DEV Community: Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan

Jill Biden Thought Joe Was Having a Stroke On Stage: The Attachment Terror of Watching Your Person Collapse in Public

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:14:33 +0000

Jill Biden Thought Joe Was Having a Stroke On Stage: The Attachment Terror of Watching Your Person Collapse in Public

When Jill Biden sat down with CBS Sunday Morning and described the moment she watched her husband on the 2024 debate stage, she did not reach for political language. She did not offer a strategic spin or a PR-approved sentence. According to a recent Variety piece, she said, "As I watched it, I thought, 'Oh, my god, he's having a stroke.' And it scared me to death."

Scared me to death.

That is not a soundbite. That is a sentence with a body underneath it. A diaphragm that locked. A throat that closed. A wife in a green room or a viewing suite who in one second stopped being a former First Lady and became something much older and much more biological. She became a primate watching her primary person falter in front of a hundred million people.

The cultural conversation went where it always goes. Was she an enabler. Was she in denial. Should she have pulled him off the stage years ago. The hot takes wrote themselves and most of them used clinical-sounding words to flatten a moment that deserves much more honesty than that.

I want to take a different angle. Because the politics will keep until the next news cycle. The attachment biology of watching your person collapse in public is the actual story here, and it is the same story I sit with every week in my San Francisco office, just with smaller audiences.

From The Moment To The Thread

You do not have to like the Bidens to recognize what was happening in that sentence. You do not have to defend a single political choice to take the biology seriously. What Jill Biden described, the dread, the freeze, the rising certainty that something is very wrong with the person who holds your heart, is something a huge number of readers of this blog know intimately. Maybe not on a debate stage. Maybe at a dinner table when your husband could not find the word for fork. Maybe in a hospital corridor. Maybe across a therapist's couch, watching your wife disappear into a shame spiral you could not reach.

This is the thread. Not the politics. The body of a long-married person watching the person they love falter, and what we do with the unbearable powerlessness of that moment.

The Biology Of "Are You There"

In my world as a couples therapist, everything runs through an attachment lens. We are an interdependent species. From your first day to your last day, you are hardwired to need to feel emotionally bonded to a primary person. That bond is not a luxury feature. It is the operating system.

I often describe this need the way a fish experiences water. The fish does not walk around asking what water is. It just needs it to live. As grown-ups we forget that we still need the equivalent of water, which is feeling emotionally tethered to the person we have built our life around.

If the bond is threatened, you do not face an inconvenience. You face an existential threat. If you were born on the savanna a hundred thousand years ago and your primary person was not there for you, a dingo came and ate you. Your limbic system has not been updated since. It is still that naked mole rat in the dark, feeling its way around, asking one desperate question: are you there.

When Jill Biden watched Joe on that stage, her limbic system was not watching the President of the United States. It was watching her primary person slip somewhere she could not follow. In that moment, the answer to the question her body was asking became a terrifying blank. The cameras kept rolling. The country kept watching. And inside her chest, a much older organism was screaming.

This is not weakness. This is not denial. This is what happens when the person you have spent fifty years turning toward looks, for a few seconds, like they might not be coming back.

The Lazy Diagnosis Of Codependency

The internet's first move with a story like this is to reach for the codependency label. She enabled him. She lost contact with reality. She needed to be needed.

I will not let that framing stand without a fight.

Calling yourself or anyone else codependent because another person is so important to you that you cannot easily find where you end and they begin is one of the great tragedies of modern psychology. I have written about this in the context of last resort couples therapy, where partners arrive having been told for years that their fierce protectiveness is pathology. It almost never is.

What is usually happening when one partner compensates hard for another is something much braver than codependency. They have accurately assessed that their person cannot, in this moment, show up the way the situation requires. So they work overtime to make sure they do not lose them. They are heroic. They try and try and try to save the person they love from a situation neither of them chose.

Here is one of the basic truths about bonded life. If your partner is not okay, you are not okay. It is not realistic to ask the well partner to stay fully grounded while the other one is collapsing in real time. That is not how two linked nervous systems work. That is not even how mammals work.

When we tell a woman in Jill Biden's position that she should have coldly assessed her husband and walked him off the stage without any messy protective panic, we are asking her to amputate the part of her biology that has been wired into him for half a century. That is not a reasonable ask. That is a fantasy of detachment that no actual marriage produces.

What I Know About Watching A Body Betray Itself

I have my own scar in this territory.

When I was a boy, around seven or eight, I was in PE at school in Ireland when I started noticing my right foot dragging. It got worse. I fell, and then I fell again, and then I had a grand mal seizure. I still remember the sensation, the bubbling rising from my leg, moving up through my body, knocking me unconscious. And I remember the terror of being unable to get up, like the ground had magnetized me. The other children stood around laughing while I was in the greatest terror of my life.

Decades later, as a grown man and a father, I had a massive panic attack on a winding coastal road in Hawaii. My seven-year-old son was in the back of my truck. I had to pull over and tell a police officer I thought I was having a heart attack. The shame of my son being a witness to that collapse has not fully left my body.

I tell you this because there is a particular flavor of helplessness in watching a body betray itself in front of people who were not invited to see it. Both the body that is failing and the people who love it pay a price the audience never sees.

In my practice I sit every week with partners who carry the adult version of this terror. One person's health, mental or physical, begins to falter. The other one sits on my couch in absolute powerlessness. They cannot fix it. They cannot argue with it. They cannot logic their way out of it. They can only stay close, and try not to make it worse, and try to keep loving a person who is slowly becoming less reachable.

That is the work of the long marriage no one tells you about when you are twenty-five.

The Relentless Lover, The Reluctant Lover, And The Dingo In The Room

In my clinical work I often name two roles in a distressed couple. The Relentless Lover protests for closeness when they feel their person slipping away. The Reluctant Lover withdraws to manage the unbearable sense of not being enough. Most couples cycle between these two postures in some version of what I call the Waltz of Pain. I hurt, so I react, which hurts you, so you react.

But in a medical crisis like the one Jill Biden feared in real time, the normal dance is suspended. You cannot pursue a stroke. You cannot withdraw from a cognitive freeze. There is no partner-fight to have. There is only the dingo in the room, the oldest threat the mammalian body knows, and the helpless love that has nowhere to put itself.

What I see in those couples on my couch is not codependency and not denial. I see two organisms trying to stay bonded across a widening gap. The well partner becomes hyper-attuned. They start finishing sentences. They start running interference. They start translating their person to the world. The world watches and calls it managing. From the inside it feels like love at its most stripped-down. Love with nowhere to hide.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

When The Audience Is Watching

There is a particular cruelty to watching your person falter in public. The privacy of the marriage is invaded by the spectators. Every gesture you make gets read. Every soothing hand on the back gets interpreted. Every quiet redirect becomes evidence in some trial you did not agree to be part of.

I see versions of this in much smaller theatres all the time. A wife whose husband drinks too much at the dinner party. A husband whose wife dissociates at the family barbecue. The partner who is watching becomes a kind of stage manager, trying to protect both the dignity of the person they love and the comfort of the room. It is exhausting work. It is often invisible work. And the people doing it almost never get credit for it because the only people who would understand the cost are inside the marriage with them.

This is also why couples in this kind of long arc often arrive at therapy in a particular state. Tired. Bracing. Slightly ashamed of how thin they have worn themselves trying to hold a public face over a private collapse. I have written about what that arrival actually feels like in Managing Waiting Room Anxiety Before Couples Therapy, because the way a couple walks into the room tells you most of what you need to know about the year they have just survived.

What I Would Say To The Woman In That Chair

If a woman in Jill Biden's position were sitting on my couch (and many women in versions of her position have), I would not start by asking about the debate. I would not start by asking about the campaign. I would not ask her to litigate the timeline.

I would ask her where her body was on that night. Where it locked. What it did with the dread. Whether she has let anyone see it since.

Because the conversation our culture wants to have about Jill Biden is a conversation about her judgment. The conversation that actually matters is a conversation about her physiology. About the long, private, unwitnessed labor of staying bonded to a person whose capacity is changing. About the grief that does not get to be grief yet because the person is still here.

That work is some of the hardest work two human beings ever do together. It is also some of the most invisible. And the lazy public framing of it, codependent, enabler, in denial, is an act of contempt aimed at people who are doing something most of the commentators have never been asked to do.

If you are doing that work right now, in a much smaller theatre, with a much smaller audience, I want you to hear this clearly. You are not pathological. You are not codependent. You are bonded to a person whose situation is changing faster than your love can fully metabolize, and your body is doing exactly what bonded mammalian bodies do. It is staying close. It is staying alert. It is refusing to let go.

The Application

Most readers of this article will never stand backstage at a presidential debate. But almost all of you will, at some point, watch the person you love falter in a way you cannot fix. Maybe it is the slow falter of illness. Maybe it is the sudden falter of a panic attack at the wrong dinner. Maybe it is the falter of a partner whose career is unraveling in public and whose shame is unraveling in private.

When that day comes, the question is not whether your body will go into protective overdrive. It will. The question is whether you will have built the kind of relationship, and the kind of support around it, that lets you stay close without losing yourself in the process.

That is the actual proof of work of a long marriage. Not the wedding. Not the anniversaries. The capacity to stay bonded across a body that is changing, a mind that is changing, a public life that is changing, without disappearing into the role of caretaker or hardening into the role of judge.

If you are in that work now and your partner is the one refusing to come to therapy with you, I have written specifically about that bind in How do I get my partner to couples counseling?. And if what you are sitting in feels like an active emergency, not a slow erosion, Getting Emergency or Crisis Couples Therapy Sessions will tell you what to do in the next twenty-four hours.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The dingo is in the room more often than any of us want to admit. The work is to recognize it when it arrives, to name what your body is doing, and to refuse the cheap diagnoses the audience will hand you while you are still trying to keep your person upright. Your love is not the pathology. Your fear is not the pathology. The pathology is a culture that watches you do this work and calls it weakness. Stay close anyway.

Jordan Ngatikaura's Post-Divorce PDA: What Public Romance After a Five-Year Marriage Reveals About Shame, Attachment, and the "F

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 07:08:24 +0000

Jordan Ngatikaura's Post-Divorce PDA: What Public Romance After a Five-Year Marriage Reveals About Shame, Attachment, and the "Fiat Love" Trap

The photo cycle is by now familiar. Jordan Ngatikaura, the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives figure who filed for divorce from his estranged wife Jessi Draper in March after five years of marriage, was recently spotted packing on the PDA with a new woman, per Page Six. The internet has done what the internet does inside the hour. Picked a villain. Picked a victim. Posted screenshots side by side. Diagnosed him from a phone.

I want to step out of that lane entirely.

I have been a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist for sixteen-plus years. I have never sat clinically with Jordan or Jessi, and the Goldwater rule keeps me out of the diagnosis business anyway. What I can do is name the pattern I watch unfold in my office almost every week, in less famous form. A five-year marriage ends. One partner, within weeks, is suddenly visible with someone new, kissing in public, smiling for cameras. The cultural script wants a story about character. The body in that photograph is telling a different story entirely.

That is the story I want to tell. Because if you are reading this from inside your own separation, or watching someone you love go through one, the Page Six photo is a doorway into something that actually matters for your life.

From the Moment to the Thread

A five-year bond is not a contract. It is a co-regulating physiology. Two bodies learned to settle inside each other. Then, abruptly, they did not. The legal filing is the easy part. The body does not read the decree.

What you are looking at in those PDA photos is almost never what the comments section thinks it is. It is rarely vindictiveness, rarely "moving on too fast," rarely a moral indictment. It is a mammal that has been through a fire, looking for a place to put its hands down.

The Body Does Not Know You Are Divorced

Here is the part nobody warns you about when a long bond ends. Your limbic system, the ancient piece of brain that runs the bond, is still operating from the blueprint of the marriage. It is still scanning for the spouse's face. Still bracing for the old fights. Still running protective software built over years of being in one specific relationship with one specific person.

We are interdependent by design. We are born needing a primary person, and we need one all the way through. When the person who held that role in your physiology is suddenly no longer there, your body does not register an administrative change. It registers a survival emergency.

So what does a survival emergency do? It looks for relief. Fast.

The sudden rush of a new, highly affectionate romance is not a calculated media stunt. It is a desperate limbic intervention. The survival brain is demanding immediate, undeniable physical proof that the person is still desirable, still acceptable, still safe in the world. Public PDA is not the goal. The goal is to silence an internal alarm that will not turn off.

I have written more about this exact biology in my piece on Jessica Alba, Danny Ramirez, and the attachment science of post-divorce PDA, because the dynamic shows up in almost every separation I work with, celebrity or not.

The Shame Underneath the Photograph

Here is where it gets clinically interesting. Underneath the visible PDA is something almost no one talks about: shame.

When a five-year marriage collapses, the partner who feels they failed is drowning in an internal cocktail of "I am bad." Not in some abstract way. In a felt, somatic, can't-sit-still way. Shame whispers: I am too much. I am not enough. I did this. I broke this. I am the reason this ended.

Shame does not stay still. It moves. It looks for an exit. Avoidance says, if I can just stay busy enough, maybe I will not feel how much this hurts. Attack-other says, this was their fault. Attack-self collapses into "I am garbage." Withdrawal disappears into the cave.

A new partner, especially one willing to be photographed kissing you a few weeks after a divorce filing, is an almost perfect antidote to the shame cocktail. Externally administered. Immediately effective. A fresh slate where you have not failed yet. The new person says, with their body, "you are still wantable." And the survival brain exhales for the first time in months.

This is not pathology. This is the bond doing what the bond was built to do. The men I see in this exact pattern in my office are not villains. They are hurt. The protector parts running the show are loyal. They kept the person alive through the collapse. The problem is that protecting is not the same as connecting, and a new romance that arrives this fast is almost always protection wearing the costume of connection.

Fiat Love: Printing Affection You Cannot Back

There is a frame I use for what happens here that I want to give you, because once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

We are living through an era of Fiat Relationships. Just as central banks print money to paper over economic cracks, we use cheap performances of affection to paper over relational instability. We prioritize performance, the Instagram couple, the public kiss, the soft-launch reel, over substance, which is actual repair and finding ground together between two bodies. We want the feeling of connection without the cost of vulnerability.

Public PDA weeks after a five-year marriage ends is that printed affection in its purest form. It is issued without backing. There has been no time for grief. No time to metabolize the bond that just collapsed. No real labor done on the wound that drove the marriage onto the rocks. And yet here is the public ledger entry, proving the new connection is real and good and chosen.

The problem with printing affection you cannot back is the same problem with printing money you cannot back. It works for a minute. Then comes the inflation. The next gesture has to be bigger. The next photo more public. The next reassurance more total. Because the underlying alarm was never actually addressed. It was just papered over with a louder signal.

I am not saying this is what Jordan is doing. I am saying this is what the pattern looks like when I see it in my office, again and again, with people who are not famous and whose photos are not on Page Six.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Two Questions Every Body Is Asking

Every behavior in a relationship, including how we exit one, is driven by two questions the body never stops asking.

Are you there for me? That is the pursuer's question.

Am I enough for you? That is the withdrawer's question.

When a marriage ends, both questions get a brutal answer. Sometimes it is "no." Sometimes it is "I do not know anymore." Either way, the body is left holding the silence.

Public PDA with a new person is a frantic, synthetic way of getting an immediate, photographable "yes" to "am I enough?" It bypasses the messy, slow, painful work of sitting with the actual answer the marriage gave you. It outsources the settling that no person can give themselves all at once after a long bond ends.

And the cruelty of this is that the answer is real, for a moment. The new person genuinely does find you attractive. They genuinely do want to kiss you. The body files that as evidence and the alarm quiets. The trouble is that the alarm will be back. Because the alarm was never about whether someone, somewhere, finds you wantable. The alarm was about a bond that just ended, and bonds end inside the body on their own timeline, not the dating timeline.

The Person Not in the Photograph

I have to name this, because my work is systemic. There is a person not in those photographs whose physiology is also being shaped by them. The estranged spouse.

Most of the hurt in a relationship comes from impact without intention. The new partner's intention may be nothing more than soothing his own pain and feeling desired. The impact, on the partner reading those photos from the other side of the divorce filing, is something close to absolute devastation. Her body, also still wired to him after five years, just got handed a public, visual answer to her own "am I enough" question, and the answer was "no, and look how publicly no."

This is not a judgment of Jordan. It is just biology being honest about what photographs do. The audience is not just the audience. The audience includes the person on the other side of the courtroom, whose body is keeping its own ledger of every image.

I wrote about a similar dynamic in Maren Morris's post-divorce comments and the body after divorce, because the impact-without-intention loop is one of the most predictable and most heartbreaking patterns I see in the months after a long bond ends.

Orphan Sovereignty vs. the Slower Kind

This is where I want to draw the line that actually matters.

There is a kind of sovereignty that gets celebrated in the algorithm and is really just avoidance wearing spiritual clothing. I call it orphan sovereignty. It sounds like: I am sovereign, you are sovereign, if we cannot get along, that is just how it is. It looks like a quick pivot to a new partner with a fresh story. It performs adulthood while actually skipping it.

The slower kind of sovereignty is harder to photograph. It looks like sitting with the alarm without medicating it. It looks like grieving the bond without immediately replacing it. It looks like letting the shame cocktail be felt in the body, all the way through, without bolting for an external antidote. It looks like asking, honestly, what dance was I running in that marriage? What protector part did I send into the room every night instead of myself? What did my partner never get from me that they needed?

That work does not photograph well. It happens in kitchens at 3 a.m., in therapists' offices, on long drives, on bathroom floors. It does not soft-launch. It does not get a Page Six photo.

But it is the only kind of sovereignty that actually changes what you bring to the next bond. Without it, the next relationship will run the exact same choreography as the last one, just with a different face on the other side of the bed. Your body uses the relational wounds of the past as the default blueprint for future love. You do not get a clean reset because your legal status changed. You get a reset by doing the real labor on what just ended.

What This Looks Like Inside the Reader's Life

Maybe you are not Jordan. Maybe you are the person who just left a long bond and is feeling the pull, hard, toward someone new who makes the alarm quieter for an hour. Maybe you are the person watching an ex move on in public and feeling something inside your chest you cannot name. Maybe you are the friend of either, wondering whether to say anything.

Whichever role you are in, I want to give you one thing. Slow down enough to ask what the body is actually asking for. If the answer is "make this feeling stop," that is not the same as "I have found my next person." Both can be true at once. They almost never are this fast.

The work after a long bond ends is to let the bond actually end inside you. Not just on paper. Inside the cells. That takes longer than the divorce filing. It often takes longer than the first new relationship. It is not glamorous. It does not generate engagement. And it is the only thing that breaks the pattern.

If you are watching someone perform their healing in public, hold them gently in your mind. They are not a villain. They are probably terrified. The photo is the protector. The person underneath the protector is somewhere quieter, and they may not be able to find their way there for a while.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The photograph is not the story. The body underneath the photograph is the story. Your job, whether you are inside the picture or watching from outside it, is to stop arguing with the image and start listening to the alarm. The alarm is the truth. The PDA is the protector. Tell me which one you are going to answer.

Laurel, Maryland Domestic Homicide: Why Physical Safety Is the Floor Beneath Every Conversation About Love

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:07:39 +0000

Laurel, Maryland Domestic Homicide: Why Physical Safety Is the Floor Beneath Every Conversation About Love

A man is dead in Laurel. According to a recent WJLA report, Laurel Police are investigating a domestic-related homicide. A suspect is in custody. That is the entire public record at this hour. There is a name, an address, a charge. There is also a household where, last week, somebody was making coffee, paying a bill, deciding what to watch. And now there isn't.

I am not going to write the kind of post where a therapist explains, three paragraphs in, what was wrong with the people involved. I have never sat with them. The Goldwater rule applies in Laurel the same way it applies in Hollywood. I will not name a pattern in a person I have not met.

What I will do is talk about the line. The clinical line between a couple in a bad cycle and a couple in a dangerous one. Because the people who read an article like this are rarely the perpetrator and rarely the deceased. They are the neighbor who heard something through the wall last March. They are the sister who keeps inviting her brother-in-law over for Thanksgiving because the alternative is a fight. They are the person sitting on their bathroom floor right now, googling whether what happened last night counts.

From a Police Tape to Your Kitchen

The reason a story like Laurel matters past the news cycle is that the line between "bad fight" and "lethal event" is not the line most people think it is. It is not drawn by how loud someone is, how often they apologize, or how much they say they love you. It is drawn by physiology, history, and a very small set of behaviors that I am going to name plainly below. If you are inside a relationship and you cannot tell which side of that line you are on, that is information. Stay with me.

Love Is a Biological Bond, Not a Mood

Start here, because everything else makes no sense without it. Attachment theory is the best theory we have of what love actually is. Love is an emotional bond. We need that bond from the cradle to the grave, as Bowlby put it. Your body is not metaphorically organized around your partner. It is literally organized around them. When that bond feels threatened, your nervous system does not file a complaint. It calls a fire.

The amygdala fires. The prefrontal cortex, the part of you that can do math and remember your better angels, goes offline. The rational brain runs behind the survival brain. Inside that gap, people do things they do not believe themselves capable of. They yell at the person they love most. They throw a phone. They block a door. They pick up a thing that should not be picked up.

This is the part of the conversation that gets missed in cable coverage. Everyone wants the perpetrator to be a monster, because if he is a monster, the rest of us are safe. The clinical truth is more uncomfortable. Under threat, human beings act brilliantly for survival. But survival logic optimizes for short-term relief, not long-term thriving. The same biology that makes a parent run into traffic to save a child is the biology that, mis-wired and unattended for thirty years, ends up in a 911 call.

That does not excuse anything. It explains a mechanism. And explaining the mechanism is the first step in interrupting it before the worst version of it shows up at your door.

Protector Parts That Cross a Line

Every person I have ever sat with has what I think of as protector parts. Strategies the system built, often in childhood, to survive being unseen, unsafe, unheld. Criticism is a protector. Withdrawal is a protector. Control is a protector. Charm is a protector. All of these strategies are brilliant. All of them are loyal. All of them kept somebody alive once.

Protecting is not the same as connecting. That distinction is the whole game.

Most of the time, protector parts show up in relationships as the same exhausting cycle: one person pursues, the other shuts down, the pursuer pursues harder, the withdrawer goes further away. I have written about that dance for years. In the published piece on high-conflict divorce, I walk through what it looks like when those protectors stop being annoying and start running the household.

But there is a place beyond annoying. There is a place where a protector part stops yelling and starts grabbing. Stops withdrawing and starts blocking the exit. Stops criticizing and starts threatening. At that point we are not talking about a difficult relationship. We are talking about a relationship in which one nervous system has begun using force, coercion, or the threat of either to manage its own panic. The protector has become the danger.

This is the line. And it is where my job as a couples therapist ends and a completely different set of professionals begins.

What I Will Not Do In My Office

I want to be plain about something because the cultural script around therapy can blur it. Couples counseling is not indicated, not appropriate, not safe when there is ongoing physical violence or a credible risk of it. That is not a stylistic preference. That is the standard of care.

If a couple comes to me and a story emerges of pushing, hitting, blocking, choking, weapons brandished or implied, threats of harm to self or partner if the partner leaves, my commitment to sit in any shadow is unstoppable, but that is a little too much. We stop. We do not "study the cycle" together. We do not do an empathy exercise. We do individual work first, separately, until containment exists.

The reason is straightforward. Couples work involves softening. It involves a partner naming a fear, a longing, a piece of vulnerability they have spent years armoring against. If softening, in this household, leads to one person being unable to contain their reactivity to the point that they hit, choke, or kill another human being, then softening in my office is malpractice. I do not get to be courageous with somebody else's body.

People sometimes hear this and think it sounds like I am abandoning them. I am not. I am pointing at where the actual work is. Containment first. The relational work, if it ever happens, comes later, on a foundation that does not melt under heat.

Naming The Specific Line

Because vague advice gets people killed, let me be concrete about what I am drawing the line at. There is a difference between a severe negative cycle and an unsafe one. Both are awful. Only one is fatal.

A severe cycle, the kind I work with every week, looks like this. Somebody hits a place of frustration where they yell. They cry. They slam a cabinet. They say things they regret. They go silent for two days. They withdraw sex. They send a text that is too long and too cold. Nobody is okay. Nobody is thriving. But nobody is threatening to hit. Nobody is hitting. Nobody is blocking the exit. Nobody is coercing.

An unsafe cycle adds any of the following. Hitting. Threatening to hit. Throwing objects at or near a person. Blocking exits or refusing to allow someone to leave a room, a car, a house. Taking phones, keys, IDs, or money to prevent contact with the outside world. Threats of self-harm used as leverage to prevent a partner from leaving. Threats against children or pets. Sexual coercion. Strangulation, even once. Strangulation is a particular alarm. The research is unambiguous that nonfatal strangulation is one of the strongest predictors of later homicide in intimate partner violence.

If anything on that second list is in your home, you are not in a relationship problem. You are in a safety problem. The intervention is not a better conversation. The intervention is a plan, a phone number, and likely a door.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

Why Couples Counseling Is The Wrong Tool Here

I want to spend a minute on this because I get the call. Not in Laurel, but in a hundred towns like it. A wife rings me and says, my husband hit me last month, but he is sorry, and we want to do couples therapy. Or a husband rings and says, my wife threw a glass at my head, but she is the one who needs the work, can we come in together.

The answer is no. Not because I am uncaring. Because the dynamic that produced the violence cannot be safely studied in a room where both bodies are still inside it. The body that was hit is not free to tell the truth. The body that did the hitting is not yet able to hold its own shame without externalizing it. If I try to do the work of helping you see the cycle when one of you is still actively dangerous, I am asking the at-risk partner to expose more surface area to a weapon. That is not therapy. That is bait.

Individual work first. Each of you. Real work. Not a six-session anger management box-check. The person who used violence needs to learn what their body does in the seconds before the act, what triggered it, what story it told them, what protector took over, and what to do instead. The person who was the target needs to rebuild a sense of their own ground, their own signal, their own right to leave. That work takes time and it takes containment. Until containment exists, we do not sit together.

This is the same logic I described in the Taylor Frankie Paul piece and it has not changed. The closing of a legal case is not the closing of a wound. And the absence of an arrest is not the same as the presence of safety.

What The Window Of Tolerance Has To Do With Murder

There is a state inside which a nervous system can stay present, take in information, feel hard feelings without acting on them in ways it will regret. Call that the window. Inside the window, you can be furious and not throw the lamp. You can be terrified and not run out the door. You can want to die and not pick up the pills.

Outside the window, on the high end, you are flooded. Reactive. The house is on fire. The limbic system will burn the house down if it thinks that's what survival requires. Outside the window, on the low end, you are gone. Numb. Dissociated. Watching yourself do things from the ceiling.

Most of the relational work I do is helping people notice they have left the window earlier, so they can come back before they say or do the thing. The Laurel headline, and every headline like it, is what happens when nobody ever named the window. When a body left it years ago and nobody noticed because the protectors got more convincing, the substances got heavier, the social isolation got tighter, the firearm got purchased.

You cannot do relational work outside the window. You cannot have an empathy conversation outside the window. You cannot apply a cognitive solution to a limbic problem. The first thing, the only first thing, is to get the body back inside the window. That is what individual containment is for.

A Note On The Story Of Other

When something violent happens in a household, there is a strong pull toward a single narrative. He is a monster. Or, in the perpetrator's mouth, she made me do it. Both are versions of what I call the Story of Other, the place the mind runs to when it cannot hold the heat of its own experience.

I have written before that the Story of Other never leads to growth, never leads to healing, never leads to sovereignty. That is still true. But here is the caveat that matters when the topic is violence: in a domestic violence scenario, the victim's story that the partner is a threat is not a story. It is a fact. Asking a person who is being hurt to soften their narrative about the person hurting them is not therapy, it is gaslighting with a credential.

The work of moving from Story of Other into Experience of Self is real work, and I do it every week. But it is work for two regulated nervous systems negotiating the ordinary heartbreaks of love. It is not a frame to apply to somebody whose partner choked them last Tuesday. For that person, the first task is to leave. The interior work comes later, with a clinician who specializes in trauma, and on ground that is not currently on fire.

When The Co-Parenting Bridge Is The Risk

Many of these households have children. If you are separating from a partner whose protector parts have crossed into violence, the children become the bridge, and the bridge becomes the risk. I wrote about this in the piece on what to do when your ex won't follow the custody schedule. The general principle holds: document, use legal channels, do not try to manage their chaos through goodwill alone. The principle changes shape, though, when the ex has a documented history of violence. Then exchanges happen in public. Then exchanges happen with a third party. Then exchanges happen, sometimes, not at all, until a court has weighed in.

This is not paranoia. This is reading the actuarial table out loud. The separation window is the highest-risk window. The decision to leave is, statistically, the most dangerous moment in a violent relationship. Your safety plan needs to account for that.

What This Means For You, Specifically, This Week

If you read this far, you are probably one of three readers.

You are the person inside it. You know what I am describing because you live there. The thing you want me to tell you is that it is not that bad and there is a clever conversation you have not tried yet. I am not going to. The next step is not a conversation with your partner. The next step is a conversation with somebody outside the house. A friend, a family member, a domestic violence hotline (in the US, 1-800-799-7233), a therapist who does individual work, a lawyer if you can get one. You do not have to leave today. You have to make one outside-the-house contact today. That is the next step.

You are the person next to it. You see your sister, your friend, your brother. You have noticed the bruises, the missed calls, the way she flinches when his hand moves too fast. The instinct to confront her about it, to demand she leave, to threaten to cut her off if she stays, will backfire. What helps is staying connected. Believing her. Asking what she needs. Not making the relationship with you contingent on her decision. The exit, when it comes, requires that there be somebody on the outside still answering the phone.

You are the person who hurt somebody and is reading this because some part of you knows. That part is the part I would work with. Not to absolve you. To help you build the containment that means it does not happen again. The work is real and it is possible and it is not couples therapy. It is individual work with somebody trained in this, alongside, in many cases, a legal process you do not get to skip.

The Floor Beneath The Work

Everything I write about relationships sits on a floor. The floor is physical safety. The work of building a real bond, of moving from protection to connection, of soft eyes across a kitchen at 11 pm, all of it assumes two bodies that are not under threat of harm from each other. When that assumption breaks, the work does not get harder. The work stops, and a different kind of work begins.

A man is dead in Laurel this week. The legal system will do what it does. There will be a name and a charge and, eventually, a sentence. None of that will return him. None of that will rewrite the months and years inside that house that ended in a phone call to police. The only thing that can be done now is to look, honestly, at the houses that have not yet ended that way and ask the question the headlines never quite ask.

Is the floor under your relationship physical safety? Or have you been doing the soft work on a floor that is, in fact, on fire?

If it is the second, the soft work is not what comes next. Getting off the floor is what comes next. Then, slowly, with help, you build a new one.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

If you are reading this from inside a house that scares you: the floor comes first. Make the one call outside the house tonight.

When the Highest Court Reopens a Closed Case: What the Murdaugh Reversal Reveals About the Stories We Use to Settle Wounds That

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:09:03 +0000

When the Highest Court Reopens a Closed Case: What the Murdaugh Reversal Reveals About the Stories We Use to Settle Wounds That Will Not Settle

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

The verdict that was supposed to close one of the most consumed legal stories of the decade has been pulled back open. According to a recent report, the South Carolina Supreme Court has overturned Alex Murdaugh's murder convictions and ordered a new trial. The cable panels are already lit. The true crime podcasts are already queued. The internet has its evening.

The procedural arguments will get handled by people whose job it is to handle them. Jury tampering allegations, clerk conduct, the specific shape of the appellate finding. That isn't my lane and I won't pretend it is. I've never sat with anyone in the Murdaugh family or anyone adjacent to that case. The Goldwater rule applies to the famously accused too.

What I want to point at is the thing the headline can't. When the most authoritative legal instrument a state has on offer reopens a case the public had emotionally filed away, something fires inside the bodies of everyone watching. Survivors. Family members. Jurors. A whole community that thought the chapter was closed. The ledger they thought had been balanced is unbalanced again. And that part, the part that lives inside human physiology rather than the court reporter's transcript, is the part I can actually speak to.

From a State Supreme Court to Your Kitchen Table

You don't need a multi-generational legal dynasty or a televised trial to live inside what this moment exposes. The same mechanism that makes a community recoil when a verdict gets unwound runs through every contested estate, every reopened custody motion, every settlement that doesn't settle, every text war with a sibling about a parent's house, every time you thought you were done with a fight and your body said no, you're not.

The legal process assumes two rational actors making decisions based on financial interest. Inside a rupture, that's a fiction. There are bodies on fire, reaching for a thinking tool to close a feeling wound. Once you see that, you can't unsee it. The mechanism shows up in your divorce, your custody fight, your business partnership detonation, the text wars you've had with people you once trusted with your whole life.

The Body Is the Original Ledger

Long before any verdict or appellate filing existed, the body was already running its own bookkeeping. It logs what mattered. Safety. Abandonment. Promises kept. Promises broken. There's no motion you can file against an entry the body has already written in.

When a community follows a high-profile criminal case for years, then watches the verdict get pulled, the headlines read procedure. I read something else. I read a thousand bodies that had finally exhaled, being told to inhale again. I read survivors of less famous violence in less famous towns, watching this and remembering their own moment when the system handed them a piece of paper that was supposed to close something a piece of paper can't close.

A couple sat in my office last year. They'd been in litigation for eleven months over a toaster. A four-slice Cuisinart, maybe forty dollars on eBay. Their combined legal fees on that one item had cleared ten thousand dollars. When I finally asked the wife to tell me about the toaster, she started crying. He'd bought it for her their first Christmas together. It was the last object she still owned that proved she had once mattered to him.

She wasn't fighting for a toaster. She was fighting for evidence that she had once lived inside someone's love.

The retirement account isn't about the retirement account. The custody schedule isn't about the custody schedule. The verdict isn't only about the verdict. The body is trying to get the world to confirm something the courthouse doesn't stock in any currency at all.

Litigating the Content, Avoiding the Wound

There's an impulse I see in every couple I sit with, and it's the same impulse that makes legal dramas so consumable. The impulse to "work the case." To get stuck in the incident. It was this. It wasn't this. It was this. It wasn't this. People burn months and savings and sanity arguing the content because the content feels solvable in a way the underlying wound does not.

The problem is never the problem.

Staying inside the facts of the argument, or the facts of the trial, is a protective move. It lets you avoid the unbearable vulnerability of what's actually happening underneath. In a couple, the question underneath is some version of two ancient questions the body runs on loop. Is the person I depend on actually present. Do I matter to them. In a public legal story, the cultural-scale version is just as primal. Did the system see what happened to the person who is gone. Did anybody count what was lost.

When an appellate court reopens a verdict, it doesn't reopen a wound. The wound was never closed. It just pulls the cover off what the community had bolted down.

The Seduction of the Story of Other

There's a place every activated body sprints to when it's in pain. I call it the Story of Other. It's the most seductive place on earth.

The world will hand you all the evidence you need to support your wound. Feel dismissed and you'll spot a thousand dismissals before lunch. Feel betrayed and every text looks like betrayal. Decide a particular person is the source of all the harm and the world lines up obediently to confirm it. The trigger is real. The meaning you stack on top of the trigger comes from your history, not from anything happening outside your skin.

The Story of Other doesn't grow anything. It doesn't heal anything. It doesn't lead anywhere close to sovereignty. It's the path the lab rat keeps sprinting down, certain that this time there's food at the end. The food is never there.

A high-profile criminal trial is the Story of Other at national scale. The public gets to point a blinding flashlight outward, at the accused, at the family, at the lawyers, at the judge. Everyone becomes the keynote speaker at the world conference on what's wrong with the people on the other side of the bench. Organizing your activation around a villain is genuinely satisfying. It's also a closed loop. Nobody inside it grows. Nobody inside it heals. A reversal simply reopens the loop and asks the public to run it again.

I've written more about how this dynamic plays out inside families specifically in a piece on the Kapur family trust battle, where a matriarch ran a family rupture all the way to the Supreme Court of India and the press read it as a corporate governance story. It wasn't. It almost never is.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Compass of Shame and the Family That Can't Be Looked At

When a powerful family gets exposed by a public proceeding, the response inside the system tends to spin along what Nathanson and Tomkins mapped as the Compass of Shame. Four directions. Denial. Collapse. Attacking other. Attacking self. A body facing annihilation rotates between these poles, looking for any heading that lets it survive being seen.

Shame isn't a feeling. Shame is a biological event. The system drops altitude so fast the thinking brain can't catch up. The most common protective move, especially inside families organized around legacy and status, is attacking other. The defense aims outward. The story becomes the failures of the prosecutors, the bias of the court, the unreliability of a witness, the conduct of a clerk. Some of that may be procedurally true. None of it touches what's happening inside the family.

There's a line from the source material I keep circling back to. Everything happening in a family, no matter how carefully it's hidden, lands in the children. Everything. Families assemble what's sometimes called a Family Ego Mass, a warm fog of enmeshment that hides addiction, shame, financial pressure, and the secrets nobody is allowed to name, all under a polished surface. We get taught not to believe what our own senses tell us. We survive by maintaining the illusion. Until something breaks the system open, and even then, the protector parts don't retire. They escalate.

I'm not claiming any of that is what happened inside this particular family. I'm saying it's the pattern I see in much less famous families every week, in my office, when a long-buried secret finally surfaces and the system tries to refuse what is now in plain view.

Two Truths, One Loop

The legal system demands binary outcomes. Guilty or not. Plaintiff or defendant. Custodial or non-custodial. It runs on what I call the Versus Illusion, the courtroom's insistence that one party prove the other is wrong.

Inside human systems, that's almost never the actual shape of the problem. Every conflict carries two truths. Your truth makes sense. Their truth makes sense. Two truths. One loop. No villains.

That framing applies more cleanly inside intimate relationships than inside criminal cases involving alleged violence, and I want to be careful with the distinction. I'm not collapsing the moral asymmetry of a homicide into a both-sides framing. I'm pointing at the wider pattern. When a court hands down a verdict, the body of the bereaved often gets told something has been settled. When the same court reverses, the body gets told the settlement was provisional. The instrument is asking the survivor's physiology to track the procedural status of their own grief. The body can't do that. It doesn't file in segments.

This is the same mechanism I see inside high-conflict divorces, which I wrote about in the Bevin piece on judicial bias claims. A spouse in attachment panic reaches for the most authoritative figure in the room and demands that figure validate the story. When the figure won't, the panic escalates. The court appearance becomes the wound's new home.

What the System Cannot Settle

Let me say the clinical thing as plainly as I can.

No verdict, no appellate ruling, no settlement, no piece of paper from any court at any level in any jurisdiction has ever closed a wound the body is keeping open. It can't. The tool wasn't built for the job.

The court can deliver consequences. It can name responsibility. It can order restraint, divide assets, set custody. None of that is nothing. For some survivors, the public naming of what happened is genuinely necessary, and I won't minimize that. What the court can't do is provide the settling, the witnessing, and the safety an alarmed survival response actually needs in order to integrate what it has lived through. That work happens in a different room, with a different kind of attention, on a different timeline.

When the headlines reopen a verdict, the survivors I sit with don't need a procedural explanation. They need their body met by someone who can stay present with what just got unbolted. That's the work. That's what no appellate finding can deliver and no comment thread can replace.

Application: When the News Cycle Reopens Your Own Case

If you're reading this from inside your own version of this, your own reopened motion, your own reversed expectation, your own moment when the thing you thought was settled suddenly isn't, the first move isn't legal. It's somatic.

Find the ground under your feet. Notice your breath. Notice the temperature of the room. Notice that the news on the screen isn't actually happening to your body in this moment, even if your body can't tell the difference. Then ask yourself what the verdict, or the reversal, or the filing, was supposed to do for you that it hasn't done. Be specific. Was it supposed to make you matter. Make the harm count. Confirm you weren't crazy. Confirm you were loved.

Whatever the answer is, that's the actual case. The court was never the place it was going to be tried. I've written more about how this plays out for parents specifically in pieces on what to do when your ex won't follow the custody schedule and when a new partner enters the custody picture. The pattern is the same. The legal instrument is a stand-in for an emotional debt the legal instrument was never going to clear.

What To Do Next

If a headline this week pulled something open inside you that you thought had been put away, that's information. It's not a sign that you've failed to move on. It's a sign the original wound was never settled, only sedated.

The work isn't to litigate the case harder. The work is to give the wound the kind of attention the wound was always asking for. A settled body across from you. Someone who can stay present while you finally let what's true rise up through you. That's the actual settlement.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The court will reopen what it reopens. It will close what it closes. None of that's in your hands. What's in your hands is whether you keep handing your wound to an instrument that can't hold it. Stop handing it over. Bring it home. That's where the real case gets heard.

Ariana Grande and Ethan Slater Split After Three Years: Why "Amicable" Breakups Still Wreck the Nervous System

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 07:07:24 +0000

Ariana Grande and Ethan Slater Split After Three Years: Why "Amicable" Breakups Still Wreck the Nervous System

There is a particular tone the culture uses when it announces a quiet celebrity split. Adult. Measured. Adjective of choice: amicable. No villain, no third party, no leaked text thread. Two people in their thirties who looked at the math and agreed the answer was zero.

According to a recent Daily Mail report, Ariana Grande and Ethan Slater have called it on a three-year relationship that started on the set of Wicked and survived a year of relentless press. The reporting says they had actually been single for months before the news broke. No drama. A slow fade. A clean exit.

The internet has greeted this with the usual mixture of relief and disappointment. Relief because nobody has to be the bad guy. Disappointment because there is nothing to feast on. A few commenters will say something like "good for them, healthy" and move on to the next story.

I want to say something different. I have been a couples therapist for sixteen years. I've sat with over three thousand couples. And I can tell you that the word "amicable," when applied to the end of a primary romantic bond, is almost always a press release the body has not yet read.

From the Press Release to the Body

The cultural algorithm rewards the amicable narrative. It praises maturity. It avoids litigation. It lets everyone keep their endorsements. But the mammalian body does not care about any of that. For your physiology, there is no such thing as a casual severance of a primary attachment bond. Three years of calming each other, three years of one specific person being the one you orient toward when the world gets loud, does not end the way a press cycle ends.

I want to use this moment to talk about what actually happens inside the people in these stories. Not to diagnose anyone, I have never met Ariana Grande or Ethan Slater and I never will. But the patterns I see in my office, the ones I see every week, are the patterns most readers landing on a story like this are quietly living through themselves.

The Myth of the Clean Break

Adults remain dependent on their primary romantic partners for emotional safety. This is not a flaw in the design. It is the design. Attachment is not a personality quirk. It is a biological imperative, the same machinery that kept infants alive on the savanna, repurposed for adult love. When a three-year bond dissolves, regardless of how civil the conversation was, the limbic system protests because the absence of the bond reads, at the deepest level, as a survival threat.

This is why people who have never been through a long breakup judge those who fall apart over one. They see a healthy adult with money, friends, and options, sobbing in a parking lot, and they think: come on. Pull yourself together. But anyone who has lost their special person knows the physiology does not behave like a spreadsheet. You can be financially secure, have a calendar full of friends, and still wake up at 4 a.m. with the entire weight of a missing person pressing on your chest.

An amicable breakup does not exempt the body. It just exempts the lawyer.

The Quiet Fade Is Almost Never Quiet

Here is what I see in my practice. When a couple ends "quietly," that quietness is almost never the starting point. It is the final stage of an exhausting loop nobody outside the relationship ever saw.

In Emotionally Focused Therapy we call this loop the negative cycle. One partner senses disconnection and reaches. They might reach with criticism, with tears, with a sigh, with a question that sounds like an accusation. I call this person the Relentless Lover. Underneath every protest is the same question: do I matter to you, am I on your mind, will you come find me if I'm hurting.

The other partner hears that protest as evidence of their own failure. Their body, which learned a long time ago that closeness comes with a bill, retreats. They go quiet. They work late. They become harder to reach. I call this person the Reluctant Lover. Their withdrawal is not indifference. It is the only move their body knows when the shame floods in.

The Relentless Lover reaches harder. The Reluctant Lover retreats further. The content of the fight changes every week, money, schedules, in-laws, the dishwasher, but the choreography never does.

Our data from over 40,000 people who have taken the Empathi quiz reveals something most therapy blogs miss. Relentless Lovers do not pursue forever. They pursue until they collapse. When their protests for closeness keep landing as criticism, their second and third most common behaviors become shutting down and withdrawing. The pursuer simply gives up.

This is what the world reads as "amicable." A pursuer who has finished pursuing. A withdrawer who finally got the space they thought they wanted, and discovered the space is empty.

The quietness does not mean there was no pain. It means the pain of trying to connect finally outweighed the pain of letting go.

You Can Understand the Mango Without Tasting It

When two intelligent, articulate, successful people separate without a public meltdown, it usually means they had enough cognitive horsepower to describe their incompatibility to each other. They could name the schedules, the press, the different career trajectories, the different cities, the different demands. They could narrate the problem with precision.

Getting it cognitively is not enough.

You can describe a mango for an hour. The texture, the smell, the way the fiber catches between your teeth. That is not the same thing as tasting the mango. You cannot logic your way back into connection. Love is experiential. The bond rewires through what the two bodies do in the room together, not through what the two prefrontal cortices agree on in the kitchen.

A quiet breakup often means two people could clearly see the logistical problem and lacked the capacity to create a new physiological reality between them in the present moment. They knew what was wrong. They could not get into a room together and feel different. That is a different problem than knowing.

I've written more about how this collapse plays out when small daily moments stop landing in my piece on Gottman's bids for connection. The masters of relationships turn toward each other's small reaches 86% of the time. The disasters turn toward 33% of the time. That gap is not about love. It is about whether the bid is registering inside the other person. Two people on opposite coasts, mid-press-tour, exhausted, are not going to hit 86%. Nobody could.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Versus Illusion, and Why Pop Therapy Wants You to Pick a Villain

The seduction of any breakup, your friend's, your own, a stranger's on a tabloid front page, is the Story of Other. The world will always offer facts to support your wound. There is always a screenshot, a quote, an interview from four years ago that, in isolation, makes the ex look like the problem.

Pop psychology now industrializes this. It tells you to label your ex as toxic, avoidant, narcissistic, love-bombing, breadcrumbing. It gives you a tidy bin for the entire human being you spent three years with. This is what I mean by the Versus Illusion. The false certainty that you were fighting a broken partner.

The amicable split, when it is real, is the rare case where two people refuse the Versus Illusion. They look at what happened and accept the systemic truth. We were both hurting. We were both reacting. It was only happening because we were so important to each other. The protectors that came online in me met the protectors that came online in you, and the dance neither of us chose ended up running the show.

Most of the hurt in a relationship comes from impact without intention. Two people throwing emotional boomerangs, each doing exactly what made sense to survive their own pain, each landing the boomerang squarely on the other.

That is the more honest story than the one with a villain. It is also the harder one to sit with. It does not let you off the hook. It does not give you someone to blame. It just gives you the system you were inside.

The Dueling Geminis: Why Attachment Roles Are Not Fixed

People want to assign roles. She was the avoidant one. He was the anxious one. He pursued, she pulled away. This makes for clean coverage. It does not match the inside of any long relationship I have ever seen.

In my own marriage, Teale and I call ourselves the Dueling Geminis. I might pursue her with some version of, "How come you don't seem to care about me right now?" Then her body hurts and she withdraws. My shame triggers, I shut down, and suddenly she is the one asking, "Where did you go?" The roles flip inside an afternoon. Sometimes inside a sentence.

Any couple under sustained pressure, a Grammy tour, a film release, a press cycle, an infant, a parent dying, a move across the country, will trade these roles dynamically. The split, when it comes, is rarely a failure of one fixed personality type meeting another. It is a systemic exhaustion where neither person can anchor the other anymore. Both people end up withdrawn. Both people end up describing the other as the one who pulled away. The cruel symmetry of the late-stage cycle is that each partner genuinely believes they are the one who got left.

If you want to look at the deeper architecture of how a long bond ends in public without an obvious villain, I wrote more about this watching another high-profile couple come apart in Vernon Kay and Tess Daly after 23 years. The mechanics are the same. The pressure of being watched just removes the privacy a normal body needs to fall apart honestly.

Connection First, Problem Solving Later

If a couple in the late stages of this dance came to my office, what they almost always want to do is solve the logistics. Schedules. Cities. Careers. Whose family to spend the holidays with. They want a project plan.

I make them stop.

When two people are deep in the cycle, the prefrontal cortex is offline. The rational brain is running behind the survival brain. Trying to negotiate the logistics of two enormous careers while the bond itself feels threatened is gasoline on a fire. You cannot solve a logistical problem with a body in alarm. You have to settle the bond first, then problem-solve.

This is the order of operations almost every couple gets wrong, and almost every breakup blog gets wrong. Safety in the body. Then connection between the bodies. Then access to the rational brain. Then, and only then, the talk about how to actually live together inside two demanding lives. Skip the order and you end up in a quiet split eighteen months later, telling your friends it was just the schedules.

If the breakup has already happened and you are now trying to figure out whether the relationship was depleted or actually broken, I walked through the diagnostic in how to fix a broken relationship. The repair protocol for each is different. Most people who think they have a broken relationship actually have a depleted one. Some don't. Knowing which is the first move.

What Most Of Us Feel Underneath

When we ask people what they feel deep down when love is not working, the most common answer is not anger. It is not resentment. It is alone.

This is what forty thousand survey responses have told us. Both partners in a pursue-withdraw dynamic describe the other one as the withdrawn one. Each person feels like they are the one being pulled away from. Each person is sitting in a separate bubble of suffering, convinced the other one left first.

In the months leading up to an "amicable" split, while the cameras are still flashing and the joint appearances still happen, two people are very often sitting in exactly that. Two separate, isolated experiences of the same loneliness, neither one able to reach across.

Back to You

You did not come here for celebrity gossip. You came here because some piece of this story matched something you are carrying. Maybe you are in the quiet stage of your own slow fade. Maybe you are the pursuer who has stopped pursuing and you do not yet have language for what that means. Maybe you are the withdrawer who finally got the space and discovered, like I said before, that the space is empty.

The work, if you want to do it, is not to figure out who was the villain. There usually isn't one. The work is to look at the dance you and your partner were caught in, name the protectors that came online in each of you, and ask whether you have it in you to do the experiential proof of work the bond needs. Not the talk. The actual physiological repair, in a room, with each other, slowly.

If you are post-breakup and the body is still grieving someone who is technically supposed to be filed under "amicable," I will tell you what I tell my clients. Your physiology did not get the memo. It is going to take time. It is going to be nonlinear. The fact that there was no villain does not mean there is no wound.

What To Do Next

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The press release is for the public. The body is for you. Stop reading other people's amicable. Go find out what yours actually feels like.

When the Unfollow Becomes the Protest: What Lee Andrews and Katie Price Reveal About Digital Attachment Wounds

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:08:53 +0000

When the Unfollow Becomes the Protest: What Lee Andrews and Katie Price Reveal About Digital Attachment Wounds

A man sitting in a cell in Al Awir Central Prison in Dubai opens Instagram and removes his wife from his follow list. That is the story. According to a recent Daily Mail piece, Lee Andrews unfollowed Katie Price the same week she returned to the platform following her own ban, while he himself is incarcerated over what is being described as a private civil matter. He went missing for two weeks. Now he is locked in a foreign jail. And the action that made the headlines is a tap on a screen.

The internet has read this as petty. As tabloid theatre. As one more chapter in a public marriage that seems to specialise in chapters. I want to read it differently. Because in my office, I have watched hundreds of couples do the digital version of exactly this. The unfollow. The mute. The block. The screenshot saved for evidence. The followers list checked at 2 a.m. when the body cannot sleep. Different platforms, different income brackets, identical wound.

What you are seeing here is not pettiness. It is a body in a cell, doing the only thing it can still do. And if you have ever found yourself hovering over the unfollow button on someone you actually love, this article is for you.

From Tabloid Spectacle to Therapy Room

You do not need to know anything about Katie Price or Lee Andrews to recognise this dynamic. You only need to have loved someone, felt invisible to them, and reached for the nearest digital weapon. The behaviour scales down beautifully from a celebrity prison cell to a suburban kitchen. The mechanism is the same.

So let's leave the celebrities to their own lives, where they belong, and talk about what actually happens when a person uses a platform to communicate something they cannot bear to say with their voice.

The Fight Is Never About the Follow

In sixteen years of clinical practice I have learned one thing more thoroughly than anything else. The fight is never about the thing. The dishes are not about the dishes. The phone is not about the phone. And the unfollow is not about the unfollow.

Every recurring fight, every dramatic gesture, every digital weapon, is a protest. It is one person's body saying, in the only language it can find, I do not feel safe with you right now. I do not feel seen. I do not feel like I matter.

I had a couple in my office last week who spent forty minutes litigating whether the husband had liked an old colleague's beach photo on Instagram. Forty minutes. He kept defending the like as meaningless. She kept escalating, pulling up other examples, building a case. By the time I slowed them down, both of them were shaking. He thought she was crazy. She thought he was a liar. Neither of them was right. Both of them were terrified.

Because underneath the Instagram like was the question her body was actually asking. Do I matter to you more than other women? Will you choose me when no one is watching? And underneath his rigid defence was the wound that runs his entire system. Nothing I do is ever enough. I am going to be a disappointment no matter how I move.

That is the real conversation. The like was the stage where their pain decided to perform that day. I have written more about how this plays out in the fights couples keep having about social media, because the pattern is so consistent it is almost boring once you can see it.

The Two Questions Underneath Everything

The attachment system in adult love has one job. It scans, constantly, for the answer to two questions.

Are you there for me?

Am I enough for you?

When the answers feel like yes, the body softens. You are generous. You are funny. You can tolerate your partner's bad mood without making it about you. When the answers feel like no, the body treats it as a survival emergency. The rational brain runs behind the survival brain. You stop being able to think clearly. You reach for whatever weapon is closest.

In 2015 the weapon was a slammed door. In 2025 the weapon is a tap on a screen that everyone in the world can witness, including the algorithm that will now serve both of you content designed to keep the wound open. The platform is new. The protest is ancient.

A man in a cell, stripped of agency, stripped of his name in the news cycle, stripped of his physical body's ability to do anything about his situation, reaches for the one act of agency that the prison guards cannot stop. He unfollows. The body needs to do something. The body chooses the only lever it has left.

The Compass of Shame Has a Digital North

When the bond is threatened and the body cannot find safety, people spin on what Donald Nathanson called the Compass of Shame. There are four points on this compass. Withdrawal. Avoidance. Attack Self. Attack Other.

Incarceration is a master class in shame. You are publicly named as failed. Your body is held. Your sovereignty is gone. The story being written about you is being written without you in the room. In that condition, the survival response will reach for whatever combination of these four points it can access.

An unfollow is a beautifully compressed cocktail of two of them. It is Withdrawal, because it removes you from the feed, makes you invisible, says I am hiding now. And it is Attack Other, because it is a public act that broadcasts to thousands of strangers this person is not mine and I am not theirs. Both protections deployed in a single tap. The body is doing what bodies do.

The tragedy is that the protections that worked in childhood, that helped you survive the actual conditions you were given, are catastrophic in adult love. Withdrawing from the very person whose presence you need is a strategy that makes total sense to your physiology and total nonsense to the relationship.

The Story of Other Versus the Experience of Self

Here is the move I watch couples make, over and over, that keeps the loop alive.

When the pain becomes unbearable, people retreat into the Story of Other. They become, as I sometimes say in session, the world-renowned expert in the problems of their partner. They can list every flaw, every betrayal, every disappointment. They can build a case so airtight that a jury of strangers on the internet would convict.

What they cannot do is sit in the Experience of Self.

The Experience of Self in a cell looks like this. I am terrified. I am alone. I do not know if she is going to wait for me. I do not know who I am if I am not the man I was a month ago. I have lost my body's freedom and I am about to lose the only person who knows the parts of me the public does not see.

That is not a tweetable feeling. That is not a headline. That is the kind of pain that crushes the chest. So the survival brain performs an emergency surgery. It exits the Experience of Self and dives into the Story of Other. She did this. She always does this. I am unfollowing because of what she did.

The unfollow lets the man avoid the well of aloneness for another ten minutes. That is its function. It is not strategic. It is anaesthetic.

The Waltz of Pain Has Wifi Now

In Emotionally Focused Therapy we map the cycle that couples get stuck in as the Waltz of Pain. It has four steps. One partner experiences an unmet need and a vulnerable feeling. To protect themselves from that feeling, they enact a protest behaviour. The protest behaviour hits the other partner's vulnerability. The second partner reacts with their own protest. The loop closes and begins again.

What looks like petty drama is two scared people dancing their pain. The choreography is just being performed on Instagram instead of in a kitchen.

You can see how the steps map. He feels disappeared from her life. He protests by disappearing her from his. She feels abandoned by his disappearance. She protests by posting more, or posting nothing, or posting something cryptic. He sees the post and feels confirmed in his story that she does not care. The wheel turns.

Neither person is the villain here. Neither person is correct. Both bodies are simply doing what bodies do when the bond feels unsafe and the survival brain has taken the wheel. I have written about this loop in more detail in my piece on the pursue and withdraw cycle, and the underlying mechanism is the same whether you are in a council flat, a Dubai prison, or a Selling Sunset mansion.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Platform as Micro Third Party

There is one more thing I want to name, because it is the thing the cultural conversation almost never names.

Every social media platform is a third party in your relationship. Not a neutral one. An actively interested one. The algorithm has goals. Those goals are not your bond. Those goals are your engagement, your outrage, your scroll time. The platform makes money when you are dysregulated. It loses money when you are settled and present with your partner.

So when you fight about Instagram, you are not just fighting with your partner. You are fighting inside an arena that profits from your inability to settle down. The arena is shaped to keep you reaching, comparing, doubting, performing. It is the perfect environment for an anxious nervous system to lose its mind, and the perfect environment for an avoidant one to find endless distractions.

A celebrity couple lives in this arena at maximum volume. Their fights are not just witnessed, they are monetised. Their reconciliations are content. Their unfollows generate ad revenue. The platform is feeding on the wound while pretending to be neutral infrastructure.

You and I are not famous, but the same architecture is in our pockets. The phone is a micro third party in the bed. The followers list is a piece of evidence in a trial we did not consent to. The block button is a relationship intervention designed by people who have never sat with a couple in pain.

This is part of why building real safety with another human being now requires more than goodwill. It requires what I think of as secure functioning, an explicit agreement between two people about how they will protect the bond from the systems that would happily destroy it for profit.

What the Body Is Actually Asking For

If you strip away the cell, the prison, the headlines, the platform, the cameras, what is left in this story is a man who is terrified and a woman who is terrified, separated by walls neither of them can scale, communicating through a medium designed to make everything worse.

The body is not asking for revenge when it taps unfollow. The body is asking do you still see me. The body is asking will you reach for me even when I make it hard. The body is asking the same two questions it has been asking since infancy. Are you there for me. Am I enough for you.

The answer the body needs cannot be delivered through a platform. The platform is not built for it. The answer the body needs is a turning toward, in the flesh, with the rational brain back online and the survival brain temporarily settled. A voice saying I am here. I am not going anywhere. The story you are telling yourself about me is not true.

In a cell, in Dubai, that turning toward is geographically impossible. Which is part of the tragedy. But it is possible for you, reading this in your kitchen, with the phone face down and your partner three feet away.

Bringing This Back to Your Life

You are not in prison. Your partner is not on tabloid covers. But if you are honest, you have probably done the small domestic version of the unfollow this week. The cold goodnight. The pointed silence. The post that was clearly aimed but plausibly deniable. The followers list checked one more time. The screenshot saved.

If you can catch yourself in that moment, before the tap, you can do something different. Not because the impulse is bad. The impulse is your activation asking for help. But the help it is reaching for, the digital weapon, will not actually settle the body. It will only confirm the story that you and your partner are enemies.

The harder move is to put the phone down and name the feeling underneath. I am scared. I am alone. I do not know if I matter to you right now. That sentence is the doorway out of the Waltz. It is the only sentence that breaks the loop. It is also the sentence that the survival brain will fight you the hardest to avoid saying.

What to Do Next

If you are reading this and recognising yourself, not the celebrities, the recognition itself is the beginning of the work. Most people are too defended to even arrive here. You arrived.

The next move is to find a way to interrupt the loop the next time your body reaches for a digital weapon. That interruption is a skill. It is not personality. It is not a fixed trait you do or do not have. It is a capacity you build, one practiced moment at a time, until your body trusts that turning toward is safer than tapping unfollow.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The platform will not save you. The algorithm does not want you to settle. The unfollow will feel like power for ten seconds and then leave you more alone than before. The work is somewhere else. It is in your body, with your partner, in the room you are actually in. Put the phone down. Say the harder sentence. That is the whole game.

Michelle Obama Says Her "Last Chapter" Is for Her, Not Her Family. A Couples Therapist on What That Actually Takes.

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 14:08:16 +0000

Michelle Obama Says Her "Last Chapter" Is for Her, Not Her Family. A Couples Therapist on What That Actually Takes.

At a live recording of the IMO podcast during SXSW London this week, Michelle Obama sat next to her brother Craig Robinson and made a statement that has been ricocheting around the internet for forty eight hours. According to The Hollywood Reporter, she told the crowd, "The choices I make now are going to be for me, not my husband, kids, the country."

The algorithm has done what the algorithm does. The line has been clipped, captioned, and absorbed into the endless cultural feed where every assertion of a woman's selfhood gets repackaged as feminist triumph or marital crisis, depending on which audience you're farming. Half the takes are "she's finally free." The other half are "this is what divorce sounds like."

I think both reads are wrong. Wrong in the same way. They both assume the only way a woman gets to herself is by getting away from the people she loves.

I want to offer a different lens. I'm a couples therapist. I've sat with more than three thousand couples over sixteen years of clinical work. When I hear a woman in her sixties say her next chapter is for her, I don't hear someone leaving. I hear someone who has done so much relational labor that she now has the ground under her feet to stand on. That ground is not built by walking away. It is built by staying long enough for something to hold.

The Bridge: Sovereignty Is Not What You Think

The internet keeps confusing two very different states. One is the withdrawal of someone whose body finally cannot take another rupture and is pulling up the gate. The other is the calm of someone whose bond has held through so many ruptures and repairs that she can finally rest inside it. They look similar from the outside. They are opposite on the inside. One is exile. The other is what I call the Sovereign Us. Let's talk about how you tell the difference, because this is the work most couples are actually trying to do, whether they have the language for it or not.

Sovereignty Is a Drawbridge, Not a Wall

Here is what the wellness industry got wrong. It sold you walls. It told you that the way to protect yourself was to build a fortress, label everyone toxic, cut people off, and call that healing. That is not sovereignty. That is exile dressed up as empowerment. It works for about a year, and then the loneliness becomes its own kind of prison.

Real sovereignty is a drawbridge. You decide when it comes down and when it goes up. You control the access. And the only way you get to operate that drawbridge with any confidence is by knowing, in your body, that the bond on the other side of it will hold when you lower it.

The wall person says, "I don't need anyone." The settled person says, "I am here. You are there. We can choose each other again tomorrow, and the day after, and that choice is what makes me free."

Those are very different states of activation. One is braced. One is rested.

When Michelle Obama says her choices are for her now, I don't hear a woman building a wall. I hear a woman operating a drawbridge she has spent decades earning the right to operate. The husband, the kids, the country, those are not enemies she is escaping. Those are bonds that have, over time, become secure enough that she does not have to keep proving her belonging inside them. She gets to choose herself without that choice meaning betrayal.

That is the whole point of secure attachment. Adults remain biologically dependent on a primary bond for emotional safety. That wiring does not vanish when you turn sixty. You don't outgrow the need. What you can do, over decades, is settle the question of whether the bond will hold, so that the daily wondering stops eating your bandwidth. Once that question is settled, you have your life back.

Where That Settled Ground Actually Comes From

People assume self-regulation precedes connection. You work on yourself, you get whole, and then you show up to a relationship as a finished product. That is fiat sovereignty. It's a story we sell ourselves because it's easier than the truth.

The truth is that real sovereignty is an emergent property. It rises out of the real labor of being safely met by another body, over and over, in the moments where you are most exposed. You don't get there alone. You get there through what I call rupture and repair, the slow accumulation of moments where the bond bends and does not break.

I guarantee the Obamas have had those moments. Two people, decades of marriage, the unique pressure cooker of public life. Of course they have been disconnected. Of course there were nights where neither one of them knew how to get back to the other. What matters is whether they kept coming back. Each return teaches your body that the bond can hold. After enough returns, you stop bracing.

This is why the language of "she's finally free of him" misses what is actually happening when someone in a long marriage steps into a chapter for herself. She is not free of him. She is free because of him. Because of the work they did. Because the bond is so settled that her selfhood is no longer at risk inside it.

The people who get there are not the ones who never fought. They are the ones who kept turning back toward each other after the fights. That is the unsexy clinical reality. Repair, repair, repair, until your body believes the bond is real.

What the Withdrawal Looks Like When It's Not Sovereignty

I want to name the opposite, because it lives in many of the houses reading this article. The withdrawal that looks like sovereignty but is actually the Reluctant Lover going quiet because they cannot survive another round.

In our data from more than forty thousand people who've taken our Empathi assessment, when we ask what people feel deep down when love is not working, the most common answer is not anger. It's not resentment. It's alone. Alone in the same house. Alone next to the body of the person they married. Alone while smiling for the school pickup.

The Reluctant Lover does not stomp off. They go very quiet. They start saying things like "I'm just focused on myself now" and "I'm done trying." It sounds like sovereignty. It is not. It is a survival response that has been flooded so many times it has finally pulled the plug to survive. The Relentless Lover on the other side pursued and pursued, asking some version of "are you with me," until they collapsed into their own version of the same exhausted aloneness.

This is what I clinically call the Waltz of Pain. Two protective strategies colliding, each one perfectly designed to gut the other while looking, from the inside, like the only sane response to the situation.

If you read Michelle's quote and felt a hot spike of recognition, like "yes, my chapter is for me too, I'm done," I want you to pause. Ask whether what you're feeling is settled ground, or whether it's the relief of finally giving up. Those are very different states. One leads somewhere. The other leads to a quieter version of the same loneliness, just with better branding.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

Compassion for Me, Compassion for You, Compassion for the System

There is a clinical move I teach couples that I call Empathy Cubed. Three layers. Compassion for me. Compassion for you. Compassion for the tragic system we built together without meaning to.

Most couples never make it past layer one. They are so consumed by their own pain that they cannot see their partner as a separate, suffering human being with their own protective strategies. The fight is always about who hurt whom first.

A few make it to layer two. They can sit across from their partner and actually see them. See the scared kid inside the angry adult. See the protector parts standing at the door of the heart, doing the only job they know how to do.

Layer three is rare. Layer three is when you can hold both your own pain and your partner's pain and see, with clear eyes, the system the two of you keep co-creating. You stop fighting the partner. You start fighting the pattern.

When I listen to how Michelle Obama talks about her marriage in interviews, I do not hear contempt. I do not hear blame. I hear a woman who has clearly done a version of this work. She is not externalizing her pain onto Barack. She is not making her selfhood contingent on him being wrong. She is just naming what is now true for her, with no villain in the story. That is layer three. That is the thing that takes decades.

You can read more about how this kind of pattern recognition actually plays out in real couples in my piece on protector parts and the bouncer at the door of every relationship. It will give you the bones of what I mean.

You Cannot Logic Your Way Here

I want to be honest about something the wellness internet will not tell you. You cannot read your way to settled ground. You cannot listen to your way there. You cannot quiz your way there.

I describe this to my clients with the mango analogy. You can spend an hour describing a mango's color, its texture, the regions it grows in, the chemistry of its sugars. None of that is the same thing as biting into one. The taste arrives in your body, not your head. Connection works the same way. You have to access the vulnerable feeling in real time, share it from inside your skin, and ask, from that exposed place, will you please love this part of me.

That is the actual work. It looks unimpressive on paper. It is brutal in the room.

In my own marriage, I remember a trip to Dublin years ago where I made a careless joke that landed on my wife Teale like a knife. I could have defended the joke. She could have stayed inside the hurt. We both could have logged it as one more rupture and moved on. Instead we stayed in the wound. I let her know she is never too much for me. She let me know I am not the disappointment my body has always feared I am. We held each other in the places our childhoods left tender.

That is what I call the missing experience. The moment where the younger part of you receives the love it never got. Each one of those moments is a new file written over an old one. Enough of those files and your body updates its default assumption about whether love is safe.

The Obamas did not get to her current "this chapter is for me" by reading articles about it. They got there by accumulating enough missing experiences to retire the old terror.

If you want a deeper read on what real repair work looks like inside a marriage, especially when one partner has spent years feeling alone in the same house, I wrote about it in the piece on being married to a workaholic. The pattern is the same. The pursuer underneath the pursuit is asking, are you here with me. The withdrawer underneath the withdrawal is asking, am I enough for you. Both are starving. Both think the other is the enemy.

What This Means For You, In Your Actual House, Tonight

You are not Michelle Obama. You are not a former First Lady stepping into a public last chapter at SXSW London. You are someone in a kitchen, or a car, or a bed where your partner has their back to you. Maybe you read that quote and felt a small lift. Maybe you felt envy. Maybe you felt a stab of grief.

The relevant question is not whether you should announce a chapter for yourself. The relevant question is whether the bond underneath your life is settled enough that you could announce one without the announcement being a hand grenade.

If the answer is no, this is not the moment to perform sovereignty. This is the moment to do the slow, unglamorous behavioral evidence of turning back toward your partner one more time. Not because they deserve it. Because that is the only road to the place you actually want to live in. That kind of settled freedom is downstream of repair. It is not upstream.

If you are already exhausted, if you have tried to turn back and felt the door slammed in your face, that is information too. I wrote separately about what to do when your spouse refuses to end an affair, because some bonds are being actively burned by one partner and no amount of relational labor from the other person will hold it. Knowing the difference between "we have work to do" and "they are choosing this" is part of the work.

What to Do Next

If something in this article hit a nerve, do not let the nerve close back up by tomorrow morning. The window where a piece of writing can actually move you is small. Use it.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

A chapter for yourself is not something you declare. It is something that becomes possible after the bond has held enough times that you stop bracing. Go do the next repair. That is how the chapter starts.

When a Family Demands Answers After an In-Custody Death: The Biology of Institutional Silence and the Wound No Press Release Can

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:13:31 +0000

When a Family Demands Answers After an In-Custody Death: The Biology of Institutional Silence and the Wound No Press Release Can Close

In Bexar County this week, a family is standing in front of cameras asking a question no answer will fully settle. Their loved one died in the custody of the Sheriff's Office. According to a recent KSAT report, the family is demanding answers, demanding video, demanding accountability, demanding that someone in a uniform stand up and tell them what actually happened to a person they loved.

The press will frame this as a procedural story. Internal review. Custodial death protocols. A timeline of incident reports. Lawyers will be retained. Statements will be drafted. The county will say what counties say.

I want to read it differently. I am not diagnosing anyone in Bexar County. I have never sat with this family, I have never sat with the deputies on shift that night, and the Goldwater rule applies to sheriffs and grieving relatives just as much as to celebrities. What I am pointing at is a pattern I have watched in my office for sixteen years, in less televised form, almost every week. When an institution that was supposed to be holding the safety of a citizen instead returns a body, and then closes the door, what follows is not a legal dispute. It is a limbic emergency between a family and a system that does not know it is in one.

From a Press Conference to Your Own Kitchen Table

You do not need a sheriff's office to live inside this story. The same thread runs through every family that has tried to get a straight answer out of a hospital after a loved one died on a gurney. Every spouse who tried to get a custody question answered without a fight. Every adult child who asked a parent what really happened in the family and got procedure instead of presence. The institution is just the wallpaper. The wound is the same.

The legal system, like the medical system, like family court, assumes two rational actors making decisions based on their interests. Inside a survival event, there are no two rational actors. There is a body in alarm trying to use a cognitive instrument to settle a biological problem. Once you see this, you cannot unsee it.

The House Is on Fire

When the call comes that someone you loved has died in state custody, and then the agency that made the call goes quiet, your body does not interpret the silence as bureaucracy. It interprets the silence as a second injury layered on top of the first. The body learns, in seconds, that the structure that was supposed to keep this person alive will not even tell you how they died.

That is when the house catches fire. Not literally. Biologically. The amygdala fires, the prefrontal cortex goes offline, and the survival brain takes over the wheel. From the outside, the family looks like they are escalating. Press conferences, attorneys, social media, motions, more press conferences. From the inside, they are not strategizing. They are fighting for their emotional survival. They are trying every door they can find to make the silence stop.

The Sheriff's Office, meanwhile, does what institutions do when they are afraid of liability and shame. It rationalizes. It cites pending investigation. It misses calls. It releases statements that say nothing. From the outside, this looks like cold professionalism. From the inside, it is an organization in its own version of survival mode, playing dead.

Two bodies, one institutional, one familial, are now locked in a cycle neither one of them is choosing.

The Waltz of Pain, Played at Civic Scale

I have a name for the choreography couples do when they are both terrified and neither can say it. I call it the Waltz of Pain. Three steps. A negative perception of the other. A reactive emotion. A protective action. Then the other person responds in kind, and the loop tightens.

What I see in stories like Bexar County is the same choreography playing at civic scale.

The family takes on the role of the Protester. Driven by abandonment, by the unbearable weight of an unanswered phone call, they push harder. They file. They speak. They demand. Their inner experience is the one I sit with constantly in my office: I am screaming into a void and nobody hears me. I am not a priority. The person I loved was not a priority. Legally, this looks like aggressive litigation. Clinically, it is a body trying to get the world to confirm that something real happened to a real person who really mattered.

The Sheriff's Office takes on the Withdrawer role. Driven by shame, by liability exposure, by the institutional terror of being a disappointment to the public, the agency shuts down, rationalizes, explains, retreats. Discovery deadlines slip. Counsel ghosts. Video does not get released. From inside the institution, this is not malice. It is dissociation in a uniform. Every press inquiry is another opportunity to feel like a failure, so the system goes quiet to protect itself.

The Protester reaches harder because the silence confirms her worst fear. The Withdrawer retreats further because the louder voice confirms his worst fear. The enemy is the loop. The cycle is the enemy. Not the family. Not even the deputies.

You cannot arrest, litigate, or press-release your way out of a biological loop.

The Mempool of the Body

Long before there was a coroner's report or an internal affairs file, the body was already the original ledger. It records everything. Every moment of safety, every moment of rupture, every promise the world made and broke.

When a family member dies in custody and the institution stonewalls, what we are watching is a trauma stuck in waiting. The transaction has not been confirmed. The body still feels an unpaid debt. Our culture has spent a century teaching us that money equals justice, so families will, rationally enough, reach for the wrongful death suit. Sometimes the suit is necessary. Sometimes it is the only language a county will respond to. But no amount of compensation, on its own, closes an emotional ledger. The body wants a different currency, and the courthouse does not carry it. I've written more about this pattern in the Kapur family trust case, where a matriarch took a family rupture all the way to the Supreme Court. The instrument was different. The mechanism was the same.

A couple sat in my office last year, eleven months and ten thousand dollars into litigation over a forty-dollar toaster. When I asked the wife to tell me about the toaster, she started crying. It was the last object that proved she had once mattered to him. She was not fighting for a toaster. She was fighting for evidence that she once lived inside someone's love.

The retirement account is never about the retirement account. The wrongful death claim is never only about the claim. The press conference is never only about the press conference. The body is trying to issue a receipt for a debt the institution has not even acknowledged exists.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Versus Illusion

The adversarial legal system runs on what I call the Versus Illusion. There is a plaintiff and there is a defendant. One side wins, one side loses, and the file gets closed. Inside the actual experience of a family who lost someone in custody, that is not the real shape of the problem.

The real shape is that a community, a county, a public trust, has ruptured. The family is one half of that rupture. The institution is the other. Underneath both of them is a third thing. The relationship between citizens and the people who hold the keys. That relationship is supposed to be sovereign. When it works, deputies and the public are not opponents. They are entries in a shared agreement that the state will hold the safety of the most vulnerable person in the room.

When that agreement breaks, both sides feel it, even if only one side knows how to say so. The family says it through grief and legal filings. The institution feels it as defensiveness, image management, and unspoken shame. Nobody at the press conference is asking the deeper question, which is, how does the bond between this community and the people who serve it get repaired? That question does not fit on a motion.

This is the same dynamic I see when a custody dispute ends with a SWAT call. Two bodies, one of them institutional, locked in alarm for so long that the survival brain finally calls in the cavalry. The cavalry, by then, has rifles, and the actual wound has not been touched.

The Time Machine

When a family member dies in custody, the people left behind do not stay in present time. They live in the Time Machine. The phone call. The drive to the morgue. The face of the deputy who could not look at them. The moment they realized the official story did not add up.

Months later, they will sit in mediation rooms or depositions and try to make a legal decision while still standing inside that phone call. Attorneys will think they are getting "emotional" or "unreasonable." They are not. They are in the past. You cannot make a present-tense decision from inside a Time Machine.

This is true for the institution too, in its own way. The agency is haunted by every prior scandal, every prior settlement, every prior career-ending review. The deputies who were on shift may be replaying their own thirty seconds on a loop, frozen between fear of consequence and fear of saying the wrong thing. They are also in the Time Machine. Nobody in the room is actually in the room.

In my office, with couples, the protocol is strict. Connection before problem solving. You cannot make a real decision while the body is in survival mode. You have to pause. You have to settle the body back into the present. Then, and only then, do you reach for the legal instrument.

Whether any institution involved in an in-custody death investigation is capable of this kind of pause is an open question. I would argue most are not. Which is why the families end up settling their own bodies themselves, alone, while still grieving.

What the Family Is Actually Asking For

If you strip away the legal language, the underlying question every family asks after an in-custody death is one of the two questions every body asks in every bond it has ever formed. I've written more about these two questions in the context of high-conflict divorce, but they apply equally here.

Are you there for me. Did you see the person I loved.

The answer the family needs is not, primarily, a legal one. They need a human being from inside the institution to stand in front of them and acknowledge, without script, that a person died who was loved, who mattered, who was somebody's son or brother or partner. They need the institution to confirm that the death was real, that the grief is real, and that the silence was a second wound on top of the first.

Almost no institution is built to do this. Risk counsel will not let them. Press strategy will not let them. The Compass of Shame inside the agency itself will not let them. So the family keeps reaching, and the agency keeps retreating, and the loop tightens.

Application: If You Are Reading This From Inside Your Own Version

You may not be facing a sheriff's office. You may be facing a hospital that lost your mother. A school that failed your child. A company that fired your spouse and then ghosted the appeal. A family member who died in circumstances no one will discuss. A parent who refuses to acknowledge what happened in your childhood.

The mechanism is the same. The wound is institutional silence laid on top of personal loss. The body cannot tell the difference between a Sheriff's Office that will not return a call and a parent who will not say "I'm sorry." Both register as the same physiological event. Both leave you reaching harder while the wall gets quieter.

What I tell people in this position is this. The legal path may be necessary. The press path may be necessary. The advocacy path may be necessary. Do not let anyone shame you out of them. But none of those instruments, on their own, will close the wound. Underneath the campaign for accountability, there is a private body that needs to be tended. A grief that has to be felt by someone who is not at a podium. A physiology that needs ground that is not built on the next motion.

Find that ground first, or alongside the legal work, not after. If you wait for the institution to give you closure, you will be waiting inside the Time Machine for the rest of your life.

What to Do Next

If you are inside one of these fights, public or private, here is the order of operations I would lay out in my office. Tend to the body before you tend to the case. Find one human being who can sit with you while you are not performing for anyone. Document everything, because the institution counts on you being too activated to track. And separate the question of legal accountability from the question of emotional reckoning. They are related, but they are not the same project, and the courthouse only stocks the first one.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Bexar County family will get some version of an answer eventually. A report. A statement. Maybe a settlement. Whether that answer touches the wound is a separate question, and one no agency is going to solve for them. They will have to build that ground themselves, the way every family carrying an institutional silence has to. The state will not hand it to you. You will have to build it on your own floor, with your own people, and decide what gets to live on top of it.

The U.S. Credit Card Debt Crisis Isn't a Budgeting Problem. It's an Attachment Crisis Happening Inside Your Marriage.

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 22:08:16 +0000

The U.S. Credit Card Debt Crisis Isn't a Budgeting Problem. It's an Attachment Crisis Happening Inside Your Marriage.

Upgrade CEO Renaud Laplanche went on the record this week and said the quiet part out loud. American credit card debt is not stabilizing. It is deteriorating. In a recent Benzinga interview, Laplanche named what most working couples already feel in their bones. Balances climbing. Rates ugly. The bottom half of American households running revolving credit not for vacations or televisions, but for eggs, daycare, fuel, the basic cost of staying alive.

For a fintech CEO, this is a market. For the couple on my office couch on a Tuesday afternoon, it is something else entirely. It is why she has not opened the Chase app in eleven days. Why he snapped at her about the Costco run. Why they have been sleeping back to back for three weeks, both pretending, both furious, both scared.

Sixteen years in this work has taught me something no fintech executive can say out loud. A credit card crisis at the national scale does not stay at the national scale. It walks into your kitchen. It crawls under your duvet. And what it does to two bodies trying to share a life is more damaging than any interest charge on any statement.

The Bridge: A Macro Number, A Micro Wound

Laplanche speaks the language of basis points and delinquency cohorts. Your living room speaks slammed cabinets, the way your partner won't look at the statement, the tone you wish you could pull back from 8:14pm last Wednesday. The translation layer between those two languages is human physiology. Right now, that layer is burning.

You can't apply a cognitive solution to a biological problem. You can't budget your way out of a survival response. You can't spreadsheet your way back to feeling chosen.

What The Statement Is Actually Doing To You

Attachment theory is the best account we have of what love actually is. Cradle to grave, we are wired for emotional bonding the way our lungs are wired for air. This is mammalian biology, not poetry. Underneath every exchange with your partner, your body runs two questions on loop. Are you there for me. Do I matter to you.

When the answer registers as no, the biological house catches fire. The amygdala fires before the rational brain knows there is a threat.

Now lay a $9,000 revolving balance on top of that. Lay the minimum payment that barely dents the principal. Lay the small drop in your stomach when the credit score notification pings your phone. Your physiology does not distinguish "consumer credit is deteriorating" from "I am not safe." It just clocks threat. And the person beside you on the couch, the one your body is hoping will help you settle, is sending the same threat signal right back.

Two flooded bodies, one living room. Then one of you mentions the credit card.

The Fight About The Statement Is Never About The Statement

Couples come into my office certain they are having a rational conversation about money. They are not. The thinking brain lags the survival brain. By the time the prefrontal cortex shows up to the meeting, the amygdala has already classified your spouse as a hostile actor and deployed the troops.

So here is the clinical truth. The argument about the Amazon orders has nothing to do with Amazon. The blowup about Doordash has nothing to do with Doordash. The problem is never the problem. It is how the two of you talk about the problem.

Every recurring money fight in your marriage is a protest in disguise. One nervous system trying, in the only dialect it has, to say something underneath the words. Something like: I don't feel held. I don't feel chosen. I don't feel like the ground is solid. Easier to argue about a credit card statement than to admit you are thirty-eight years old and cannot afford the life your parents had at the same age.

I went deeper into the biology of this dynamic in Inflation at 3.8% Is Not a Budget Problem in Your Marriage. What Laplanche is describing has only sharpened since I wrote that piece.

The Not-Good-Enough Financial Mother

Here is the frame that changes the conversation for the couples I work with.

I call the fiat system the not-good-enough financial mother. In attachment terms, a good mother is a secure base. The child explores, takes risks, comes back, knowing she'll be there. The fiat mother runs the opposite operating system. She promises stability and delivers debasement. She tells you to grind harder and quietly debases your purchasing power overnight. She watches you swipe a card for groceries, then raises the rate to 24%.

She never pays the cost of her mistakes. She prints. She inflates. She postpones the bill and shoves the tab onto ordinary working people. Living inside a parental system like that does specific things to a body. It locks you in hypervigilance. It keeps you scanning the horizon. It keeps you ashamed.

I see this shame every single week in my practice. The couple making minimum wage feels ashamed they can't provide. The couple making $500,000 in San Francisco is shocked it still doesn't stretch to two kids in private school, a normal house, one annual trip, and a Friday dinner out. Everybody is carrying it. Almost nobody names it.

Because here is what credit card debt actually does inside a person. It convinces them the macro reality they are drowning in is somehow a personal defect. The math says the median American household cannot afford the median American life on the median American income. The shame says: that's on you. You must be lazy. You must be reckless. You must be the problem.

The shame is a lie. But it is the loudest voice in your marriage right now.

The Compass of Shame Is Running Your Money Fights

When the statement lands and shame hits, the body cannot tolerate the caloric cost of just sitting with it. So it bolts for the nearest exit. The late Donald Nathanson mapped four of them and called the map the Compass of Shame. Attack Other. Attack Self. Withdraw. Avoid.

Watch how this plays at your kitchen table.

She opens the statement. Shame hits. She bolts toward Attack Other. "How did we spend $640 at Whole Foods this month. Are you even paying attention."

He hears the criticism. Shame hits him too. He bolts toward Withdraw. He shrugs. He goes quiet. Picks up his phone. Heads to the garage.

She reads his silence as proof he doesn't care, which lands on the oldest wound she carries, the one whispering she does not matter. Attack Other on steroids. He reads her escalation as proof he is, once again, failing as a provider, which lands on his oldest wound, the one whispering he is not enough. Withdraw on steroids, maybe sliding toward Avoid by way of three beers and a podcast.

Neither of them is in a conversation about money. Both of them are protesting an attachment injury through the only doorway they know how to open. The balance just sits there, earning interest, while they tear each other up.

I have written more about this protest pattern in When the Fed Holds Rates Because of War. The macro story keeps shifting. The biology underneath does not.

Printing Relational Debt

Here is the parallel that took me years to see cleanly.

When an American consumer puts groceries on a card at 24%, they are stealing financial time from the future to pay for right now. The bill comes due. With interest. Always.

When a couple ducks a hard conversation and just "moves on" to keep the peace, they are running the exact same scam. They are printing relational debt. Lifting stability from their future selves to buy comfort tonight. The thing about money you didn't say. The resentment about pickup. The quiet fury about seven weeks of no sex. Each one is a swipe of the relational card.

And here is the cruel mathematics. Relational debt compounds too. The conversation skipped at year three is twice as expensive at year five. The repair postponed tonight is four times harder by next Christmas. You cannot print your way out of a broken bond any more than a Treasury can print its way out of a sovereign debt spiral. Eventually hyperinflation hits the marriage. Trust collapses. The couple shows up in my office wondering how they got here when "nothing big" ever happened.

Nothing big. Just years of small swipes.

The Body As The First Ledger

Long before there was a credit bureau, there was the autonomic system. The body is the original ledger. The body keeps the score.

You can tell yourself the debt doesn't bother you. You can tell your spouse you are fine. You can run the spreadsheet that says it's paid off by 2027 if nothing breaks. That is the cognitive accounting. That is what the mind narrates.

The body is keeping a second set of books. It clocks the fact that you haven't slept through the night in six months. It clocks the jaw clench when the mail hits the table. It clocks the shoulders climbing toward your ears every time your partner says "we need to talk." The ledger does not lie. If the debt is there, the dread is there. If the dread is there, the disconnection is there. If the disconnection is there, the fights are there.

You are not crazy for feeling any of this. You are sane. Your body is keeping accurate accounts inside an economy that is keeping fraudulent ones.

Two Terrified Adults In One Living Room

Let me describe a session from earlier this year. Details changed, shape kept.

She tracks every dollar on a color-coded spreadsheet. He has not opened the credit card app in four months. From the outside, she reads as responsible. He reads as irresponsible. From the inside, they are both drowning in the same cold water, kicking in opposite directions.

She is in hypervigilance. Scanning. Counting. Controlling. Because if she lets up for one second the whole thing collapses, and she has been holding it up alone since she was nine years old watching her mother weep over bills at the kitchen table.

He is in collapse. Numbing. Slipping out the back. Because every time he looks at the balance, his body gets hit with a wave of "you are failing your family," and he learned at seven years old, from a father who drained every bottle in the house, that the only way to survive that wave is to not be in his body when it comes.

She thinks he doesn't care. He thinks she sees him as a loser. Neither of them knows the other is lying awake at 3am feeling like a wreck. Two terrified children in adult bodies. Both needing each other. Both unable to show up. Both convinced the other is the source of the pain.

The repair didn't start with a budget. It started when he managed to say, voice shaking, "I am so scared you are going to wake up and realize you married someone who can't provide for our family." The relief in the room was physical. Not because the debt vanished. Because the real wound finally had a name.

I've written more about this dynamic in Money Fights Are Never About Money. The doorway is finance. The home is always attachment.

What To Actually Do Tonight

You cannot fix the U.S. credit card crisis. You cannot make Renaud Laplanche stop being right. You cannot wrestle interest rates down by sheer will.

You can do one thing. Stop pointing the shame at your partner when the shame belongs to a system that broke before they ever met you.

The next time the statement lands and you feel the heat rise, pause for ten seconds before any word comes out of your mouth. Ask yourself what is actually happening in you. Not "I am angry at him for overspending." Underneath that. The real thing. Some version of: I'm scared. I'm lonely. I'm ashamed that I cannot make this work the way my parents seemed to.

Then say that instead of the criticism. "I'm scared. I have no idea how we're getting out from under this, and it's making me hard to live with." That is not a budget meeting. That is a bid for connection. Your partner's body can actually meet a bid like that. Your partner's survival response cannot meet "why did you buy those shoes."

The debt is real. The interest is real. The math is brutal. But whether you face it as a team or as adversaries gets decided every single night, in every single tone, in every single look across the kitchen.

The fiat system will not save your marriage. You may have to save each other. Start by telling the truth about what is actually moving in you. The balance will still be there in the morning. But the person sleeping beside you might finally be reachable.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

Brad Pitt's Miraval Deposition Win and the Biology Family Court Cannot Settle

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 18:09:38 +0000

Brad Pitt's Miraval Deposition Win and the Biology Family Court Cannot Settle

The headline reads like a chess move. Brad Pitt scored a "big win" against Angelina Jolie in the long Chateau Miraval dispute. According to a recent Page Six report, a Michigan judge found that counsel on the Stoli side had improperly shut down testimony during a key deposition, and ordered a central figure back to the chair. The press calls it strategic leverage. Legal analysts call it a discovery victory. The PR teams on both sides will feed the next twenty-four hours of the narrative cycle with it.

I read it differently.

I am not going to diagnose Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. I have never sat with them, and the Goldwater rule keeps me from pretending otherwise. What I will do is name a pattern I see in my office every week in much less famous form. When two intelligent, well-resourced adults have spent years pushing subpoenas, motions, and depositions across a vineyard neither of them lives on, they are not running a corporate dispute. They are running a survival response through an instrument that was never built to settle survival.

The vineyard is the content. The biology is the actual case.

From a French Winery to Your Kitchen Table

You do not need a chateau to live inside this. The thread that runs through a celebrity discovery fight runs straight through every contested divorce, every estate war, every former business partnership that detonated into seven figures of legal fees over what one of them now calls "the principle of the thing."

Adversarial law presumes two rational adults weighing financial interest. Inside a family rupture, no such adults exist in the room. There are two survival systems on fire, grabbing for a cognitive tool to close a wound the tool was not designed to touch.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

The House Is on Fire

When a high-profile couple keeps litigating years past the original break, attorneys assume sophisticated strategy. Sometimes some of that is real. But the deeper engine, in my clinical experience, is biological.

A long bond does not dissolve the day paperwork gets filed. For years, your physiology was running two questions on loop inside that relationship. Was the other person there for you. Were you enough for them. When the bond shatters, especially publicly, the limbic system does not hear paperwork. It hears threat to survival.

The prefrontal cortex drops offline. The thinking brain trails behind the survival brain. The body reads the rupture as a house on fire, and the limbic system will burn the place down if it believes that is what living through this requires. Trying to reason your way through that state is, as I often tell the attorneys I consult with, gasoline labeled as water.

This is why I keep saying you cannot apply a cognitive solution to a biological problem. The judge can rule on whether testimony was improperly blocked. The judge cannot tell either body that it is safe now.

The Waltz Two Bodies Dance in a Deposition Room

Under that kind of pressure, parties polarize into two protective roles. I call this dynamic the Waltz of Pain, and I have watched it run as cleanly in a family law conference room as in my office on a Tuesday morning.

One body becomes the Protester. Driven by a deep fear of abandonment, this person pursues. In a marriage, they follow you around the house wanting one more conversation at midnight. In litigation, they flood the system. Motions. Discovery demands. Subpoenas. Sanctions requests. From the outside it reads as aggression. From the inside it is a body trying to force the world to confirm it still matters.

The other body becomes the Withdrawer. Driven by a terror of being a disappointment, or of being overwhelmed altogether, this person shuts down. In a marriage, they go quiet, rationalize, work late. In litigation, they slow walk discovery, miss deadlines, instruct witnesses to be unavailable. From the outside it reads as obstruction. Clinically it often looks like a body playing dead because the vulnerability of a deposition room feels like annihilation.

When a court rules that lawyers "improperly blocked testimony," the system sees a procedural violation. I see a withdrawal strategy ordered back into the room. Forcing a withdrawer's body into the chair does not settle them. It only raises the temperature.

I have written more about how this pattern runs through the entire divorce machine in the Bevin judicial bias piece and in the Sotomayor custody dissent piece. The shape is the same whether the contested asset is a kitchen appliance, a custody calendar, or a French winery.

The Time Machine

Here is the part of the work that attorneys find most disorienting when I teach it.

Lawyers spend hundreds of billable hours listening to clients narrate the history of the marriage. The deposition transcript thickens. The fact pattern sharpens. Nothing actually shifts. As I say in clinical practice, you can spend an hour telling me the story of the fight and the fight will not move an inch.

Why? The client is in a Time Machine. When they are fighting over vineyard shares, NDAs, or events from a decade ago, they are not mentally in the present. They are reliving the collapse. They are inside the original wound, hunting evidence that they were right.

You cannot solve a present-tense legal problem with a body the survival brain has dragged into the past. Court believes that getting the facts on record will resolve things. In serious clinical work, we do not run venting sessions. We do surgery.

The intervention is not another objection. It is grounding the biology. I hear the history. Pause with me. Your chest is tight. We cannot make a sound decision while your body believes it is fighting for its life. That sentence is more useful in a high-conflict mediation than a thousand pages of discovery.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Versus Illusion

Adversarial law is built on what I call the Versus Illusion. Plaintiff and defendant. Petitioner and respondent. The entire instrument presumes you stand on one side of a line and the person across the aisle stands on the other.

In a family rupture, that is not the actual shape of the problem. The shape is that a dynamic between two people is choking out what used to be a shared life. You are not really fighting your former spouse. The two of you are locked inside a cycle inflicting things on both of you that, in your right mind, neither of you would pick.

A vineyard is not a vineyard. It is the last public proof that something was once built together. Winning it outright confirms the loss. Losing it outright confirms the loss. The Versus Illusion offers no exit either direction, because biologically the question underneath the legal one is not who owns the asset. It is whether anything that was made together still counts.

The Third Chair and the Sovereign Us

When I work with a couple, even one in active divorce, I introduce a third entity to the room. I call it the Third Chair. Chair one is You. Chair two is Me. Chair three is the relationship itself, or in a post-divorce context, the co-parenting unit, the shared legacy, the thing built that outlives the marriage.

In a vineyard fight, the Third Chair is the estate as a sustainable entity. The brand. The children's eventual relationship to the place. The legacy of what two people, at one point, chose together.

The Sovereign Us is the recognition that three interests sit in the room, not two. Me. You. Us. When one side files motions to compel testimony, I ask the Protester: how does that move land on the Chair? When the other side blocks discovery, I ask the Withdrawer: how does that move land on the Chair? If we destroy the Chair to wound them, we still lose. The asset usually survives the fight. The relationship to it rarely does.

A judge cannot mandate this kind of awareness. The legal system can only adjudicate between Me and You. Which is why even a definitive ruling rarely settles anything. The body's ledger stays open.

The Body Is the Original Ledger

Long before there was a winery deed or a corporate filing, the body was already keeping the books. It records what mattered. Safety. Abandonment. Promises kept. Promises broken. You cannot file a motion against an entry the body has already written.

I sat with a couple last year who had been in litigation for nearly a year over a single appliance. A four-slice toaster from a kitchen store. Maybe forty bucks if you found it used. Their combined fees on this one item had run past five figures. When I finally asked the wife what the toaster meant, she broke down. He had given it to her their first Christmas as a couple. It was the last thing in her possession that proved she had once been somebody's beloved.

She was not fighting for a toaster. She was fighting for proof she had once lived inside another person's love.

A vineyard is just a far more expensive toaster. The retirement account is never about the retirement account. The Stoli deposition is never about the Stoli deposition. The body is trying to make the world acknowledge a debt the courthouse does not stock in any currency it knows how to issue.

I write about this same mechanism through the lens of the Kapur family trust battle and the Blake Lively post-settlement filings piece. Different families. Different assets. Same engine.

Why Forcing the Deposition Will Not Heal It

So Pitt's team scored a procedural win. The blocked witness will be put back in the chair. The transcript will thicken. The press will declare leverage has shifted.

Clinically, none of that touches what is actually keeping this case alive. Until the two bodies at the center can climb out of survival mode, more discovery is just more turns in the same dance. More motions. More billable hours. More public exposure. More reinforcement of the story that winning is the only way out, when winning was never on offer in the first place.

Connection First, Problem Solving Later. That is the protocol I teach to attorneys, mediators, and clinicians. It does not require the parties to reconcile. It requires the bodies to come out of fight or flight before any agreement they sign will actually hold. An agreement signed by two terrified survival brains is not an agreement. It is a pause between escalations.

What This Means for Your Life

You are probably not fighting over a vineyard. You may be fighting over a house, a 401k, a Saturday afternoon with your kids, a piece of furniture your grandmother gave you, a missed pickup, a text that should have come back three weeks ago.

The mechanism is identical.

If you catch yourself escalating, ask one question before you send the email, instruct the attorney, or post the thing online. Will the move I am about to make actually change something in my real life, or will it just satisfy the part of me that wants the world to confirm I was right? Most of the time, the honest answer is the second one. And most of the time, the world declines to confirm.

The work is not winning the deposition. The work is finding a floor under yourself that is not built on the other person's failure. Your ground is not contingent on whether they testify, settle, apologize, or admit. Your ground is yours, or it is fiat. There is no third option.

What To Do Next

If you are inside something like this right now, the most useful thing you can do is not the next legal move. It is the next settling move. Slow your breathing. Get the body out of the chair. Walk. Sit with a clinician who actually understands what is going on underneath the content. Stop treating the courtroom like a place that can give you what only your own physiology can give you.

The lawyers will keep doing their job. Make sure you are doing yours.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The vineyard will outlast the case. The case will outlast most of the headlines. The question is what survives inside you. Build that ground first. The rest is just paperwork.

When Your Partner's Mental Health Shakes the Bond: What KJ Dillard's Honesty About His Relationship with Dara Levitan Reveals

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:07:37 +0000

When Your Partner's Mental Health Shakes the Bond: What KJ Dillard's Honesty About His Relationship with Dara Levitan Reveals

The Summer House cast keeps handing the culture a particular kind of mirror. Reality TV strips off the polite veneer of dating in your twenties and thirties, and what is left underneath is the part most of us actually wrestle with at home: two bodies trying to find safe ground inside a bond that keeps moving.

KJ Dillard, the model on Bravo's Summer House, recently spoke candidly about how his mental health struggles affected his relationship with makeup artist Dara Levitan. In a recent Page Six piece, he described the impact his internal struggles had on their love life. The honesty is the part worth pausing on. Most couples never name this out loud, never mind on a podcast or a reality show. They live it, suffer it, and rarely understand it.

The cultural script treats this as an individual story. KJ has a thing. The thing leaked onto Dara. Dara coped or didn't. The truth, the thing I want to spend the rest of this article on, is that mental health and the bond between two people are not two separate stories. They are one story told from two angles. And once you see that, the whole way you understand "my partner is struggling and it's affecting us" changes.

The Bridge: Why Individual Diagnoses Miss the Couple

Here is the part the media will not tell you. When one partner is suffering inside their own head, the other partner's body is also under attack. Not because they are weak, codependent, or enmeshed. Because they are biologically tethered to their primary person. If your partner is not okay, you are not okay. That is how important they are to you.

The mainstream story makes one person the patient and the other person the supportive bystander. That framing is wrong, and it keeps couples stuck for years.

The Anchor: Mental Health as Attachment Adaptation

I have been a couples therapist for sixteen years. I work with high-achieving people in San Francisco, many of them building the future of technology, many of them carrying diagnoses they wear like ID badges. Anxiety. OCD. ADHD. Depression. The diagnosis becomes a flashlight that points only at the inside of one skull.

What I have learned across thousands of sessions is this: what we call mental illness is very often a survival strategy your body built to cope with not feeling securely held. The symptoms are not random brain weather. They are the shape your system took when the ground underneath it was not steady.

This is not me dismissing real clinical pictures. Some people need medication. Some people need individual therapy. But when someone in a primary relationship is suffering, treating the suffering as a private internal event misses the whole field it is happening inside.

Think about it this way. A child who never knew if their caregiver would be reachable learns to either reach harder or stop reaching altogether. Thirty years later, that adaptation does not vanish because you fell in love. It activates harder, because love is the exact environment that lit it up in the first place.

I had a couple in my office where the husband had a clinical diagnosis of OCD and the wife had a clinical diagnosis of ADHD. They had been pathologizing each other for years. He thought she was chaotic and unreliable. She thought he was rigid and impossible. Both diagnoses were technically accurate. Both diagnoses were also getting in the way of the work.

When we slowed down, what we found was not OCD and ADHD as standalone conditions. We found two children who had learned to survive. For him, growing up inside chaos, a clean house meant he was loved. If the house was not clean, his system panicked because he did not feel safe. For her, connection itself had been overwhelming as a child. Her system learned to dissociate, to scatter attention, to not stay in any one place long enough to get hurt. When I reframed what was happening, that they were just two normal people who got terrified when it looked like the other person was not there for them, both of them cried. The relief was enormous. The labels had been keeping them apart.

This is what the Page Six piece gestures at but does not get under. KJ's mental health did not happen in a vacuum next to Dara. It happened inside the bond. And her experience of his struggle was not separate from her own wiring asking, every minute, am I safe here, is he reachable, do I matter.

The Dance That Forms When One Partner Struggles

When one person's mental health starts taking hostages inside a relationship, a predictable choreography emerges. I call it the Waltz of Pain in my clinical work, and you can watch it play out in almost any couple where one person is suffering and the other is responding to that suffering.

The partner who is struggling tends to retreat. Not because they don't love you. Because they feel like a constant disappointment, a burden, a person who is failing at the basics. Depression and anxiety both come with a heavy shame load. So they pull back, go quiet, cancel plans, stop initiating sex, stop initiating anything. In my framework I call this the Reluctant Lover position. The retreat is not rejection. It is self-protection from the unbearable feeling of not being enough.

The other partner, watching the person they love disappear in slow motion, almost always escalates. They ask more questions. They check in more. They suggest therapists, supplements, podcasts, sleep schedules. When the suggestions don't land, they get frustrated. The frustration leaks out as criticism, sometimes contempt. This is the Relentless Lover position, the pursuer terrified of losing the bond, protesting the distance the only way the body knows how.

Here is the part nobody wants to hear. The harder the pursuer reaches, the more the withdrawer feels like a failure, and the deeper they retreat into their struggle. The more the withdrawer retreats, the more terrified the pursuer becomes, and the harder they push. Two truths. One loop. No villains.

Both people are throwing invisible boomerangs. What you throw out to protect yourself ends up gutting your partner, and then it swings back around and hits you in the face. Round and round it goes. The mental health struggle is real, but the loop is what makes the struggle uninhabitable for the relationship.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Danger of Diagnosing Your Partner

We live inside an algorithm that will hand you a diagnosis for the person sleeping next to you in ten scrolls or less. Narcissist. Avoidant. Disorganized. Borderline. The therapeutic industrial complex has bled out into TikTok, and now everyone is an armchair clinician of their own bedroom.

I understand the pull. When someone you love is hurting you, a diagnosis gives you a story with a villain. It gives you certainty in the place where there is only confusion. It validates your withdrawal, your guardedness, your decision to stop reaching. That is why people grab labels. The labels feel like ground.

But the labels are a protector strategy in disguise. By turning your partner into a clinical category, you destroy the empathy required to actually heal anything. You stop seeing the frightened human being and start seeing the diagnosis. And once you cannot see them anymore, the relationship has already started to die.

I write about this in my piece on why I don't treat patients. I am not the holder of all the wisdom on one side of a desk while the suffering people sit on the other. We are all wounded healers in progress. The therapist who pathologizes their client misses the work. The partner who pathologizes their spouse misses the marriage.

The Story of Other, the Experience of Self

When a couple is caught in this dynamic, they almost always default to what I call the Story of Other. They become world-class experts on their partner's flaws. They can recite every failure, every disappointment, every moment the other person did not show up the way they needed. The litigation is endless and it goes nowhere.

The work is to turn the flashlight inward. Instead of "your depression is ruining our lives," the move is "when you disappear into the dark, I feel completely alone and terrified, and I don't know what to do with all that fear." Instead of "you are too needy and won't leave me alone," the move is "when you pursue me that hard, I feel like a failure, like I am letting you down again, and the shame is so big I want to go underground."

This is hard to do. The protector parts want to keep pointing at the other person. The vulnerable parts have to risk being seen in the wound. But this turn, from Story of Other to Experience of Self, is the entire door to repair.

If you want a starting point for understanding the survival blueprint you brought into your relationship, the attachment quiz I built is built on EFT research and will give you something more useful than a TikTok label.

What KJ Got Right, and What Most Couples Miss

The honesty itself is a gift. Most people in KJ's position would minimize, perform fine, or quietly suffer until the relationship ended without anyone knowing why. Saying out loud "my mental health affected my partner" is the first real step. It refuses the cultural lie that men in particular are supposed to be self-contained, sovereign, unaffected.

Here is what most couples miss, though, even when they get to honesty. They name the impact and stop there. They treat the disclosure as the cure. It is not. The disclosure is the beginning.

What comes next is the harder work. Sitting together in the discomfort of how it landed. Letting the partner who absorbed the fallout say, without being managed or fixed, how scary it was, how lonely, how much they felt forgotten. Not to make the struggling partner feel worse, but to be witnessed. The partner who was struggling has to be able to receive that without collapsing into more shame.

This is what I mean by moving from two suffering bubbles into one shared suffering bubble. Empathy Cubed. Compassion for yourself, compassion for your partner, and compassion for the living thing that is the relationship itself. All three at once. That is what restores the bond. Not the disclosure alone, and not the diagnosis. The shared sitting in what is real.

A Word About Individual Therapy When You're in a Relationship

I have to say this even though it will make some individual therapists annoyed. When one partner in a struggling relationship goes to individual therapy and the other one does not, something predictable often happens. The individual therapist, hearing one side of the story, doing their job of caring for their client, ends up reinforcing the client's defended self. They validate the client's perception that the partner is the problem. They cannot hold the whole system because they cannot see it. They only see one chair.

This is not a knock on individual work. I send people to individual therapists all the time. But if your relationship is the thing that is suffering, the relationship is what needs treatment. Two people in the room. One frame that can see both physiologies and the dance they are doing together.

If you are even considering this kind of work, I wrote something about the waiting room and the anxiety that shows up before you walk in. The fear that something will be confirmed about how broken you are. It is the most human thing.

Bringing It Back to You

So, you read a headline about a reality TV star and his girlfriend, and you ended up here, reading about the bond and the choreography of suffering. That probably means something. Maybe you are the one struggling and watching your partner get further away. Maybe you are the one watching your partner go under and not knowing how to reach them. Maybe you are both, on different days.

The takeaway is not "diagnose yourself better" or "communicate more." The takeaway is that mental health inside a partnership is never a solo event. Your physiology and your partner's are in constant conversation, whether either of you knows it or not. The struggle one of you carries lives inside the field both of you share.

The work is to stop pathologizing each other long enough to see the frightened humans underneath, to name your own experience instead of prosecuting theirs, and to risk staying in the room when every old part of you wants to retreat or pursue. That is not a cure. It is a practice. It happens in small moments, repeated thousands of times.

What To Do Next

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

KJ said the thing out loud. That is harder than it looks, and easier than what comes next. The disclosure is one move. The repair is a thousand more. If your partner is struggling and the struggle is eating your bond, the question is not who has the diagnosis. The question is whether you can both stop treating each other as cases and start treating each other as the only person in the room who can actually help.

Stop reading. Go find your person. Say one true thing.

Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster, and the Biology of Feeling "Really Alone" When You're Compared to an Ex

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Sun, 31 May 2026 22:08:01 +0000

Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster, and the Biology of Feeling "Really Alone" When You're Compared to an Ex

Sutton Foster is in a position no human body was built for. She's fifty-one, a two-time Tony winner, one of the most respected performers on Broadway, and she's spending her mornings reading internet comments that pit her against a woman she has never met. In a recent Daily Mail piece, she said she feels "really alone" right now, and pushed back on the cultural ritual of pitting women against one another. She and Hugh Jackman, who confirmed their relationship in January 2025 after he announced his split from Deborra-Lee Furness, were photographed looking tense. The internet did what the internet does.

I want to skip the gossip layer. The image of two famous people on a sidewalk tells you nothing useful. What Sutton said, on the other hand, tells you a great deal. "Really alone" is not a casual phrase. It is the most common answer my team has gotten from over forty thousand people when we asked what they feel deep down when love is not working. Not angry. Not disappointed. Alone.

That word matters, because aloneness in a bond is not an opinion. It's a biological alarm. And the way that alarm fires in a high-visibility relationship, with a thirty-year previous marriage hovering in the background and a million strangers running a public referendum on whether you measure up, is something I want to walk through carefully. Not because Sutton Foster needs my analysis. Because if you've ever stepped into a relationship where someone before you cast a long shadow, this is your dynamic too.

From the moment to the thread

When a new partner is being publicly measured against an ex, the cultural script demands a villain. Was she the home-wrecker? Was the ex too controlling? Is the man at the center oblivious? Those questions are seductive because they offer certainty. They are also almost always wrong. The actual story, the one happening inside two bodies trying to build something new on ground that won't stop shifting, has nothing to do with villains. It has to do with two people being asked to stay settled in their own skin while the entire internet performs a stress test on their bond.

That's what I want to write about. Not the photo. The biology underneath it.

The two questions your body asks

You are wired from birth to need a primary attachment figure. Not as a preference. As a survival requirement. Your body needs emotional bonding the way it needs oxygen, from the first breath to the last. That wiring never goes away. It just changes who it's pointed at.

Inside every adult bond, your physiology is running a constant background process, asking two questions. "Are you there for me?" And "Am I enough for you?" Every fight, every silence, every moment of distance is your body trying to get an answer. When the answer feels like a yes, the system settles. When the answer feels like a no, the alarm fires, and the parts of your brain that do nuance and patience and clever sentence construction go offline.

Now imagine you're Sutton. The question your body is asking is the second one. "Am I enough for you?" And the answer is being supplied not by Hugh, but by a million strangers writing comparison pieces about a woman he was married to for almost three decades. That is a bonding injury delivered by algorithm. Your physiology cannot tell the difference between a tabloid headline and a real signal from your partner that you don't measure up. It just hears the verdict.

This is why "really alone" is the right word. Loneliness inside a bond is what happens when the survival response cannot get a clean yes to those two questions. You can be sitting next to the person you love and feel like you're in a separate suffering bubble, because somewhere in your body the alarm has not stopped ringing. I've written more about this dynamic in The One Cup of Coffee That Almost Ended Our Marriage, where the small fight is never really about the small thing. It's a safety audit.

The Time Machine

Here's the part most people get wrong about a moment like this. They think Sutton's distress is about Hugh, or about Deborra-Lee, or about the tabloids. It isn't. Or rather, it isn't only that.

When your body gets hit with a comparison wound, it doesn't stay in the present. It time-travels. Whatever you learned about being not chosen, not seen, not preferred, all the way back to childhood, comes flooding into the current moment. Your body responds to the present provocation as if it were the original wound. That's why these moments feel so disproportionate. You're not just fighting the tabloid. You're fighting every previous time you were measured and found wanting.

This is what trauma actually is. Not a singular catastrophic event. The past merging with the present so completely that your body can't tell which decade it's in. A successful, accomplished, fifty-one-year-old Broadway star can be looking at a comment thread and, inside, be five years old again, watching a parent choose someone else's approval over hers. The internet does not know that. The internet is happy to keep feeding the wound.

The Waltz of Pain in a public relationship

Here's where the danger really begins. Under this kind of pressure, almost every couple slides into a predictable choreography. I call it the Waltz of Pain. One partner's protective strategy collides with the other's, and the relationship becomes a slow reenactment of wounds neither person created.

Sutton, if her body is reaching for reassurance, might protest the disconnection. She might bring it up at the wrong time. She might be tense in a photograph. She might ask Hugh, in a thousand small ways, "Am I enough? Am I real to you? Will you still be here when the next think piece lands?" That reaching, when it lands on a partner who is already overloaded by media attention and his own grief about a thirty-year marriage ending, can register as criticism. As pressure. As one more person needing something from him.

His likely response, if he's the type whose activation pushes him into silence, is to retreat. To get busy. To take the call. To say less. To soothe himself through work or distance. That retreat, however logical it feels to him, is then read by her body as confirmation. "I knew it. I'm not enough. He's already pulling away." Her reaching intensifies. His retreat deepens. Two people who genuinely love each other end up throwing emotional boomerangs, doing exactly what makes sense from inside their own pain, and gutting each other in the process.

Neither person is the villain here. The dance is the villain. The system they have co-created under impossible pressure is the villain. I wrote about exactly this kind of dynamic in the Paddy McGuinness and Christine split, because the structure repeats across every high-visibility breakup, every new pairing, every long marriage that quietly cracks apart. The names change. The choreography does not.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

Impact without intention

Here is the line I find myself saying in my office almost every day. Most of the hurt in a relationship comes from impact without intention.

Hugh almost certainly did not set out to make Sutton feel measured against his ex-wife. The press did that. The audience did that. The structure of public life did that. But here is what does not help in this moment: him explaining, logically, that he did not cause the problem. The logical defense of intentions, when a partner's bond feels under threat, is gasoline on the fire. The prefrontal cortex is offline. You cannot solve an emotional rupture with a logistical argument.

What I teach couples is what I call Connection First, Problem Solving Later. Before you can talk about strategy, before you can talk about PR, before you can talk about what to do about the comment sections, the body that feels alone has to feel found. He has to put down the defense and come close. He has to let her know that her pain makes sense to him, that he sees it, that he is not going anywhere. Only after the alarm settles can the two of them actually think together about how to live inside this strange new public life.

If you've never watched your partner refuse to defend themselves and instead just sit with your pain, you don't know yet what that does to the body. It is the closest thing I know to a magic trick.

The Versus Illusion

The other thing the culture wants from this story is a war between two women. Sutton named it directly. "Women shouldn't be pitted against one another." She's right, and not just morally. She's right clinically.

When you are inside relational pain, the algorithm of the mind, and now literally the algorithm of your phone, wants to give you a villain. It is so much easier on your physiology to externalize the suffering than to feel the actual ache. Deborra-Lee becomes the obstacle. Or Sutton becomes the obstacle. Or Hugh becomes the cad. The story tidies itself up. The internet feasts.

But what this framing does is keep you stuck. Because as long as the problem is a person out there, you cannot do the only work that ever actually helps, which is the work inside your own body, with the partner you are actually with. There is no villain. There is a thirty-year marriage that ended. There is a new bond trying to take root. There is grief, on every side. There is a public that does not get to be in this story but acts like it has a vote.

What it takes to survive this kind of pressure is what I call Empathy Cubed. Compassion for yourself. Compassion for your partner. And compassion for the tragic, impossible system the two of you have been dropped inside. We are both hurting. We are both reacting. And it is only happening because we are so important to each other.

The rebound shadow, and why it doesn't apply the way the internet thinks it does

The other thing the audience is doing with this story is calling it a rebound. Hugh and Deborra-Lee announced their split. A year later he confirmed Sutton. The math is enough for the internet. I wrote a long piece on what a rebound relationship actually is, and I'll say here what I said there. A rebound is not defined by timing. It's defined by function. The question is not how many months have passed. The question is what the new relationship is doing for the body underneath. Is the new bond being asked to anesthetize a pain that hasn't been faced? Or is it a real meeting between two adults who happen to have arrived at the same crossroads?

I have no idea which one this is for Hugh and Sutton. Nobody outside their living room does. The press doesn't. The pals voicing fears don't. You don't. But the rebound conversation is a useful diagnostic for anyone reading this, because most of us, at some point, have been on one side or the other of this question. Is this person here because I am running from a feeling I cannot tolerate? Or is this person here because I am genuinely meeting them?

The answer is rarely clean. The answer is almost always work.

What this means if you're not famous

You will probably never be photographed on a sidewalk with a tabloid caption underneath you. But you have almost certainly stood inside this dynamic. You started dating someone whose ex-wife is in the parenting group chat. You moved in with someone whose long-term partner is the godparent of a mutual friend's child. You married someone whose mother still talks about the one who came before you. You are being compared, in small ways and large, and your body is logging every comparison.

The shape of your life is different. The biology is identical. The question your body asks does not care about your celebrity status. "Am I enough for you?" is the same question whether you ask it from a Manhattan penthouse or a kitchen in Ohio.

What you do with the question is what matters. You can spend the next decade trying to win a contest that nobody can actually win, because the contest itself is the problem. Or you can do the harder thing. You can let your partner know you feel alone. Not as a complaint. Not as a weapon. As a request to be found. And your partner can do their work, which is to stop defending intentions and start showing up to the impact.

That is the real labor of love. Unglamorous. Repeated. Daily. The kind of bond a person does not want to leave, because being inside it is the safest place they've ever stood.

What to do next

If you are reading this because some version of this dynamic is alive in your own life, the comparison wound, the ex-shaped shadow, the feeling of being on trial for a verdict that already feels rigged, you have options today.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

Sutton said something the internet didn't deserve. She said she feels alone, and she refused to be drafted into a war with another woman. That is sovereignty in the middle of a storm. Whether or not she and Hugh make it through this chapter is none of our business. Whether you and yours do is yours to write. Stop looking for the villain. Start looking for your partner. The contest is rigged. The work is real.