There’s a moment in a first couples session I’ve learned to watch for. One partner, usually the one who made the call, describes the other with a word borrowed from therapy: narcissist, gaslighter, avoidant, toxic. Then the room gets very quiet, because the person sitting three feet away has just been diagnosed by someone who has never met him.
Nobody in that room is lying. The word usually came from a real hurt and a well-meaning individual therapist. But it arrives as a conclusion, and conclusions are hard to do therapy with.
So I read the recent TIME essay “Therapy Has a Relationship Problem” with the particular relief of hearing a colleague say out loud what many of us mutter in consultation groups. The author, an anxiety specialist with more than two decades in practice, argues that our field has become very good at helping people identify unhealthy relationships and not nearly as good at helping them stay in difficult but meaningful ones.
I’ve spent more than 25 years sitting with couples and families, and I agree with nearly all of it. I’d push it further in a few places. And in one place, I’d pull it back.
Yes, Therapists Are Often Too Quick to Endorse Walking Away
In my experience, therapists do support ending difficult relationships more readily than the evidence justifies. Not because they’re careless, but because most therapy is built to hear one side. When the only person in the room is the one who’s hurting, everyone else becomes a character in her story rather than a participant in the work.
It’s a structural blind spot. And it has consequences that show up years later, often in an office like mine.
A Hard Relationship Is Not the Same as an Unhealthy One
The most important idea in the TIME piece is that we routinely confuse relational distress with relational dysfunction. Distress means the relationship hurts right now. Dysfunction means it cannot become safe. Those require completely different responses, and treating the first like the second is how a lot of salvageable relationships end.
The research on healthy relationships is, frankly, reassuring about how messy they are. John Gottman’s longitudinal work found that about 69% of conflicts in stable couples are perpetual. They never get solved. They get managed, joked about, and returned to for decades. Edward Tronick’s developmental research found that even well-attuned mothers and infants are in sync only around 30% of the time. The health of the bond lives in the repair, not in the absence of mismatch.
So if the test of a good relationship is “it doesn’t cause me stress,” nobody passes. The couples who do well in my practice aren’t the ones who don’t fight. They’re the ones who come back after they do. As a Gottman- and EFT-trained couples therapist, most of what I teach is not how to avoid rupture. It’s how to return from it.
“No Contact” Ends the Conversation. It Rarely Ends the Relationship.
Family estrangement is not rare. Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer‘s national survey for Fault Lines found that roughly 27% of American adults are estranged from at least one relative. The TIME essay cites Wall Street Journal reporting on a survey of about 7,000 estranged parents, a third of whom believed their adult child’s therapist had influenced or recommended the cutoff. Parents aren’t neutral reporters of their own estrangement, of course. But a third is not a number our field gets to shrug at.
Murray Bowen, one of the founders of family systems therapy, had a name for this: emotional cutoff. His observation, which I see confirmed in my office constantly, is that distance manages anxiety without resolving the attachment underneath it. The unfinished business travels. The adult daughter who cut off her mother shows up years later in couples therapy, and the fight with her husband has a very familiar shape.
I see the same thing in gray divorce. Couples in their 50s and 60s end 30-year marriages over distress that was real but was never actually worked on. Some of them flourish afterward. Many are surprised by how lonely the relief turns out to be.
That loneliness is not trivial. Julianne Holt-Lunstad‘s meta-analysis of 148 studies and more than 300,000 people found that strong social relationships were associated with a 50% greater likelihood of survival, an effect comparable to quitting smoking. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, now running more than 85 years, found that relationship satisfaction at 50 predicted health at 80 better than cholesterol did. Close relationships aren’t a nice-to-have for mental health. They are the infrastructure.
The Problem Isn’t Individual Therapists. It’s the Individual Frame.
The author makes a point I wish got more airtime: our mental health system is built around one identified patient. A diagnosis attaches to a person, and insurance reimbursement follows that person. But a marriage can have a problem that lives in neither partner and in both of them. There isn’t a tidy code for “we keep having the same fight about his mother.”
The essay’s most honest moment is a case the author got wrong: a husband’s OCD treated successfully, a marriage left untreated, and the progress eventually lost. That story will be familiar to anyone who does couples work. Individual symptoms and relational patterns keep feeding each other. Fix one and ignore the other, and the system tends to pull itself back to where it was.
Where I’d Pull It Back: Some Relationships Should End, and People Often Know It Late
The author writes that in more than 20 years of practice, there was exactly one time they directly recommended divorce, for a husband deliberately driving his wife toward suicide. I respect that restraint. But couples work shows me the opposite error too, and it’s just as common.
Coercive control rarely looks like distress. It often looks like one partner quietly shrinking: less money of her own, fewer friends, more checking before she speaks, a growing sense that her own memory can’t be trusted. Those clients don’t arrive saying “I’m being controlled.” They arrive saying “every marriage has hard seasons.” A field that suddenly swings toward “stay and repair” could keep them there longer.
The distinction I use is simple to say and hard to assess. Distress is two people who both hurt each other and both can repair. Abuse is one person systematically controlling the other’s safety, money, reality, or freedom. Repair skills are only worth building in a relationship that allows repair. When a relationship doesn’t, leaving isn’t avoidance. It’s the treatment plan.
“Let Them” Is Only Half the Skill
The essay leans on Mel Robbins‘s The Let Them Theory: stop trying to control other people, let them disappoint you, then choose your response. I agree with it as far as it goes. A great deal of the misery I see comes from people making another person’s change the price of staying connected.
But acceptance without reaching turns into polite distance. The other half is what I’d call “let me.” Let me say what I actually need. Let me own my share of the pattern. Let me set a limit without leaving. That’s the move EFT is built around: not just tolerating a partner, but turning toward them with something vulnerable and true.
It also helps to separate two tools that get lumped together. A boundary says, “I won’t discuss my marriage with you at Thanksgiving.” A cutoff says, “You won’t see me at Thanksgiving.” Both are sometimes the right call. They are not the same call, and a good therapist should help you tell which one you’re reaching for, and why.
If You’re Deciding Whether to Walk Away
I’ve watched friendships of my own fade over the years, some gradually and some all at once. The ones I still miss are rarely the ones where something unforgivable happened. They’re the ones where nobody made the phone call.
If you’re reading this wondering whether a marriage, a parent, a sibling, or an old friend is worth the effort, a few questions matter more than whether the relationship is stressful. Can both of you be hurt and both of you repaired? Has anyone, including you, actually tried to repair it with help? Are you looking for a boundary or a cutoff? And would leaving move you toward the life you want, or mostly away from a feeling you can’t stand?
Frequently Asked Questions
Are therapists encouraging people to go no contact with family?
Some are. A widely cited survey of about 7,000 estranged parents found that a third believed their adult child’s therapist influenced or recommended the estrangement. In my experience, the cause is usually structural: individual therapy hears one side of a relationship, which makes the other person easy to diagnose and hard to understand.
How do I know if my relationship is unhealthy or just going through a hard time?
A hard relationship causes distress but still allows repair: both people can be hurt, own their part, and come back together. An unhealthy one involves a pattern where one person controls the other’s safety, money, sense of reality, or freedom. Stress alone is not a sign of dysfunction; Gottman’s research found about 69% of conflicts in stable couples never fully resolve.
What’s the difference between a boundary and a cutoff?
A boundary limits what you’ll participate in while keeping the relationship. A cutoff ends contact. Family systems theory suggests cutoffs relieve anxiety in the short term but often leave the underlying attachment unresolved, so the same patterns resurface in other relationships.
Can couples therapy help if only one of us wants to stay?
Often, yes. Discernment counseling is a short, structured approach designed for couples where one partner is leaning out and the other wants to try. Its goal is clarity about whether to attempt therapy, not forcing the relationship to continue.
When should someone end a relationship?
When it isn’t safe, or when one person consistently controls the other and repair isn’t possible. In those cases, leaving is healthy, not avoidant. A relational therapist can help you tell the difference before you make a decision that’s hard to undo.
References
- “Therapy Has a Relationship Problem,” TIME, August 29, 2026
- Pillemer, K. (2020). Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them. Avery.
- Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Crown.
- Tronick, E. Z., & Gianino, A. (1986). Interactive mismatch and repair. Zero to Three, 6(3).
- Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLoS Medicine, 7(7).
- Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Simon & Schuster.
- Kerr, M. E., & Bowen, M. (1988). Family Evaluation. Norton.
