money, children's behavior), organizations ("the office," "the team"), and even the past (unresolved issues with parents that shape current relationships).

Three laws of triangles:

1. They are self-organizing. They form naturally without conscious intention.

2. They strengthen when two parties hide truths from the third through secrets or gossip.

3. They are perverse—they can create an illusion of intimacy while destroying genuine openness and directness.

Here's the systems view of stress: to the extent you become enmeshed in the relationship between two other people, you absorb the stress of their relationship. Stress comes from taking responsibility for others' relationships.

The way out isn't quitting or abdicating. It's making others responsible for their own relationships while remaining connected. "Staying in a triangle without getting triangled gives you far more power than never entering the triangle in the first place."

Chapter 8: Crisis and sabotage are the keys to the kingdom

The final full chapter delivers a counterintuitive insight: effective leadership actually elicits reactivity and sabotage.When you see crisis and resistance, that's often evidence your leadership is working, not failing.

Friedman identifies "the key to the kingdom": resistance that sabotages a leader's initiative usually has less to do with the issue at hand than with the fact that the leader took initiative. Systems resist change not because it's wrong but because it's unfamiliar. Even dysfunctional systems prefer their familiar pain to the discomfort of recalibration.

Leadership is not complete until you've brought about change and endured the resulting backlash.

How do you manage crises? Most can't be fixed by direct, forceful action. They must be managed until they work themselves out. Don't make the crisis the center of your world. Continue standing in ways that are well-defined and non-anxious, challenging others to take personal responsibility.

Friedman is clear about the unavoidable costs: pain, isolation, loneliness, personal criticism, loss of friends. The question is whether you have the nerve to pay them.

A Couples Therapist Rates the Internet's Top Relationship Tips

These are ten common relationship tips you'll find online, rated from zero to ten.

1. Know Your Partner's Love Language — 2/10

Gary Chapman's Five Love Languages (Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, Physical Touch) remains the dominant framework. The idea is that partners often express love differently than they receive it, causing disconnection.

My take: When my wife and I read the Love Languages book twenty-something years ago, we found out that she likes gifts and acts of service, and I like physical touch and words of affirmation. Interesting—but it didn't help us change anything.

Here's the problem: it's hard to change the things that keep us from treating our partner well. If I were going to focus on the things my wife loves, I would have had to care about her a lot more than I did at that time. The book didn't help us address the underlying problems. Knowing what your partner wants is easy. Actually wanting to give it to them is the hard part.

2. Active Listening Over Problem-Solving — 6/10

Active listening is described as one of the simplest yet most powerful communication tools couples can practice. Truly hearing your partner rather than immediately fixing or responding is emphasized everywhere.

My take: This one gets a decent score because problem-solving doesn't actually solve problems—for a couple of reasons.

First, the whole reason I jump in to solve my wife's problems is because I can't handle my own anxiety. She's anxious about something in her life, she's telling me about it, and my anxiety spikes. That's why I'm jumping in—not because I'm being helpful, but because I can't sit with my own discomfort.

Second, there's an implication that I'm somehow better at dealing with her problems than she is. That's problematic in its own way.

It really is better to just listen unless she specifically asks for help figuring something out. The key is being able to handle my own anxiety and not jumping in without being invited.

3. Understand Your Attachment Style — 2/10

Attachment theory with its four main styles—secure, insecure-avoidant, insecure-anxious, and disorganized—is widely discussed as shaping how we approach closeness, intimacy, dating, and romance.

My take: I lean towards anxious attachment. My wife leans towards avoidant. Understanding this didn't do much to help us fix it.

The way I see it: my anxiety pulls me towards her, and her anxiety pulls her away from me. For us to deal with that dynamic, we had to understand why it's hard for me to feel okay when she's not paying attention to me, and why it's hard for her to feel okay when I am paying attention to her.

The other problem with attachment styles is that just because my anxiety pulls me towards her doesn't mean it's not still my responsibility to deal with it. "That's what my attachment style does" isn't an excuse to lean on her for soothing instead of learning how to calm myself down.

4. Avoid the Four Horsemen — 3/10

Gottman's research identifies four negative behaviors—criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling—that can predict relationship failure.

My take: Yes, obviously you should avoid the four horsemen. But this only gets a three because it's so obvious. If I'm treating my wife with contempt, of course I'm going to have a bad relationship.

The Gottman approach of identifying problems and then talking about them isn't very helpful in getting people to actually stop. I would have to look at why I started treating my wife with contempt in the first place. That's a much harder question than "I shouldn't treat my wife with contempt"—as if I didn't already know that.

5. Accept Bids for Connection — 4/10

The Gottman Institute found that couples still married at the six-year point accepted bids from their partners 86% of the time. The small moment your partner asks you to watch something or look at something matters.

My take: Connection is good, but accepting bids for connection only works if it's genuine.

If I'm pretending to accept a bid for connection when I'm not dealing with the reason I didn't want to connect in the first place, that causes problems. Say my wife periodically does something I really don't like, and then she makes a bid for connection. I don't feel good about it, but I'm not willing to talk to her about the thing she does that bothers me. Now I'm offering her an inauthentic connection. That doesn't solve anything.

6. Maintain a 5:1 Positive Ratio — 3/10

Gottman's research found that for relationships to thrive, we need a ratio of 5:1 positives and appreciations.

My take: This is the kind of advice that leads people to do inauthentic things. If I feel like I'm supposed to say positive things to my wife, I might come home and say something positive. But I don't really mean it, and she knows I don't mean it. Now I'm being deceptive, and she's not going to trust me.

It's problematic to say positive things when I'm not thinking or feeling positive things. It's better to deal with what's going on inside myself that leads me to feel this way about my wife. Can I address things she's doing that need to be addressed? More importantly, can I deal with who I am and what I'm doing that needs to be addressed?

7. Put Down Your Phone — 10/10

One of the biggest complaints therapists hear from clients is that their partners are constantly on their phones. Committing to unplugging for a set period of time each day is widely recommended.

My take: Amazing life advice in general. Put down your phone. Live a little. 10 out of 10. No explanation needed.

8. Stop Trying to Be the Perfect Partner — 8/10

Esther Perel argues that the idea of being fault-free and put together every day is utterly unrealistic and can prevent you from developing real confidence in yourself.

My take: This one gets a boost because I love Esther, and because it's genuinely good advice. If you're holding yourself to a standard of perfection—you can never make a mistake, never say a mean thing, never let your partner down—that's not realistic.

Hold yourself to a high standard, and be kind and gentle to yourself when you fall short.

9. Balance Togetherness and Separateness — 10/10

Esther Perel suggests that love requires both closeness and distance: "Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness."

My take: We focus so much on togetherness in modern relationships, but there has to be a balance between separateness and togetherness.

Here's another way to think about it: if I want to feel kind feelings towards my wife, I have to be on solid footing myself. I have to feel like I'm going to be okay, that I can take care of myself. Then I can reach out with love and kindness.

It's like climbing a slippery slope when someone asks for a hand. I'm happy to help as long as my footing is firm. But if I don't feel solid in myself, I'm naturally going to be hesitant to reach out.

Esther Perel is right: a solid sense of separateness is critical to creating long-lasting love.

10. Build Love Maps — 5/10

The Gottman Institute's framework encourages partners to really get to know each other's inner worlds—asking about thoughts, worries, joys, and deeper questions.

My take: The Gottmans frame this as asking your partner a lot of questions about what's going on inside them. I'd put it differently: instead of asking my wife, I'm going to be more open with her about what's going on inside of me.

I try to present my wife an accurate picture of what it's like to be me—my thoughts, feelings, goals, and dreams. Instead of presenting an optimized persona of who I think she wants me to be, I'm more honest about revealing my mind to her. That helps her build what they call a "love map"—an accurate perception of who I am. But I'd call it unmasking my mind.

Asking questions doesn't solve much if she isn't willing to unmask her mind to me. The best approach is for me to reveal myself to her. That creates intimacy unilaterally. The more I reveal myself to my partner, the more intimacy we have—and it makes it easier for her to reveal herself to me, as long as I can handle what she reveals.

The Bottom Line

You can tell I favor Esther Perel's advice over the Gottmans'. That's my professional opinion, and it's how I do therapy.

The common thread in my critiques: knowing what to do is easy. Actually doing it requires dealing with what's going on inside yourself. Most relationship advice tells you what to do without helping you understand why you're not already doing it.

Adlerian Couples Therapy Triangles

I use two Adlerian Couples Therapy Triangles when I’m working with couples.

The first one has three sides:

• that pad person

• poor me

• what will I do now

The second one has two sides, the third side is blank:

• your impact on me

• my impact on you

This gives me a physical object that I can hand to a client to help them pause and think about how they're using their time in therapy. Are they focused on talking about things they can't control, or are they focused on talking about things that they actually have power over?

Here’s a printable PDF:

Couples Therapy Tool Printable PDF