DEV Community: Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan

How Travis Kelce Is Spending His Final Days Before the Taylor Swift Wedding, and What Every High-Stakes Couple Gets Wrong About

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 22:07:38 +0000

How Travis Kelce Is Spending His Final Days Before the Taylor Swift Wedding, and What Every High-Stakes Couple Gets Wrong About the Week Before "I Do"

The Page Six timeline is doing what tabloid timelines do. Kelce spotted in New York. Swift spotted in New York. Bachelor party rumors. Rehearsal dinner speculation. A recent Page Six piece walks the reader through how Kelce is spending his final days before the biggest wedding of the year, and the internet does what the internet does. Screenshots. Zoom-ins. Lip-readers on TikTok trying to decode a hug in a hotel lobby.

I want to say something to any therapist who has ever sat with a couple in the week before a wedding, and to any reader who is about to be one. What happens in your body in the seven days before a high-stakes wedding has almost nothing to do with logistics and almost everything to do with the bond. It does not matter if you are a tight end with three Super Bowl rings or you are getting married at the courthouse on Tuesday. The biology is the same.

The week before a wedding is not a scheduling problem. It is a physiological event. And the people who fare best in that week are not the ones with the smoothest itinerary. They are the ones who have some vocabulary for what is happening in their bodies while the rest of the world is fussing about seating charts.

From the Doorway to the Room

Kelce and Swift give us the doorway. What I want to walk you into is the room, because I have been sitting in versions of this room for sixteen years. Couples in my office in the week before a wedding. Couples in my office three years into a marriage that started with a wedding just like this one. Couples who are quietly wondering if the panicked feeling in their chest right now means they are marrying the wrong person, when in fact it means they are a human being with a limbic system.

Here is the strongest thread from my work on this, and I want to plant it before we go anywhere else. The magic is never in the perfection of the day. The magic is in the repair after the day when something inevitably cracks.

The Sneaky Danger of a Day That Is Supposed to Be Perfect

I have written about this pattern in the Hollywood Life column on the sneaky pressure of a "perfect" wedding, and I want to bring it here in fuller form.

There is a rule I have watched hold true across every kind of couple I have sat with. The greater the expectation that a day will go perfectly, the greater the sense of failure when something goes wrong. Your sensitivity to feeling injured actually goes up, not down, as the stakes rise. A tiny misattunement, a look, a sigh, a slightly-late arrival, starts to land like a threat.

Think about what this means for a couple whose wedding is being covered like a state funeral. Every guest list decision is public. Every outfit is analyzed. Every hug is transcribed. The internal expectation is already massive. The external expectation is on a scale most human bodies were never designed to metabolize.

Under that kind of pressure, what happens in your body? It braces. And a braced body reads its partner more harshly, not more generously. You become more likely to throw a boomerang that guts the person you love, not because you have stopped loving them, but because the stakes have made your survival response treat any small disconnection like an emergency.

The Two Questions Underneath the Rehearsal Dinner

Bowlby said we are wired for emotional bonding from cradle to grave. That is not a preference. That is the architecture of being human. Which means the person you are marrying has just become your primary attachment figure, whether either of you consciously signed up for that or not.

And your body, from the moment you get engaged all the way through the honeymoon and beyond, will scan that person for the answer to two questions. Can I count on you when I need you. Do I still matter to you.

Every argument you will ever have as a married couple is a variation on those two questions. You will believe the fight is about the seating chart. You will believe it is about his mother. You will believe it is about who was supposed to confirm the florist. You will be wrong every time.

Underneath the seating chart fight in the week before a wedding, one of you is asking, "Are you still with me in this, or am I doing this alone?" The other is hearing, "I am failing you again, and I am about to fail you in front of everyone we know."

That is not a communication problem. That is two people in a survival response, wearing wedding clothes.

Fame Does Not Change the Biology

Here is what I learned before I became a therapist, sitting in a marble tower at Merrill Lynch in San Francisco. I was surrounded by people making more money in a year than my family had made in three generations. Billion-dollar portfolios. And their physiology was in free fall.

I sit with founders who have exited successfully and feel a crushing emptiness. I sit with executives running teams of hundreds who are terrified they are one small mistake from ruin. They come in confused. Why am I still anxious. Why can't I rest. Why does my relationship feel like another job I am failing at.

The answer is not that they are broken or ungrateful. The answer is that the body does not read a resume. It reads safety. And safety does not come from the outside. Safety is a physiological state.

Fame is not different. A stadium full of people singing your lyrics does not settle your amygdala. A Super Bowl ring does not tell your body that your partner is going to be there for you at 3 a.m. when one of you is scared. The success only raises the ceiling of what you have to lose. It does not change the biology of what you need.

For high-performing couples, this creates a specific trap. They live in what I call the Penthouse of the emotional building. Up in the Penthouse, you feel competent. You manage things. You optimize. Down in the basement is where the frightened parts of you are locked away, the shame, the fear that you are not actually enough. High performers spend their whole lives in the Penthouse, and they try to run their marriages from up there too.

The Mango Problem

Here is what the Penthouse looks like in the week before a wedding. One partner says, quietly, "I feel disconnected from you."

The Penthouse partner goes to work. "Okay, let's look at the schedule. We have a window on Wednesday afternoon. I'll book the place we went last summer. We'll turn the phones off. Problem solved."

The other partner deflates. Not because the offer was bad. The offer was reasonable. But it missed the entire point. They did not want a scheduled solution. They wanted the mango.

You can describe a mango. Color, texture, origin, ripeness. You can be very accurate about it. But describing a mango is not the same thing as biting into one and feeling the juice run down your chin. Love is a mango. You cannot manage your way into it from the Penthouse. You have to come downstairs, into the body, into the mess, and take a bite.

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

The Fiat Relationship Versus the One That Holds

I have a name for the version of love the culture actually sells us. I call it a fiat relationship. Fiat means by decree, without backing. Fiat money is currency that can be printed and debased without your consent. A bond built by decree is the same move, applied to love.

Two people agree to perform connection without paying the price of actual vulnerability. The optics are immaculate. The matching outfits. The tastefully curated grid. The wedding that looks like it was styled by a magazine. Meanwhile, inside the house, nobody is actually reaching for anybody. Decree runs the whole thing.

The alternative is a bond where both people have done the caloric work of being known. Where your partner has seen your shadow, your history, the parts of you that would not survive a profile piece, and has chosen to stay. Where the ground you stand on was not inherited from a script. It was laid by hand. Truth, then repair, then truth again.

You cannot see this from the outside. This is exactly why the tabloid gaze is so useless. It can only read the surface. It cannot read the felt evidence of the bond. I have written more about this in Rosamund Pike's twenty-year love story and what it teaches us about judging relationships from the outside.

The question for any couple in the week before a wedding is not whether the day looks good. The question is whether you are building something with proof of work behind it, or whether you are performing an image and hoping the performance holds.

The Waltz Both Villages Are Watching

When couples in the week before a wedding lose track of the two questions underneath, they fall into a predictable pattern. One partner starts to feel the disconnection first. Their body protests. They pursue. They ask more. They raise the volume. From outside it looks like nagging. From inside it feels like trying to prove the bond is still alive.

The other partner feels the pursuit as a verdict. "I am failing again." Shame floods in. They retreat. They go quiet. They get busy with logistics. From outside they look calm. Inside they are collapsing under the weight of being not-enough.

Then the retreat sets off the pursuer's alarm. And the pursuit sets off the retreater's shame. Around and around. It looks like a communication problem. It is not. It is two protector parts, formed in childhood, colliding with each other in the middle of your rehearsal dinner.

Now add the goldfish bowl. Everything is seen. By both villages. Every move watched, judged, commented on, saved, shared, screenshot, archived. Which means the pursue-retreat pattern is not just happening between two people. It is happening on camera, with a soundtrack, in front of millions of strangers who feel entitled to a verdict.

That is what Kelce and Swift are metabolizing this week. Not the schedule. The witnessing.

What Actually Protects a Wedding Week

Here is what I tell couples in my office in the days before their wedding. You do not need a perfect day. You need a repair strategy.

You need to have named the pattern out loud, before the pressure hits, so that when one of you pursues and the other retreats at the rehearsal dinner, you can catch it. Not fix it. Catch it. "There we are again. I am pursuing. You are retreating. Let's slow down."

You need a way of coming back after rupture that does not require either of you to be perfectly settled. Because you will not be. One of you will say something sharp. One of you will shut down. That is not the failure. The failure is if you cannot find your way back to each other by bedtime.

You need permission, from each other and from yourselves, for the day to be less than perfect. Because if you are gripping perfection, every small misattunement will feel like a five-alarm fire. If you are holding it loosely, a spilled drink is a spilled drink.

You need, more than anything, to have chosen this person for who they actually are, not for who they photograph as. Because on Tuesday of an ordinary week in year six of your marriage, the person you are married to is not the person in the wedding photo. It is the person doing the dishes with their back to you, and your body is asking, again, "Are you still with me?"

Back to the Reader

You are probably not marrying Taylor Swift. You are probably not marrying Travis Kelce. But you might be marrying someone. Or you might be married to someone. Or you might have just made it through a wedding week that felt harder than it was supposed to feel, and you are wondering if that means something is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you. Your body was doing exactly what a body does when the person on the other side of your primary bond becomes the answer to every question your physiology has been asking since you were born.

The people who make it are not the ones who avoid the panic. They are the ones who can hold hands through it. Who can name it. Who can turn back toward each other after a rupture that felt, in the moment, like the end of the world.

Wedding day does not make a marriage. The Tuesday after the wedding day makes a marriage. And the Tuesday after that. And the one after that.

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

The internet will keep watching this wedding. That is not the couple's job to solve. Their job, and yours, is the same job every couple has when the cameras are off. Come back to each other. Bite the mango. Do the proof of work.

The SK Chairman's Near-Billion-Dollar Divorce and What a Korean Courtroom Cannot Settle About a Collapsed Bond

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:06:45 +0000

The SK Chairman's Near-Billion-Dollar Divorce and What a Korean Courtroom Cannot Settle About a Collapsed Bond

Seoul is back in session. According to a recent Reuters report, the country's highest court has resumed hearings in the divorce case of SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, a proceeding that has swelled into one of the largest matrimonial disputes in Asian history, with a lower court ruling that had approached the vicinity of a billion dollars in split assets. The financial press is doing what the financial press does. Analysts model the effect on SK's ownership structure. Governance reporters chase board reactions. Legal scholars debate what a precedent of this size does to how Korean chaebol families structure their marriages going forward.

I read it differently.

I have never sat with Chey Tae-won. I have never sat with Roh Soh-yeong. The Goldwater rule applies to industrialists and first daughters just as much as to anyone else, and I am not in the business of diagnosing people I have not met. What I want to point at is the pattern underneath. When two people at the top of a country's economic hierarchy escalate a marital fight to the highest court their society has on offer, we are not watching a corporate governance event. We are watching two bodies in attachment alarm, using the most authoritative instrument available to close a wound the instrument was never designed to close.

From a Seoul Courthouse to Your Kitchen Table

You do not need to be the heir to a Korean conglomerate for this to apply to your life. The same thread that runs through a chaebol divorce runs through every contested estate, every custody motion that keeps generating motions, every business partnership detonation, every spouse who will not sign the final paperwork, every adult child who has not spoken to a sibling in six years over an eleven percent share of a residuary estate.

The legal process assumes two rational actors making decisions based on financial interest. Inside a family rupture, that is fiction. There are two bodies on fire, using a cognitive instrument to settle a limbic problem. Once you see this mechanism, you cannot unsee it. It lives inside your divorce, your custody fight, your business partnership implosion, the text wars you have had with people you once trusted with your whole life.

The near-billion-dollar number is a red herring. So is the eleven months of litigation. So is the four-slice Cuisinart.

The Problem You Think You Are Fighting About Is Rarely the Actual Problem

A couple sat in my office. They had been married nineteen years. Two kids. Both had good jobs. They had been in litigation for eleven months over a toaster. A four-slice Cuisinart, maybe forty dollars on eBay. Their combined legal fees on this single item had cleared ten thousand dollars. Her attorney thought she was unreasonable. His attorney thought he was petty. The judge was irritated with both of them.

I asked the wife to tell me about the toaster. She started crying. He had bought it for her their first Christmas together. Before the kids. Before everything went wrong. It was the last object she still owned that proved she had once mattered to him.

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

The retirement account is never about the retirement account. The trust corpus is never about the trust corpus. The 1.38 trillion won splitting order is never really about the won. The body is trying to get the world to confirm something the courthouse does not stock in any currency at all.

I have written about this same mechanism in the context of a family trust dispute that went to the Indian Supreme Court. Different family. Different currency. Different jurisdiction. Same body. Same wound.

The High Achiever's Trap

I learned something about this long before I became a therapist. I was twenty-three, sitting in a marble tower at Merrill Lynch in San Francisco, surrounded by people making more money in a year than anyone in my family had made in three generations. They had the suits. They had the status. They had the views of the bay. And underneath the performance, when you got close enough to see, the same wound was running through all of them.

I have coached the whole spectrum since then. People who came from nothing and became tech billionaires. Children of boomer-generation dynasties. Everybody in between. When you go deep enough, they carry the same wound. Shame is the great equalizer.

Here is what nobody tells you about high-net-worth marriages. The traits that make you successful at the office are often disastrous in the living room. The workplace is designed to reward your protector parts. Your relentless drive gets you promoted. Your ability to compartmentalize gets you the corner office. Your capacity to strategize your way out of any situation gets you a board seat.

Then you come home, and your partner says "I feel disconnected from you," and you reach into the same toolbox. You strategize. You solve. You optimize the disconnection like it is a supply chain problem. And your partner's nervous system goes into free fall, because what they needed was not a solution. What they needed was to feel felt.

The strategies that make you rich make you lonely. I have watched this movie play in penthouses from Menlo Park to Gangnam.

The Waltz of Pain in a Marble Boardroom

Every couple in distress dances the same choreography. Three steps. A negative perception of the other. A reactive emotion. A protective action. I call it the Waltz of Pain, and it does not care about your net worth.

One partner lives in what I think of as the penthouse. High up, high energy, demanding connection and visibility. In a marriage, this partner cannot stop bringing up the past, follows you from room to room wanting to talk, sends the long text messages at midnight. In a divorce, this same partner becomes the aggressive litigator. Scorched earth. Excessive motions. Irrational demands for justice. Stopping the fight feels like accepting abandonment, so they cannot stop.

The other partner begins in the basement. Retreated. Self-contained. Rationalizing. Building the logical argument. Missing discovery deadlines. Ghosting counsel. The attorney thinks "this is my reasonable client." What the attorney is actually seeing is a body dissociating because every new legal issue is another opportunity to feel like a failure.

The pursuer reaches. The withdrawer retreats. The pursuer reaches harder. The withdrawer collapses deeper inside themselves. Both feel hurt. Both feel unseen. Both swear the other is the problem. Nobody is the problem. The system is.

Diagnostic rule I teach every clinician who comes through my trainings. If one of four things is present, all four are present. I am hurting. I am reacting. You are hurting. You are reacting.

Look at any high-conflict divorce headline for long enough and you will see all four running under the surface, no matter how many zeros are attached to the settlement.

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

Money as Attachment, Not Math

Every couple I work with has a money story underneath their relationship story. Your relationship with money and your relationship with your partner run on the same operating system.

Money is never about money. It is: how come I am alone with this. It is: I am scared the way you spend. It is: you are not here for me. I have sat with couples at Google whose equity packages would make most people faint, and their physiology is in free fall. The body does not care about numbers. It cares about safety.

When a marriage is amassing wealth, the accumulation itself can look like the bond. Look at what we have built. Look at what we own. Look at how the world sees us. And then something small happens, a comment at a dinner, a late text, a decision made without consultation, and the whole thing cracks, because the accumulation was not the bond. The accumulation was a monument to the bond that never quite got built.

When the marriage ends, the accumulation becomes the only currency the couple knows how to fight in. So they fight in it. The billion becomes the language. The percentage becomes the plea. Am I enough for you gets translated into court filings. The body is trying to issue a receipt for a debt the courthouse does not know how to count.

I have written about this same dynamic playing out in a settlement that would not stay settled. The mechanism is identical. When the wound is limbic and the tool is cognitive, the tool keeps failing, and the couple keeps reaching for it, and the fees keep climbing.

The Prenup That Never Happened

There is a specific version of this pain that is worth naming when we are talking about a chaebol marriage. The prenup conversation, or the absence of one, or the presence of one that never got worked on emotionally.

A prenuptial agreement is a strange animal. You literally sit down before your wedding and make legal plans for every worst case scenario. Divorce, infidelity, custody, incapacity. And what most couples do is jump straight to the finalized details. Whose assets. Which trust. What percentage. That is exactly the same move as the husband who jumps to the solution about the dishes while his wife's nervous system is on fire. Skipping the emotional conversation guarantees the emotional conversation shows up later, wearing a different mask, in a courtroom.

What I help couples do, and it sounds paradoxical, is have the other conversation first. Not the terms. The fears. What does the prenup process bring up inside you. What do you worry might happen. What are the worst things you can imagine. Where does this touch old wounds about being wanted for who you are versus what you bring. What does it mean to sign paperwork acknowledging that this could end.

Rarely does a solution make things better. What makes things better is connection first, problem solving later. Get the couple emotionally bonded, then let them solve the practical problem. Whole new problem-solving capacities become available on the fertile soil. Without that soil, the same conversation just triggers both partners back into their old survival positions and the negotiation becomes another wound.

Most chaebol prenups, most billionaire prenups, most prenups of any size, skip this entirely. And then twenty or thirty years later, the courtroom becomes the place where the conversation nobody was willing to have gets had, at the volume of a national headline, in the currency of hundreds of millions.

Sovereignty That Is Actually Just Avoidance

There is a kind of sovereignty that is really just avoidance in spiritual clothing. It sounds like: I am sovereign, you are sovereign, if we cannot get along that is just how it is. That is not adulthood. That is self-protection dressed up as wisdom.

I call this orphan sovereignty because it is the survival strategy of someone who learned early that leaning on another person was too dangerous to try. It is very common in high-achievement cultures. You build the empire. You build the reputation. You build the fortune. And underneath, you are still the child who decided that needing anyone was too risky, so you would rather have a marble tower than a hand to hold in the dark.

When two orphan-sovereign people marry, the marriage often looks impressive from the outside for a long time. Two capable individuals, high functioning, running parallel lives. And then something happens, a health crisis, a child leaving home, a business setback, a betrayal, and the parallel lines finally have to meet, and neither person has ever built the muscle for that meeting. So they reach for the tools they know. Lawyers. Filings. Numbers. Precedent.

Real relational sovereignty is different. It says I am sovereign, you are sovereign, and the us between us is sovereign too. Two people staying present without disappearing or overpowering. That is not fusion. That is not independence. That is the actual work.

Building that between two people takes years of small repairs. Every disconnection, every small rupture, every moment of misattunement is a chance to cross the bridge back to your partner's reality. That is the proof. Not the wealth. Not the status. Not the photograph on the cover of the business magazine.

What This Means for Your Life

Maybe you are not on the SK board. Maybe your marriage is not being litigated across the front page of an international newspaper. But if you are reading this, some version of the mechanism is probably alive somewhere in your life.

Look at whatever fight you are currently stuck in. The one about money, about time, about the schedule, about who called whom back too slowly, about the way your in-laws were treated at Thanksgiving. Ask yourself the harder question underneath. Am I safe here. Was I seen here. Did the person I built my life around build me in too, or was I always just a contributor.

The court, the mediator, the lawyer, the arbitrator, none of them can answer that question. They were never designed to. They handle content. Your body is asking about connection.

The good news, and there is good news, is that connection is repairable at almost any stage. I have watched couples that a previous therapist told there was no hope, that were already divorced, that were already living in separate states, find their way back once someone finally gave them the framework for what was actually happening between them. The tools are simple. The work is not easy, but the tools are simple. Slow down. Notice the cycle. Name the wound underneath the accusation. Cross the bridge. Repair.

That is the whole game, whether you have four hundred crore in trust or forty dollars on eBay.

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

The Seoul court will rule on the number. It will not rule on the wound. If you are watching this case and something inside you keeps flinching, that is not because you care about Korean corporate governance. It is because a body somewhere inside you already knows the difference between a settlement and a resolution, and it is asking you what you are going to do about the ledger you have been carrying.

Answer that. Not the court.

Héctor Bello's Wife Andrea Died Shielding Their Daughter in an Earthquake: A Therapist on the Biology of a Mother's Final Act an

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 07:06:59 +0000

Héctor Bello's Wife Andrea Died Shielding Their Daughter in an Earthquake: A Therapist on the Biology of a Mother's Final Act and the Ground the Surviving Father Now Has to Build

Some stories arrive and the body knows before the mind does. You read the sentence and something in your chest drops before the words even finish landing.

Andrea Bello, wife of Venezuelan defender Héctor Bello, died shielding their baby daughter during an earthquake. In a recent E! News piece, Héctor announced that his wife covered their child with her body as the ceiling came down. The baby survived. Andrea did not.

The internet is already doing the internet thing. Sanctifying her. Making her a symbol. Reaching for phrases like "hero mom" and "the ultimate sacrifice" because those are the phrases we have when the actual event is too big for language.

I am not going to add another lit candle to that pile. I did not know Andrea. I will not diagnose Héctor from a headline. I will not pretend to speak to a family in Venezuela through a therapy blog in California.

What I will do is sit under this moment for a minute. Because underneath the hero-mom framing is the most raw, unarguable evidence I have ever seen of what attachment actually is in the human body. And the man left standing, holding a baby whose primary regulator just disappeared under a roof, is now facing a task that most cultures barely have words for.

The Bridge: Why Andrea's Body Made the Choice Before Her Mind Did

Here is what I want to name before anything else. Andrea did not "decide" to shield her daughter in the way we usually mean the word decide. Her body did that. The choice ran through her before the neocortex ever got a vote.

This is where I want to spend the next 1,500 words, because what happened in that room, and what is happening now in Héctor's body and his daughter's body, is not really a "grief story." It is a story about the deepest wiring in the mammalian brain, and about the very specific work a surviving parent has to do when the co-regulator is suddenly, violently gone.

The Anti-Death Protocol

Attachment is not a soft topic. It gets filed under "feelings" by people who have never read the science.

From the moment a human being is born, the primary need is not food, not water, not shelter. It is emotional bonding. If there is no good-enough other on the other side of your birth, you die. This is not metaphor. This is what Bowlby spent his life proving. Your body, from breath one, is scanning for the answer to a question with existential stakes: is there someone here who will keep me alive?

The dingo is on the savanna. If your mother is not there, the dingo eats you. That is the environment the human animal was built inside. We are, at the marrow, an anti-death protocol dressed up in language and clothes.

Andrea's body, in the second the ground moved, ran the protocol perfectly. Every molecule of her physiology did what a mother's physiology is designed to do. She became the shield. She placed her own biology between her child and the falling world. She did not sacrifice herself in some noble abstract sense. Her body executed its deepest programming: this small body survives, whatever happens to mine.

I want to say something that might land wrong at first and then land right. Andrea did not fail to survive. She succeeded. She did the thing the whole mammalian design is oriented around. That is not a consolation prize. That is the truth of what love is, at the layer below language.

The Body Is the First Ledger

Long before we had written records or any system of accounting, we had the body itself. It is the original ledger. It records every terror, every rupture, every moment of safety or its absence.

What Héctor and his daughter just experienced is what I call, in the therapy room, a sudden interruption of positive affect. One second, family. Wife. Baby. Roof. Ground. The next second, none of it. The interruption is so violent that the body cannot file it as ordinary information. It files it as a survival event.

That event is now written into both of their bodies. The baby cannot narrate what happened. She is too young for language. But her tissues know. Her breathing knows. Her startle response knows. Her body has recorded the moment the world stopped being reliable. She will carry that block in her ledger forever, whether she can name it or not.

Héctor's body has recorded a different block. The moment the phone call, or the sight, or the pulling away of rubble. The moment he saw what she had done. That is not a memory that fades. That is a permanent entry.

A fiat culture will tell them both to move on. Be strong. Time heals. Kick the emotional debt down the road. But bodies do not print their way out of grief the way governments print their way out of insolvency. The debt has to be settled at the level where it was incurred, which is the body itself.

The Mother on the Phone, and Then Some

I use a scene with grieving families to help them understand what happens in the first hours and days after a sudden death.

Picture a small child in a kitchen with their mother. They are playing. Connected. The mother's phone rings and she learns her sister has just died. She is still physically in the kitchen. Her body has not moved. But emotionally she is gone, plunged into a private ocean of grief.

The only thing the child knows is that mom has gone. She was here. Now she is not here. And the child is alone in a devastating relational pain they have no language for.

Now amplify that a thousandfold. Andrea did not go into a private ocean of grief. Andrea is not in the kitchen at all. And the person left holding the child is also drowning. This is what I mean when I say a sudden death does not just shake the building. It shakes the ground the building stands on. I've written about this dynamic in more depth in my piece on what sudden death actually does to a family.

Héctor is now standing on shaken ground while being asked to be steady ground for a child whose primary source of steadiness was just taken. That is the actual, brutal, unromantic job description.

The Two Questions, Now Impossible to Answer Cleanly

Underneath every human interaction, your body is asking two questions. Are you there for me. Am I enough for you.

Héctor's daughter will spend the rest of her life, at some level of consciousness, asking the first question of the empty air where her mother used to be. That is not something a father can fully answer for. He is not her mother. He cannot become her mother. And he should not try.

What he can do, and this is where the actual proof of work of being a surviving parent lives, is answer his own version of the question, over and over, with his body. I am here. I am not leaving. When you cry in the dark, I come. When you rage, I stay. When you go silent, I do not go away. That is not romance. That is a repeated, exhausting, holy transaction between his physiology and hers.

The couples I work with often think settling each other happens through the right words. It does not. It happens through repeated physical presence in the moments the body expected abandonment and got something else instead. The child learns, over ten thousand small repetitions, that this world is not the world where the roof fell. Or, more honestly, that the roof fell once, and this person stayed anyway.

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

The Trap of the Unfeeling Rock

Here is where I want to talk directly to any father, or any surviving parent, reading this. Because there is a script the culture will hand you, and it will nearly kill you if you follow it.

The script says: be the rock. Feel nothing. Hold it together. Provide. Do not cry in front of the child because she needs you to be strong.

That script is wrong. It is the same script that turned generations of men into people who identified with the protective strategy and forgot the wound underneath. The rock is not the parent who feels nothing. The rock is the parent who stays present while feeling everything.

A child does not need a father who is impervious. A child needs a father whose body is honest. Safety does not soothe your physiology first. Safety allows your physiology to tell the truth.

If Héctor pretends nothing hurts, his daughter will read that signal her whole life. She will learn that big feelings are private and shameful. She will learn to hide her own grief because dad handled his without showing anyone. She will build what I sometimes call protector parts. The Bull who just works and endures. The Caretaker who tries to heal the surviving parent instead of grieving her own mother. The Ghost who disappears into achievement so nobody has to worry about her.

I saw this in my own house growing up. Alcoholic father, overwhelmed mother, and a very early lesson that my sadness would break the adults if I actually let it out. So I stopped going to daycare. I started cooking for myself. I tried not to be a burden. I thought if I was funny enough, useful enough, special enough, I could fix my mother's heart. I was doing the caretaker's job before I was old enough to spell it.

Héctor's daughter will have that pull. Every child who loses a parent early has that pull. She will want to become his rock. His job is to gently, repeatedly refuse the offer. She is not here to hold him. He is here to hold her. And he holds her better by letting her see that he is human, that he weeps, that he misses her mother out loud, than by performing a stoicism that trains her to bury herself.

Empathy Cubed in a Shattered System

There is a piece of my work I call Empathy Cubed. Most people know empathy in one direction. I feel for you. Actual survival of a shared catastrophe requires three directions at once. Compassion for me. Compassion for you. Compassion for us.

Héctor and his daughter have been thrust into a shared suffering bubble. Neither of them chose it. Both of them are in it. To survive it, he cannot only feel for his daughter's motherless terror. He cannot only steel himself against his own grief. He has to hold three things at once. His own devastation. Her devastation. And the devastation of the shattered us they are now rebuilding from rubble that is both metaphorical and, in this case, literal.

The parent who tries to do only compassion for you burns out and resents the child by year three. The parent who does only compassion for me is absent even when they are in the room. The parent who can hold all three, imperfectly, day after day, gives the child a real chance.

The Missing Experience in Real Time

In couples therapy, I spend months trying to time travel clients back to the moments in childhood where they felt abandoned, so their partner can offer them, in the present, what I call the missing experience. The love that was not there when they were four. The steady presence that was not there when they were seven.

Héctor's daughter is in the origin wound right now. Live. Unfolding. He does not have the luxury of doing this work with her at forty. He is doing it with her at, whatever her age is, right now.

That is a task of a specific kind of holiness. When she cries in the dark, he cannot fix her grief with logic. You cannot cognitively reason a limbic wound into settling. The rational brain runs behind the survival brain. He can only hold her at the threshold of her despair and say, with his body more than his words, I am here. We are hurting together. You are not alone.

That is the missing experience. That is what he can give her. That is the whole work. I've explored more of this territory in my piece on what families carrying unspeakable grief actually need, if you want to sit with it further.

What This Asks of Any Reader Who Is Not Héctor

You are probably not a Venezuelan soccer player who just lost his wife in an earthquake. You are probably a person reading this on your phone in a warm room with everyone you love more or less accounted for.

But the biology of what Andrea did is not unique to catastrophe. It is running in you right now. You are, at some layer, a body wired to shield the small bodies you love, wired to settle in the presence of the person next to you, wired to keep asking those two questions of the people you belong to.

If you have children, ask yourself when you last let them see you feel something real. Not performed. Not managed. Real.

If you have a partner, ask yourself if the two of you have built enough ground that, if the ceiling actually came down, you would know where each other's bodies were.

If you are the person in your family who has been playing the unfeeling rock, ask yourself what the cost has been. To you. To them.

The peg for this article is a tragedy in Venezuela. The wisdom is not. The wisdom is that you are living inside the same wiring Andrea was, and the same wiring Héctor is now, and the choices you make about how present to be with the people in front of you are the same choices that ran through her body when the ground moved.

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

Andrea did what her body was designed to do. Héctor now has to do what a body is barely designed to do, which is stay present through devastation and become the ground for another small life while his own ground is gone. He will fail some days. He will succeed others. That is the whole shape of it.

Do not wait for the ceiling to fall to find out whether the people you love know where your body is.

Gray Divorce Is Rising: A Couples Therapist on Why 40-Year Marriages Are Quietly Going Bankrupt After the Kids Leave

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 14:15:46 +0000

Gray Divorce Is Rising: A Couples Therapist on Why 40-Year Marriages Are Quietly Going Bankrupt After the Kids Leave

The New York Times reported this week that divorce rates among adults over 50 have climbed sharply over the past three decades, and the experts they quoted offered the usual theories. Longer lifespans. Less stigma. Women with more financial independence. Empty nests. The story made the rounds on Facebook with the polite shock that always accompanies the gray divorce conversation, as though it is some mysterious cultural weather pattern blowing through the boomer generation. You can read the original Times piece here.

I want to offer a different read. I have been a licensed marriage and family therapist for over sixteen years. I have sat with couples in their late sixties, seventies, even two couples right now in their eighties. What I see is not a generational mystery. It is a predictable, almost mechanical outcome of how these marriages were built. Or more accurately, how they were not built. The empty nest does not cause the divorce. It removes the twenty-year distraction from a relationship that was already running on fumes.

That is the thread I want to pull on. Because if you are in your forties or fifties reading this with a quiet pit in your stomach, the news is not that you have to wait until the kids leave to find out what is underneath. The news is that you can find out now. And you should.

The Bridge: Why "We Grew Apart" Is Almost Always a Lie

When older couples explain the end of a long marriage, they reach for the same sentence. "We just grew apart." It is the socially acceptable answer. It does not blame anyone. It treats the marriage like a houseplant that simply did not get enough sun.

But I have never met a couple that actually grew apart. What I have met, hundreds of times, is two people who spent thirty or forty years avoiding the small, daily, uncomfortable work of repair. The bill comes due eventually. Gray divorce is the bill arriving.

The Twenty-Year Distraction

Here is the architecture of most long marriages I work with. You meet someone. You fall in love. You have a few good years of just being a couple. Then the kids arrive. And for about eighteen to twenty years, depending on how many you have, your primary focus shifts off yourselves and each other and onto those kids. That is not wrong. That is what raising children requires.

The challenge is not to completely lose yourself or your partner in that transition. Most couples cannot do this. They reach a kind of truce. They are living together. They are functional. They are not at an all-needs-met situation. They are getting through.

I went through a version of this myself with my wife Teale when our kids were small. There is a moment I have written about before, a fight in our kitchen, where I jumped ahead trying to offer a solution and skipped over the reconnection part entirely. Teale said something to me I will not print here. She was right. I had treated her like a logistics problem rather than a person who needed me to slow down and meet her in her body. That is the parenting-years pattern in miniature. Efficiency over presence. Tasks over tenderness. And it stacks. Day after day, year after year.

Then the kids leave. The distraction is gone. The focus has to return to the bond. And couples suddenly realize that their primary attachment to each other has been disrupted for two decades.

The Bill Comes Due

I write about money a lot because the dynamics rhyme. When a couple avoids a difficult conflict and smooths it over to keep the peace, they are not being good partners. They are printing relational debt. They are stealing stability from their future selves to buy comfort right now.

I call this a fiat relationship. The words "I love you" and "I'm sorry" get used the way governments use printed money. Overused, underbacked, devalued every time they leave the mouth without the work behind them. You can run this scheme for years. You can run it for decades. The currency keeps circulating because both parties are too tired to call the bluff.

But the body keeps the true ledger. You cannot gaslight your own physiology. And eventually, hyperinflation hits. Decades into a marriage, the trust collapses. One partner looks at the other across the kitchen table after the youngest leaves for college and realizes the savings account is empty. There was never anything in it.

This is what the demographers are watching. A spike in older-adult divorce is the market correction of decades of printed currency with no backing. It is not sudden. It is not mysterious. It is the most predictable outcome in the world if you understand what has been silently accruing on the emotional balance sheet.

Real love requires Proof of Work. The work is repair. Repair costs energy, attention, humility, and the willingness to stay present when everything in your body wants to flee or attack. Over time, repair builds an emotional ledger in the body that says we can lose each other and find each other again. That ledger is the only thing that holds a marriage at year thirty.

The Mechanism: Two Protectors Dancing for Decades

I want to be specific about how the disconnection actually accumulates, because "we grew apart" hides the machinery. Your protector parts meet your partner's protector parts, and the relationship becomes a reenactment of wounds neither of you caused.

In most of the heterosexual long marriages I work with, the pattern looks the same. The wife has been the Relentless Lover, reaching for connection for years. She is the one asking why she is the only one trying. She is the one wanting the conversation about the relationship. She is the one demanding more emotional presence while he watches Sunday football. The husband has been the Reluctant Lover, retreating when things feel intense, protecting through distance. He goes to his workshop. He goes to his email. He goes anywhere except into the room where the bond actually lives.

The more she reaches, the deeper he collapses inside himself. The deeper he collapses, the louder and more critical her reach becomes. Round and round you go, dancing the same painful loop together. If this loop runs un-repaired for thirty years, you build up to toxic levels of resentment and reactivity. I have written about this dynamic at length in my piece on attachment styles and the hidden blueprint behind every relationship if you want the full anatomy.

By the time these couples reach their sixties or seventies, the woman is often what I would call a burnt-out pursuer. She is so tired she has actually given up. She has spent a lifetime feeling abandoned and not cared for, and she finally decides she can no longer live in a state where her bonding needs are unmet. She does not leave in a rage. She leaves in exhaustion. The fire she carried for years is out.

Her husband, meanwhile, is often genuinely shocked. He thought things were fine. He always thought things were fine. That is the Reluctant Lover's tragedy. He confused her silence for peace when it was actually the sound of her giving up.

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

The Grand Canyon Bed

There is a couple I worked with whose phrase I will never forget. They told me they had been sleeping like the Grand Canyon for ten years. Same bed. Miles of empty space between them. Two bodies in the same room, completely isolated from one another.

That image stays with me because it captures what gray divorce actually looks like before it becomes a legal event. It is not a fight. It is not an affair. It is two people in the same house whose nervous systems stopped meeting somewhere around the time the oldest kid started middle school. They learned to coexist. They got good at it. They mistook coexistence for love.

The couples who frighten me most are not the ones who fight. They are the ones who do not. I have seen couples who are both committed to withdrawing from conflict, both conflict avoiders, who believe everything is fine because nobody is yelling. That kind of couple is actually very hard to work with. I have to light a fire under their seats and create enough discomfort that they can finally see what their real wounding is. They look perfect on the outside for decades because they keep the peace. Underneath, the un-repaired ruptures have quietly bankrupted the relationship. Then the kids leave, and there is nothing to talk about except the bankruptcy.

If this is starting to sound familiar, the disagreements you are currently having about kids and logistics might be more diagnostic than you think. I have written about how something as small as arguing about your kid's bedtime routine is rarely about bedtime at all. It is about whether you are still on the same team. Whether your partner has your back. Whether the two of you are protecting your family together or protecting yourselves from each other. Those small fights are the early-warning system. Most couples ignore them for twenty years.

What Has to Happen Instead

If you are reading this and recognizing yourself, the path out is not complicated to describe. It is just hard to walk.

The couple has to move from two separate sufferings to one shared suffering. Right now, one partner is alone in their anxiety, the other is alone in their loneliness, and they are separated by a wall of accumulated defense. The work is Empathy Cubed. Compassion for me, compassion for you, and compassion for us, all at once. When a couple can look at the wreckage of thirty years and say, "Wow, we are both really hurting, look at the mess we are in, this is hard for us," the suffering itself becomes the bridge. The mess stops being evidence against the marriage and becomes the thing they hold together.

This requires building what I call a Sovereign Us. The relationship itself becomes the third entity, the thing both of you are protecting, separate from your individual needs and your individual pride. Not fusion. Not codependence. Two people who have decided that the bond is worth defending against the dynamic trying to kill it. I write more about this in the context of couples fighting about in-laws, but the principle applies to gray divorce just as cleanly. The enemy is not your partner. The enemy is the loop the two of you have been running for decades.

And here is the hope I want to leave you with. I am working with two couples right now in their eighties. Eighties. People always surprise me with their ability to access their feelings and share vulnerably when they are given time and a little space, regardless of their generation. The body can heal and rewrite the ledger at any age. The bond can be rebuilt. I have watched it happen with people who had been told by previous therapists that there was no hope, that they should divorce, that the relationship was dead. It was not dead. It was starved.

Application: The Question to Sit With Tonight

If you are in your forties or fifties, I want you to ask yourself something honest. Not what your spouse needs to change. Not what you wish they would do differently. Something harder.

When was the last time you actually repaired something between you? Not smoothed it over. Not moved on to keep the peace. Repaired. Turned toward each other after a rupture and stayed there long enough to feel the bond mend.

If you cannot think of a recent example, your relationship is not necessarily in trouble. But it is running on debt. It is printing currency without backing. And the kids are not going to be in the house forever. The distraction has an expiration date.

The good news is that the work is available to you right now. The ledger can change starting today. Every small act of presence, every conflict you do not avoid, every moment you stop, slow down, and ask what is actually happening in your partner's body, those are deposits in the only account that will matter when you are sixty-five and the house goes quiet.

What to Do Next

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

Gray divorce is not a mystery. It is a receipt. The question is not why the boomers are divorcing. The question is what you are putting in the account now, while you still have time to compound it. Stop printing. Start building. The bill always comes.

Kate Gosselin, Collin's Memoir, and What Happens When a Family System Has to Expel Its Truth-Teller

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 07:07:47 +0000

Kate Gosselin, Collin's Memoir, and What Happens When a Family System Has to Expel Its Truth-Teller

When a recent Daily Mail report describes Kate Gosselin as "spiralling" ahead of her estranged son Collin's tell-all memoir, with a source saying "she never thought this would come out," I want to slow the whole conversation down. The cultural reflex is to pick a villain. Either the mother is a narcissist who exploited her children on camera, or the son is a troubled rebel weaponizing his pain for a book deal. Pick a side, post a take, move on.

I have been a couples and family therapist for over sixteen years. I am not going to diagnose Kate Gosselin. I do not know her. I will not diagnose Collin. I do not know him either. What I do know, from the inside of the therapy room, is what happens when a family system that has been holding a public performance suddenly has one of its members refuse to keep holding it. And I know what happens inside the body of the parent on the other side of that refusal.

This is not a story about a bad mom and a wounded kid. It is a story about a system. And once you can see the system, you can see why this was always going to happen, why the parent in this position panics, and what any of us watching from our own families can actually learn from it.

The Bridge: The System Is the Story

In my office, I tell couples something that lands hard the first time they hear it. The problem is the system between you, not the person in front of you. Nobody is the villain. Nobody is the victim. Two people who matter enormously to each other are caught in a cycle that makes perfect sense when you see it from above. That same lens applies to a parent and an adult child. And it applies to a family that grew up with cameras in the kitchen.

The Truth-Teller the System Had to Expel

Every unstable family system needs someone to carry the truth it cannot face. I have watched this dynamic in family after family, across sixteen years of sessions. There is almost always one child who refuses to collude with the lie the family is telling itself. The one who notices the drinking. The one who names the emptiness. The one who feels what no one else in the system can tolerate feeling.

The system does not celebrate this child for the clarity. Quite the opposite. The truth-teller becomes the problem. The one who will not participate becomes dangerous to the family's emotional survival. So the system does what unstable systems have always done. It corrects. It shames. It dismisses. It sends to therapy. It diagnoses. It medicates. It exiles.

This is not because the truth-teller is wrong. It is because their clarity makes the family's denial impossible to maintain. The cost gets paid later. Sometimes much later. A memoir is one form of that cost coming due.

I am not saying this is what happened in the Gosselin family. I am saying that in any family system that has functioned partly as a public performance, the child whose body refuses to perform becomes the one most likely, eventually, to tell the truth out loud. That is not pathology. That is the system's own pressure finding an outlet.

The Parent's Panic Is Not Malice. It Is the Compass of Shame.

When a parent learns their child is publishing a tell-all, the body does not register it as a publishing event. The body registers it as the deepest form of attachment exposure a person can experience. The child they raised, the child whose love they need, is about to make their not-good-enoughness visible to the entire world.

This is where the Compass of Shame becomes useful. When shame erupts in the body, the survival response flees in one of four directions. Attack self. Attack other. Withdraw. Avoid or numb out through compulsivity. These are not character flaws. They are survival strategies, and every human being uses some combination of them when the ground gives way.

A parent in the position of being publicly exposed by their adult child is going to feel that compass spinning in real time. Attack other says, "If I discredit you first, no one will believe you." Attack self says, "I am the worst mother who ever lived, I deserve this." Withdraw says, "Please do not see my flaws. Please do not see my not-enoughness. Please do not reject me." Avoid says, "Pour another drink, scroll the phone, book the trip, anything but stay with this feeling."

When you read that a famous mother is "spiralling," you are reading a description of the compass spinning at high speed. It is not a moral failure. It is a body that does not have the capacity to settle long enough to stay present to the shame underneath.

This is the part most cultural commentary will miss. The panic is biological. The panic is the body saying, "I cannot survive being seen this way." Whatever you think of the person, the panic itself is human.

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

Repair Between Parent and Child Goes One Direction

There is a hard thing I have to say to parents in my office, and I will say it here too. Repair between a parent and a child is a one-way street. I do not care if it is a ninety-year-old parent and a seventy-year-old child. One person is still the parent and the other is still the child when it comes to repair. The parent should not be looking to the child to meet the parent's emotional needs. Ever.

When an adult child writes a memoir, the parent's job is not to demand the child manage the parent's feelings about it. The parent's job is to find their own ground, their own therapist, their own capacity to settle the body, and then, if and when the child is willing, to offer something the child actually needs. Not a defense. Not a counter-narrative. Not a press tour. An acknowledgment of impact.

This is where most parents in this position get stuck. They want to argue intention. "I did the best I could." "I was a single mom." "You don't understand what I was going through." All of that may be true. None of it is repair. Most of the hurt in any close relationship comes from impact without intention. Your child does not hear your decisions through the ledger of your stress in 2009. They hear them through the ledger of their body at age six. Each time the gap between intention and impact shows up, there is a choice. Defend the intention or attend to the impact. The first path feels safer. It kills intimacy every time.

I have written more about how the absence or volatility of a parent gets encoded in a child's body in When the Father Isn't Involved with the Baby. The mechanics are the same whether the missing parent is absent through addiction, work, divorce, or being too overwhelmed by their own activation to stay present. The child's body keeps the ledger. And the ledger eventually wants to be read out loud.

The Sibling Society and the Failure of the Base Layer

Robert Bly used a phrase that has stayed with me. He called modern Western culture a Sibling Society. Adults waiting to be rescued. Adults expecting their kids, their partners, their followers, their fans to settle them. That is not sovereignty. That is arrested development.

A parent's job, when the kids are small, is to be the steady base. To regulate the child until the child can internalize regulation. The rules are predictable. The ground does not shift. The caregiver remains present even when the child is dysregulated, difficult, or inconvenient. That is the work. That is the proof of work of parenthood.

In families where the parent never had that themselves, where the parent's own attachment was unstable, where the parent is running on fumes and shame and unprocessed grief, the base layer fails. The parent flips the polarity. The child is asked, implicitly, to make the parent feel like a good parent. To not embarrass the parent. To smile for the camera. To make the family look okay. That is the inversion. And inversions show up later, sometimes in a courtroom, sometimes in a memoir, sometimes in a long silence that lasts decades.

If you are reading this and you recognize the inversion in your own family of origin, that is not a small recognition. That is the doorway to the actual work.

The Waltz of Pain Between Parent and Adult Child

Anytime there is conflict, three things are happening inside each person at once. A negative perception of the other. A reactive emotion in the body. An action tendency born out of that perception and emotion. That is the dance step. And the other person's dance step, locked into yours, makes the whole infinity loop.

In an estranged parent-adult-child dynamic, the loop tends to look like this. The parent perceives the child as betraying, ungrateful, weaponizing pain. The parent feels shame and panic. The parent's action tendency is to attack the child's credibility or to collapse into self-pity. The child, watching this, perceives the parent as never having taken responsibility. The child feels the old wound. The child's action tendency is to push harder, to be louder, to make the truth impossible to ignore. Which lands on the parent as more attack, which produces more panic, which produces more attack on the child's credibility, which produces more pushing.

Both people are hurting because they once loved each other and on some level still do. They keep pulling the same three painful steps from each other, back and forth, until someone can see the system from above. Until then, the dance just keeps going.

I have written about the way this same dynamic shows up between parents who are still together, fighting about how to raise their kids, in Fighting About Parenting Styles. The presenting fight is rarely the real fight. The real fight is almost always about whether each person feels safe, held, chosen, and like the future is solid.

Why Public Performance Families Are Especially Vulnerable

There is one piece of this that deserves naming. When a family's income, identity, and meaning are bound up in being watched, the family system takes on a second master. The first master is the bond between members. The second master is the audience. When those two masters disagree, the audience usually wins, because the audience pays the bills.

A child raised inside that arrangement learns very early that the camera is part of the relational ground. Their physiology reads the room as: I am loved when I am performing. I am useful when I am photogenic. I am a problem when I make the family look bad. That is not a healthy base. That is a system in which the child's authenticity becomes a liability to the family's survival.

So when one of those children grows up and writes a memoir, what they are doing, neurobiologically, is reclaiming the right to be the author of their own story rather than a character in someone else's. Whether the prose is good or bad, whether the publisher is reputable or sleazy, whether the timing is generous or cruel, the underlying movement is the same. They are saying, "My experience of self matters more to me now than your story of other."

That is the only path to sovereignty for a child raised inside a performance system. Painful for the parent. Necessary for the child.

Application: This Is Not Just a Celebrity Story

You may not have a reality show. You may not have a memoir coming out about you. But almost everyone reading this is somewhere in this dynamic. Either you are the parent terrified that your adult child is going to one day name what happened in your house. Or you are the adult child trying to figure out whether to keep colluding with the family story or finally tell the truth. Or you are the partner of someone in one of those two positions, watching them spiral and not knowing what to do.

The work is the same in every case. Stop trying to win the story of other. Turn the flashlight back around onto your own experience of self. Find a therapist, a coach, a friend, a journal, a community where you can feel what is underneath your panic without weaponizing it onto the other person. Recognize that your body is doing what it learned to do. And recognize that the only way out of the loop is for someone in it to stop pulling on the rope.

That is what I have come to call the proof of work of love. Not a feeling. Not an announcement. The repeated, unglamorous practice of staying with your own truth long enough to stop demanding that someone else carry it for you. If you want a different angle on why people only do this work when the current way of being hurts badly enough, I wrote about it in Love, Bitcoin, and Why You Won't Change Until It Hurts Like Hell.

What to Do Next

If you are sitting in any chair in this dynamic, the parent terrified of exposure, the adult child wrestling with whether to speak, the sibling watching the family fracture, the spouse trying to support someone caught in it, the work is not to figure out who is right. The work is to find the ground underneath the spiral.

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

Whatever side of the story you are on, the truth is going to find its way out of the family system one way or another. The only real question is whether you do the work to meet it with some ground under your feet, or whether you spend the rest of your life flailing at the people who name what your body was never able to face. The memoir is not the threat. The denial was.

When a Faked Death Ends in Real Custody: Nicholas Alahverdian and the Psychology of a Life Built on Fiat Identity

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 18:09:55 +0000

When a Faked Death Ends in Real Custody: Nicholas Alahverdian and the Psychology of a Life Built on Fiat Identity

The story arrived in a way that almost no story arrives anymore. The man pronounced dead in Rhode Island in 2020 was, according to recent reporting, found years later in a Glasgow hospital using a different name, in a different accent, with a different biography stapled to his face. Extradited. Tried. And now dead, this time apparently for real, in Utah custody. The Providence Journal carried the story under the kind of headline that gets clicked because it has the shape of a movie and the texture of a true crime podcast.

The internet is doing what the internet does. People are picking sides about whether his death was suspicious, whether he was a monster or a victim, whether the system caught him or failed him. The algorithm rewards the most certain take, and the most certain take is almost always the wrong one.

I want to read this differently. I am not going to diagnose Nicholas Alahverdian. I never sat with him. The Goldwater rule applies to the famously accused too, and it applies even when they are no longer around to be insulted. What I am going to do is point at the pattern, because the pattern is what shows up in my office in much smaller, less spectacular forms every single week. A life built entirely on a manufactured identity is not a clever heist. It is a body that decided, very young, that the organic self was so unacceptable it had to be erased and rebuilt from synthetic parts.

From a Glasgow Hospital Bed to Your Living Room

You do not need a fake death and an international manhunt to live inside this. The same mechanism that lets a man bury his real name and walk through a decade as someone else runs through quieter performances we all recognize. The partner who has been having a five-year affair while staying married. The professional who has constructed an entire LinkedIn persona that the spouse at home would not recognize. The adult child who calls home every Sunday and never once says anything true. The friend who has been lying about their finances, their sobriety, their marriage, for so long they can no longer remember what the original truth was.

The Alahverdian case is the loudest possible version of a quiet thing. The quiet thing is this. A young physiology can decide, somewhere in childhood, that the real self is the dangerous one. From that decision, an entire architecture of performance gets built. The architecture is impressive. The architecture works. And the person living inside it slowly forgets what their real voice sounded like before it learned to survive.

The Representative Eats the Host

Every one of us arrives in adulthood with a survival strategy we learned long before we had language. These strategies are not personality. They are not flaws. They are not conscious. They are the nervous system doing what it had to do inside the conditions it was given.

For most people the strategy is partial. There is a polished version sent out to handle the world. There is also a private self that still gets to sit on the couch in pajamas, still gets to be tired, still gets to have a real reaction to a real moment. The polished version (the Fixer, the Executive, the Bull, the Charmer) handles the office, the in-laws, the first dates. The organic self gets to come back online when the door closes.

But sometimes the conditions of the early environment are so unstable, so shaming, so unsafe, that the polished version is told to never leave the stage. The host gets eaten by the role. The mask becomes the only face. You come home and your partner does not want The Fixer, but The Fixer is all that is left. The organic self has been gone so long the person cannot find their way back to it.

A life of total deception is what this looks like when the dial gets turned all the way up. It is not a moral failure. It is a survival response that received a message early on (do not be who you actually are, that person is not safe here) and obeyed the message for the rest of its life.

The Compass of Shame, All the Way Out

Shame is not embarrassment. Shame is the body registering a rupture in the attachment field. It feels like losing your place in the tribe. The body cannot tolerate this feeling for long, so it moves. It moves in one of four directions, and the moves are not chosen, they are reflexive. Attack self. Attack other. Withdraw. Deny.

Faking your own death is the Withdraw and Deny quadrants taken to their absolute outer limit. You do not just leave the room. You leave the country, the name, the body, the entire ledger of who you were. The shame the body is fleeing is so old and so total that ordinary withdrawal will not do. It needs a full erasure.

I see smaller versions of this every week. The husband who stops answering his wife's texts for three days after a fight, because facing her face feels like dying. The mother who has not spoken to her sister in eleven years over a comment about a christening dress. The client who quits a job the day before performance review season every single year. These are not strategies a person chose with their thinking brain. These are the limbic system doing what limbic systems do when the alarm gets too loud. Run. Hide. Become unfindable. Become someone else.

If we truly want to escape the suffering, we have to see that almost every reactive behavior (attacking, avoiding, collapsing, vanishing) is just a body trying not to feel shame.

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

Fiat Identity: Printing a Self Without Backing

Here is where I want to push the frame, because this is the part the true crime coverage will never reach.

We live inside a culture that has trained us to accept currency without backing. The dollar in your pocket is not redeemable for anything. The promises politicians make are not redeemable for anything. The therapy-speak in someone's Hinge profile is not redeemable for anything. We have all gotten used to value statements that have no proof of work behind them.

A life of total deception is the human-scale version of this exact pattern. It is a self printed without backing. The con man wants the rewards of connection, status, sympathy, romance, without the caloric expenditure of being a real person who has done real things. He prints emotional currency by the truckload. New name. New tragic backstory. New cancer diagnosis. New cause. The currency circulates for years because the people receiving it have no way to check the reserves.

But there is no such thing as printing your way out of a broken bond. There is no such thing as printing your way out of a real self that needs to be metabolized. The debt always comes due. Hyperinflation hits. The receipts the body has been keeping (because the body, unlike the courthouse, is the original ledger) eventually demand settlement, and there is no currency in the world that can settle them.

I see this in milder forms in couples I have worked with for years. A spouse who has been performing intimacy without feeling it. A partner who has been agreeing to things he did not agree to. A wife who has been managing her own collapse by pretending it is not happening. The relationship runs on printed affect for a long time. Then the currency loses meaning. Then the system shatters. I have written more about how this collapse plays out under legal pressure in the piece on the Bevin divorce and judicial bias claims, where two activated bodies try to use a courtroom to settle a currency that the courthouse does not stock.

Why the Courtroom Was Always Going to Fail Him

The end of this story is a man dying in custody before any of it could resolve. There will be reporting on cause of death, on procedure, on whatever the formal record says. None of it will close the case the body was actually fighting.

This is the thing the legal system cannot do, and it is the thing I write about constantly. The courtroom is built on the assumption that there are two rational actors making decisions based on their interests. Inside a body that has spent decades on the run from its own shame, there is no rational actor. There is an amygdala that has been holding a microphone for forty years and a prefrontal cortex that has not been allowed in the room.

You cannot apply a cognitive solution to a biological problem. You can convict a man. You can extradite him. You can place him in custody. None of that touches the original wound that built the entire elaborate apparatus in the first place. The wound was attachment. The wound was always attachment. The court has no instrument for that. I made this same argument in the Murdaugh reversal piece, where the highest court in a state reopened a case the public had emotionally filed away, and the bodies that had finally exhaled were told to inhale again.

The Waltz With No Partner

I describe most relational suffering as a Waltz of Pain. Two people, two protectors, stepping on each other's toes in a cycle neither of them chose and neither of them can stop alone. I am hurting. I am reacting. You are hurting. You are reacting. Around and around.

But there is a version of this dance that happens without a partner. The dancer waltzes alone, with the world itself as the imagined other. The protector parts step out, do damage, then run from the inevitable reaction. There is no one to catch the music. There is no one to soften the step. There is no chance, ever, of the dance ending in a Sovereign Us, because there is no us. There is only the performance, the flight, the next performance, the next flight.

A life lived this way ends the way it ends. Alone. In custody, or in a hospital, or in a rented apartment in a city no one from the original family ever knew the name of. The lonely terminus of a system that could never let anyone in close enough to interrupt the choreography.

I do not write this with contempt. I write it with the particular grief I feel when I sit with people who have spent decades hiding from the small, scared, hurting child who is still waiting somewhere inside them. Almost all of my clients, no matter how impressive their architecture, are eventually trying to find their way back to that child. Some never make it. The ones who do not are not bad people. They are people whose physiology decided, very early, that the cost of being known was greater than the cost of being lost.

Reflexive Participation: The Antidote, Such As It Is

If there is a way out of this pattern, and I think there is for most people, it lives in something I call reflexive participation. It means being willing to witness your own body. To hold your own affect long enough to notice what is true under the alarm. To take emotional self-custody rather than outsource the ledger of your inner life to other people's reactions.

This is the opposite of the con. The con lives forever in the Story of Other. What they think of me. What I can get them to believe. What I am being seen as. Reflexive participation lives in the Experience of Self. What is actually happening in my chest right now. What I am actually afraid of. What I would have to feel if I stopped performing for thirty seconds.

The work is not glamorous. Nobody buys a podcast about it. There is no documentary in it. It is sitting on a couch with a partner and saying the small true thing instead of the big polished thing. It is letting your face do what your face wants to do at the dinner table. It is telling the person you have been performing for that you have been performing, and watching what happens when the performance stops.

Most of what I do for a living is help people stop performing inside their primary bond. The amount of suffering that lifts when the performance ends is enormous. The amount of intimacy that becomes available is enormous. None of it is available while the Representative is still onstage.

Back to Your Life

If you are reading this from inside your own version of it, here is the part that matters. You do not have to fake your death to be living a fiat life. You can be doing it from inside a marriage that looks fine. You can be doing it from inside a job that pays well. You can be doing it inside a friendship that has not had a real moment in nine years. The question is not whether you have hidden. The question is whether you are willing to be found.

If you share children with someone whose performance has collapsed into something more dangerous, the practical work is also real. I have written about what to do when a co-parent stops honoring agreements, because the legal scaffolding around your kids is one of the few places where documentation and structure genuinely protect what is happening in your body.

But for most people reading this, the work is closer to home and quieter. It is the willingness to walk back into your own body, sit with the child who has been hiding inside it, and stop printing affect that has no backing.

What to Do Next

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

A man died in custody this week after a decade of pretending he was already dead. That is the loud version. The quiet version is whatever you have been faking, and for how long, and what it would cost to stop. The courthouse will never settle it. The performance will never settle it. The only thing that settles it is the slow, unglamorous work of being a real person in front of someone who is willing to stay. Pick up the phone. Tell the small true thing. See who is still there in the morning.

Annie Knight, Henry Brayshaw, and the Gambling Relapse: Why "Codependent" Is the Wrong Word for What's Happening to Her

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 07:07:26 +0000

Annie Knight, Henry Brayshaw, and the Gambling Relapse: Why "Codependent" Is the Wrong Word for What's Happening to Her

Annie Knight broke down on camera this week. Stan's Turned On: Dirty Sexy Money aired the moment her fiancé Henry Brayshaw relapsed on his gambling addiction, and the relationship, according to the show and a recent Daily Mail piece, hit rock bottom. She cried. He retreated into the shame of it. The cameras kept rolling.

I have not met either of them. I am not going to diagnose them. But I have sat with this exact dynamic in my office for sixteen years, and I want to talk about what I am almost certain is happening underneath the tears, because the comment section is already gearing up to call Annie "codependent" and Henry "an addict," and both of those words are going to make everything worse.

Here is what I will not do. I will not call her codependent. I won't hear it. I won't hear anyone label the part of her that is fighting for love a bad part of her. And I will not call him an addict as if the word itself explains anything about what is breaking between them. There is a more accurate frame, and it changes everything about what the work actually is.

From the Headline to the Thread

What people are watching on that screen is not a sick man and the woman who enables him. What people are watching is two bonded bodies in an emergency, with a Third Party in the room. Gambling, in this case. It could be alcohol. It could be another person. The shape is the same. There is a competing attachment, and her body knows it, and her crying is not weakness or pathology. Her crying is accurate threat detection.

Let me walk you through what I actually see when a couple like this lands on my couch.

The Third Party in the Room

An affair, in attachment terms, is never just a behavior. It is a third presence walking into the primary bond. Gambling does the same thing. A competing pull is whatever a partner reaches for outside the relationship to soothe themselves, to feel something, to connect with anything other than the person they promised to turn toward.

When Henry placed that bet, the message his fiancée's body received was not "my partner has a disease." The message was existential. You are not my priority. There is something else that matters more to me than you, than us, than the life we said we were building. Two beliefs get shattered in the same breath: I am your priority, and I am enough for you.

That is the wound. Not the money lost. Not the broken promise on its own. The collapse of the two beliefs that let a person rest inside a bond.

This is why "just stop gambling" never works as a relational fix. Even if Henry stops tomorrow, Annie's body has now logged the data. The ground moved. She knows it can move again. Trust, the way I think about it, is the body's belief that it is safe to rest. Once that belief breaks, the body keeps scanning. That scanning is what gets misnamed as "codependent."

The Heroism of the Pursuer

I want to defend her, fiercely, before anyone calls her a doormat.

What looks like clinging is a human being fighting desperately not to lose her primary attachment figure. She is behaving the way a child behaves when she senses her mother might disappear. She will make any compensation she has to make to not lose the bond. She will lose every friend. She will lose every toy. She is not addicted to being needed. She is registering a threat to the bond at the most primitive level the body knows.

These partners are heroes, the ones who keep reaching toward someone who keeps reaching past them. They are unbelievably brave. They try and try and try to save the person they love from the thing that is taking them, because the alternative, losing the relationship, is unbearable. That is not pathology. That is love doing what love is built to do, in conditions love was not built for.

I have written more about why we should stop diagnosing the reaching partner in this piece on red flags. Most of what gets labeled red flag behavior is actually a protest at the bond. The same is true here. Annie's tears are not a character problem. They are a protest. A correct one.

The Two Questions Underneath the Tears

In my office, I tell every couple there are only two questions the bonded body asks. Are you there for me? And am I enough for you?

Every fight is a proxy fight for one of those two questions. The dishes, the money, the lie about where he was last Tuesday. All of it is what I call drag and drop content. The body does not care about the surface. It cares about the answer underneath.

A gambling relapse answers both questions, brutally, in the same instant. Are you there for me? No, I was at the betting site. Am I enough for you? No, the thrill of the bet is what I went to instead of you. That double no is what makes a betrayal of this kind so much heavier than a single failure. It is not one wound. It is two, fired at the same time, into the foundation.

If you want to see how I lay this out for couples in session, these are the questions I actually ask in the room, and you will notice none of them are "who started it."

The Waltz That Got Them Here

Here is the dynamic I would bet is running between them, because I have seen it in every couple where one partner has a competing pull.

She reaches. He retreats into the gambling, or into the shame of the gambling, which functionally is the same thing because both take him out of the room. She reaches harder, because the retreat confirms her worst fear. He collapses deeper inside himself, because her reaching confirms his worst fear, which is that he is a disappointment, that he is not enough, that he will never be enough. So he sprints toward the thing that gives him a hit of synthetic enoughness. He places another bet.

Partner one aches inside. You're not here for me. Partner two reacts. I have to protest this somehow, because you're making me feel unacceptable again, and I hate this feeling. So partner two leaves. Or opens the app. Partner one gets confirmation. You're not here for me. Partner two feels even more I'm never going to be acceptable. So they sprint harder toward the thing that numbs it.

That is the loop. Both feel hurt. Both feel unseen. Neither one is the villain. The loop is the villain, and the loop is being fed by the Third Party.

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

Sheila Cannot Stay

When a couple comes into my office with active addiction in the room, I use a metaphor. I call it Sheila.

Picture it. You both sit down across from me and say, "We totally see the dance we're in. We see how we're hurting each other. Oh, and by the way, four nights a week I go and stay at Sheila's house, and that is going to keep happening." Then we keep working. I help you understand each other. I help you reach for each other. And then he goes back to Sheila. And the partner left behind feels even more abandoned, protests harder, and the cycle restarts.

We are stuck. Sheila cannot continue to be part of this relationship. We can do all the bonding work we want, but if Sheila stays, none of it holds.

Gambling is Sheila. So is alcohol. So is the affair partner. So is the work obsession that takes a person fully out of the bond. If the third party stays, the relational work cannot proceed.

I am explicit about this with couples. There is no path to helping the two of you feel emotionally bonded while there is a clear third party sitting in the relationship. If someone is actively using to the point of addiction, they need to deal with that on their own first. Get sober. Get out of the loop. Come back in thirty days and we will start the relationship work.

This is not a punishment. It is geometry. You cannot rebuild a foundation while someone is still pouring water on the cement.

What Henry Has to Stop Doing

If I were sitting with the version of Henry that lives in my office (not the public man, the one I have never met), here is what I would say.

The hardest part of a relapse is not the relapse. It is what happens next, inside the partner who relapsed. He will fall into shame. He will look at her tears and they will confirm his deepest belief about himself. I am bad. I am destructive. I am unworthy. I will never stop hurting her. He will collapse into that, and the collapse will feel, to him, like remorse. It will feel like the right thing to do.

It is not. When he collapses into "I am bad," he makes the moment about him. He abandons her again. She is left alone in her pain because he is too busy drowning in his own.

The internal cocktail right now is 100 percent "I feel bad about myself." That ratio has to shift. It needs to be maybe 20 percent "I feel terrible about who I am right now" and 80 percent "my heart is breaking for what I did to you." The shame collapse is another exit. It is another version of leaving the room.

This is what I call One-Way Repair. In the moment of betrayal, the injury is not symmetrical. One person dropped the bomb. The other person was standing in the explosion. Trying to get the betrayed partner to "own her part" too early lands as gaslighting, because it is. One-Way Repair sounds more like this: yes, it really was that bad. I see what I broke in you. I am not going to leave this room while you are in that pain. No defense. No collapse into self-hate. Just presence.

That is what she needs. Not an apology dressed up as self-loathing. Presence.

The Missing Experience

What I tell couples who are trying to rebuild after a betrayal is this. The repair is not about fixing the past. The past is not fixable. The repair is about giving each other now what was missing then.

When the relapse happened, what was missing for her was him. His presence. His prioritization. His "you matter more to me than this thing." That is what was absent. The work of rebuilding is to begin providing that, in real, felt, repeatable doses. Not a grand apology. Small proof. Day after day. This is what I mean by proof of work in love. It is not the cherry of "I'm sorry" placed on top of nothing. It is baking the whole cake, slowly, with her watching, and her body deciding, over months, whether to trust the kitchen again.

And for him, what was missing underneath the gambling was the felt sense of being enough. Not synthetic enoughness from a win on a bet. Real enoughness from being met by his partner without performance. That is the other half of the work. Both partners need a missing experience delivered now, and neither can do it while Sheila is still in the house.

Bringing It Back Into Your Life

You probably did not arrive here because of Annie and Henry. You arrived because something in that headline rang in your own chest. Maybe it is gambling in your house. Maybe it is alcohol. Maybe it is the phone. Maybe it is a person who is not you that your partner keeps choosing in small ways.

If that is you, hear me on two things.

One. Your reaching is not pathology. Stop letting the internet diagnose the part of you that is fighting for love as the broken part. It is the alive part. It is doing exactly what a bonded human is built to do.

Two. The relational work cannot start until the third party leaves the room. That is not a failure of love. It is the floor underneath love. Without it, every conversation you try to have will collapse, because the ground is still moving.

Name the third party. Out loud. Ask your partner to deal with it as a precondition to the work, not as the work itself.

What to Do Next

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

If Annie watches the episode back, I hope she sees what I see. A woman protesting a real injury. A body telling the truth. A heart that has not given up on the bond. None of that is something to be ashamed of. The shame belongs somewhere else, and so does the work.

Name the third party. Get it out of the room. Then, and only then, ask whether the two of you want to try to rebuild on the bones of what broke. The bone that breaks can heal stronger. But only if you stop putting weight on it before it sets.

The $158 Billion Pet Custody Industry: Why Couples Litigate Over Labradoodles When the Real Bond Has Already Collapsed

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 18:06:13 +0000

The $158 Billion Pet Custody Industry: Why Couples Litigate Over Labradoodles When the Real Bond Has Already Collapsed

Americans spent $158 billion on their pets last year. And now, according to a recent Washington Post opinion piece, a growing share of separating couples are escalating to formal court battles over who gets the dog. Forensic accountants tally walking hours. Lawyers depose dog walkers. Judges who used to assign visitation to children are being asked to assign visitation to a Goldendoodle named Biscuit.

The cultural read on this is predictable. People are infantilizing their pets. Millennials are choosing dogs over children. The legal system is being asked to do something absurd.

I read it differently.

When two adults who once shared a bed are willing to spend $40,000 in legal fees fighting over an eight-pound rescue, I am not looking at absurdity. I am looking at two bodies in attachment alarm using the most authoritative instrument a society has on offer to close a wound the instrument was never designed to close. The dog is not the point. The dog has never been the point. The dog is the last living receipt that the bond was once real.

The Bridge From the News to Your Living Room

You do not need to be in the middle of a litigated pet custody fight for this to apply to your life. The same mechanism runs through every contested asset, every retirement account dispute, every text war about who gets the couch. The dog is just unusually honest about what is actually happening. It breathes. It loves you back. It cannot be split. So the litigation gets louder, the legal bills get bigger, and somewhere underneath it all, two bodies in survival mode are trying to use a courtroom to settle something the courthouse does not stock in any currency at all.

The Problem That You Think You Are Fighting About Is Rarely the Actual Problem

A couple in my office last week spent forty-five minutes telling me about their dog. Specifically, about who fed the dog more often, who took the dog to the vet, who was on the original adoption paperwork, who paid for the dog's surgery in 2022. The husband had built a spreadsheet. The wife had pulled vet records. They were two months from a divorce filing and they had already burned through about eleven thousand dollars of legal time arguing about an animal who was, at that moment, asleep on a couch in a house neither of them was currently living in.

I let them litigate for a while. Then I stopped them and asked the wife to tell me about the day they got the dog.

She started crying inside of fifteen seconds.

It was their first anniversary. They had wanted children. The pregnancy hadn't held. He had driven her to a shelter on a Saturday in October and told her, "Let's just love something together while we figure out the rest." The dog they brought home that day was the only thing that had survived everything that came after. The miscarriage. The affair. The eighteen months of cold sleeping in the same bed. The dog had outlasted the marriage.

She wasn't fighting for the dog. She was fighting for evidence that there had once been a Saturday in October where someone she loved drove her to a shelter and said, "Let's love something together."

This is what I mean when I say content is a red herring. The retirement account is never about the retirement account. The toaster is never about the toaster. The Labradoodle is never about the Labradoodle. Underneath every legal filing about an asset is a body trying to issue a receipt for a debt the legal system cannot count.

Why the Dog, Specifically

There is a reason the dog generates more legal heat than the couch or the car. It is the only asset in the marriage that loved you back.

For many couples I sit with, the dog was the only secure attachment in the house. The dog did not have a defended self. The dog did not bring a protector part to the kitchen at six p.m. The dog was, in physiological terms, the only relationship in the home that consistently answered the two questions every body is asking on loop: Are you there for me? Am I enough for you?

The marriage stopped answering those questions a long time before the divorce filing. The dog never stopped. So when the marriage finally cracks, the legal fight over the dog becomes a fight over the last remaining proof that someone in that house once felt safe.

This is also why the legal system, when it tries to handle these cases, makes everything worse. A judge can order a visitation schedule. A judge cannot restore a bond. The court is being asked to settle a limbic emergency with a cognitive instrument. It cannot do it. It has never been able to do it. The judge's order arrives, both parties read it, and within twenty minutes the next motion is being drafted because the body still feels unsettled. I have written about this same pattern in the biology behind a custody dispute that ends in a SWAT call, where the escalation looks extreme from the outside but makes complete sense from the inside of a survival response that believes it is about to lose everything.

The Versus Illusion, Now With a Leash

When two people sit across a mediation table arguing about a dog, the legal frame requires them to be opponents. Plaintiff and respondent. Petitioner and counter-petitioner. The whole instrument assumes you and the person you once shared a bed with stand on opposite sides of a line, and that one of you is going to win.

That is not actually the shape of the problem.

The shape of the problem is that a dynamic between you is suffocating what is left of the bond, and both of you are being conscripted into roles that make the dynamic worse. I call this the Versus Illusion. It is not you versus your ex. It is the two of you versus a cycle that neither of you, in your right mind, would choose. The lawyers, of course, have no language for this. The lawyers are paid to keep you inside the illusion. So you fight harder. The legal bills go up. The dog, oblivious, naps.

I have watched this collapse hundreds of times in sixteen years of clinical practice. The pattern is the same whether the asset is a Cuisinart toaster, an eleven percent share of a residuary estate, a vacation home neither party even likes visiting, or a Labradoodle named Biscuit. Two nervous systems on fire, reaching for a thinking tool to close a feeling wound.

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

The Pursuer and the Withdrawer, Holding a Dog Leash

Inside any contested separation, partners tend to fall into one of two patterns. There is the Relentless Lover, the one who reaches when connection feels at risk. Their body says: please do not leave me. In the legal process, this is the partner who files the most motions, generates the longest text chains, escalates fastest. They are not litigating the dog. They are protesting an abandonment their body believes is happening in real time.

Then there is the Reluctant Lover. The one who retreats when things feel intense. Their body says: please do not see my flaws. In the legal process, this is the partner who goes cold, hands everything to the lawyer, refuses to engage in mediation, treats the whole thing as a transaction. They are not indifferent. They are organized around a haunting fear that they are a disappointment, and litigating the dog at arm's length feels safer than acknowledging that what collapsed was a bond they were never quite sure they deserved in the first place.

Both protectors meet at the courthouse. Two childhood strategies collide. The dog stays asleep on the couch.

If you recognize yourself in one of these positions, this isn't a character flaw. It is the choreography most of us learn early, and it gets louder under the threat of separation. I've explored this in more depth in what I've written about regret after divorce, because the same pattern that fuels the legal fight also fuels the three a.m. wondering about whether the whole thing was a mistake.

Shame Under the Leash

Where attachment injury appears, shame is never far behind. And shame, in my read, has four directions it can move. Withdraw. Avoid. Attack self. Attack other.

Pet custody litigation is one of the most culturally sanctioned Attack Other moves available to a separating couple. Attack Other says, "If I push you away, you cannot see how vulnerable I really am." Filing for sole custody of the dog is a way to externalize a grief so large the body cannot hold it. It converts the unbearable interior weight of, "I failed at love," into the manageable exterior project of, "I am going to prove in court that my ex is unfit to care for a small spaniel."

The spaniel becomes the proxy. The proxy gets a calendar. The calendar generates billable hours. And the actual grief, the grief over the collapse of a Sovereign Us that once felt like home, never gets touched.

This is the tragedy. The legal system is set up to convert wounds into receipts, and receipts do not heal.

What the Body Is Actually Asking For

Attachment is not a metaphor. It is biology. We need to be emotionally bonded from the first breath to the last. When the primary bond collapses, the body protests. Sometimes that protest looks like grief. Sometimes it looks like rage. And sometimes, when the culture has not given you any other language, it looks like a $40,000 court fight over a dog.

What the body is actually asking for is acknowledgment. Not a verdict. Not a visitation schedule. Acknowledgment. Some sign that the bond was real, that the loss is real, that the years and the shared mornings and the dog you adopted on a Saturday in October all mattered.

The courthouse cannot give you that. The forensic accountant cannot give you that. Your lawyer, however good, cannot give you that. The only place that acknowledgment can actually land is inside your own body, and inside the relational field with the person you used to share a life with, if you are both willing to step out of the Versus Illusion long enough to look at what is actually there.

I have seen couples do this even mid-litigation. Not by softening on the legal questions. By doing the empathy work underneath them. By having the other conversation first, the one that asks: what is this dog actually about, for you? What was the day we adopted her? What were we hoping she would carry that we couldn't carry alone? When that conversation happens, the legal fight usually deflates inside of two sessions. Not because the practical questions go away. Because the body finally feels heard, and the body was the one driving the war.

This same dynamic shows up in the most extreme custody fights too. I've written about what Justice Sotomayor's custody dissent reveals about the biology of broken families, and the pattern there is identical. A judge cannot repair a flooded survival response. The instrument is wrong for the wound.

Back to Your Life

If you are reading this from inside your own version of this fight, whether the contested asset is a dog, a house, a retirement account, or a four-slice Cuisinart, I want you to do one thing. Before you write the next email to your lawyer. Before you forward the next motion to your ex. Sit with the question: what is this object actually about, for me? What is my body trying to issue a receipt for?

It might be a Saturday in October. It might be the only Christmas your former spouse ever made you feel chosen. It might be the dog who slept on your chest the night you found out the pregnancy hadn't held. Whatever it is, name it to yourself first. Out loud if you can. The body needs to hear you say it before it will stop conscripting the legal system into a fight that the legal system cannot win.

The dog cannot be split. The bond is already broken. The only thing left is whether you grieve it honestly, or spend forty thousand dollars pretending the grief is about a leash.

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

The dog is not the problem. The dog is the witness. Stop litigating the witness and start listening to what the witness saw.

Melissa Gilbert Leaves NYC Apartment Amid Husband Timothy Busfield's Child Sex Abuse Case: A Therapist on Shattered Reality, Pub

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:07:38 +0000

Melissa Gilbert Leaves NYC Apartment Amid Husband Timothy Busfield's Child Sex Abuse Case: A Therapist on Shattered Reality, Public Shame, and the Body's Search for Solid Ground

The note was short. "I promise we will be back, it's just that right now…..well….you know."

That ellipsis is the whole story.

In a recent Page Six piece, Melissa Gilbert announced she was leaving the New York apartment she shares with her husband, Timothy Busfield, as he faces child sex abuse allegations. The post is not a statement. It is not a defense. It is not a press strategy. It is a woman whose ground has collapsed, telling the public she cannot stand on camera right now because she cannot find the floor.

I am not going to diagnose Melissa Gilbert. I have never sat with her. I am not going to comment on the legal merits of the case against her husband. That is a courtroom's job, not a therapist's. The Goldwater rule applies even when the tabloids are screaming.

What I want to talk about is the thing under the ellipsis. The biological event that is happening inside the body of any person whose entire reality, the timeline of their marriage, the meaning of every shared meal, every vacation, every quiet Sunday, just got shattered. That event has a shape. I see it in my office every week, in much less famous form. And the shape is worth naming, because most of the advice the culture will hurl at Gilbert in the coming weeks is going to make things worse, not better.

The Bridge: When the Goldfish Bowl Meets the Earthquake

Two things are happening to Gilbert at once.

The first is private. A bond she trusted has been ruptured by an allegation so severe that, true or false, the meaning of the marriage is now under interrogation. The second is public. Every move she makes from here is content. Photographed, screenshotted, archived, debated.

A body can survive one of those. It cannot easily survive both at the same time. So she did the only thing a body that wants to live can do. She moved.

The Body Is Not Being Dramatic. It Is Doing Its Job.

People think shame is a feeling. It isn't. Shame is a biological event. The nervous system loses altitude faster than the mind can catch it. The body registers a tear in the attachment field before the brain has even formed a sentence about it.

When the rupture is this severe, and when it arrives wrapped in legal documents and public reporting, the body does not have language yet. It has only direction. Away. Out. Somewhere quieter.

Gilbert's note is not a PR statement. It is the literal sound of a body asking for shelter. The ellipsis is where her words ran out and the survival brain took over.

This is what I tell couples in my office when one of them has just been hit by news that destroys the story they were living inside. You are not weak. You are not avoidant. You are not hiding. Your body is doing exactly what bodies are built to do when the ground gives way. It is looking for somewhere it can put its feet down without falling through.

The Compass of Shame and the Geography of Retreat

The Compass of Shame, drawn from the work of Donald Nathanson, names four directions a body moves when it cannot tolerate the shame field it is standing in.

We withdraw. We hide, go silent, drop off the map. We avoid. We pour ourselves into busyness, scrolling, drinking, working, anything that fills the inside of the head with noise. We attack ourselves. We rehearse every missed sign, every ignored gut feeling, every moment we should have known. Or we attack others. Blame, mock, prosecute, moralize.

Every person in Gilbert's position will spin through all four. Some hours she will be in withdrawal, packing boxes, refusing the phone. Some hours she will be in self-attack, replaying twenty years of marriage and asking what she missed. Some hours she will burn with rage at her husband, at the press, at strangers in comment sections.

This is not instability of character. This is the compass spinning because the ground underneath it is no longer magnetic north.

A piece of writing I find myself returning to, when families are in this kind of free fall, is on how a body searches for footing after a different kind of family rupture. I wrote about it in the Kapur family trust case, where a matriarch took her own children to the Supreme Court. The press read it as governance. I read it as a body trying to issue a receipt for a debt the courthouse does not stock in any currency at all. The same mechanism is at work here. The legal instrument is downstream of the biological event.

The Third Party Was Never Just Another Person

In my clinical writing on betrayal, I talk about what happens when a third party enters a primary bond. I usually mean an affair. But the framework is broader than that. Any force that introduces a competing reality into the bond functions as a third party. A secret. A double life. An allegation that, true or not, places someone else in the marriage who the betrayed partner did not know was there.

The third party shatters two beliefs the bond was built on. I am your priority. I am enough for you.

What it produces in the partner who did not know is something I call psychological vertigo. They look back at last year, or five years, or twenty, and they ask: what was real? When we were on that trip, were you somewhere else in your head? When you said you loved me that night, did you mean it? When I trusted you with my children, with my reputation, with my body, was the person I trusted the person who was actually there?

This is not jealousy. This is not insecurity. This is the timeline of a life being interrogated by the present, and every entry being marked uncertain.

You cannot live inside vertigo for long. The body will demand ground. Sometimes the ground is a different apartment. Sometimes it is a different city. Sometimes it is a parent's spare room. The location is incidental. The need is structural.

What the Public Cannot See and Should Not Demand

Here is where the second pressure enters. The goldfish bowl.

Gilbert is not allowed to fall apart in private. Every version of her unraveling is recorded. Every grief move is captured. Every silence is interpreted. She does not get to experiment and fail quietly. She does not get to be a woman in her sixties trying to figure out what she just lost. She has to be a public figure performing legibility for a culture that has already written the headline.

The culture in moments like this functions as what I call the algorithmic mother. It amplifies outrage. It rewards certainty. It punishes anyone who threatens the coherence of the group story. There is no privacy. And without privacy, it is harder to grow, harder to integrate, harder to become oneself.

You do not need to be a famous person to feel this. Anyone who has gone through a public-facing rupture, divorce in a small town, scandal at a workplace, infidelity revealed at a wedding, knows the second pressure. The first wound is the rupture. The second wound is the audience.

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

Close the Doors. Patch the Roof. Then Look at the View.

When a couple comes into my office in the aftermath of a rupture this severe, there is a frantic energy in the room. The partner who caused the rupture, or who is associated with it, is usually desperate to move forward. They want reassurance. They want the spinning to stop. They want their partner to come back to the present.

The partner who was hit by the news is spinning. Asking for details. Checking timelines. Furious one minute and collapsed the next.

The intervention I run in those rooms is what I call closing the doors. If there are unhealed injuries, you do not add a second story to the house. You patch the roof first. You close every door to the outside, to in-laws, to friends offering opinions, to the algorithm, to the lawyers when possible, and you sit with what is actually broken inside the four walls.

Gilbert's move out of the apartment is, geographically, a version of closing one door. Whether it is the right door, only she can know. But the principle is sound. You cannot assess foundational damage while standing on the sidewalk arguing with strangers about the architecture.

One-Way Repair, And Why Symmetry Is the Wrong Goal Right Now

In ordinary couples work, I help both partners see their role in the dance between them. The Waltz of Pain is a shared loop. Both bodies are dancing. Both are protecting. Both make sense.

But when the injury is asymmetrical, when one person dropped a bomb and the other was standing in the explosion, symmetry becomes gaslighting. You cannot ask the partner who was hit to own their part of the bomb. There is no part to own. For a season, the traffic flows one way.

I call this one-way repair. The person associated with the rupture has to sit in the terror of what has happened, without defending, without minimizing, without asking the other to move on. They have to let the bruise be looked at. They have to say, in some form: yes. It was that bad. I see how your reality has been broken. I am here with you in that.

Most people, in the moment of being looked at, want to look away. The body cannot tolerate sitting in the shame field. So they reach for explanation. For context. For mitigation. Anything to ease the pressure on their own survival response.

If Gilbert is going to find any path forward inside this marriage, and that is a very large if and entirely her business, the only door that opens is the door of one-way repair. Symmetry, fairness, "let's move forward together," none of that is available yet. The bruise has to be witnessed first.

The Children in the Room

When a family rupture involves allegations against a parent or stepparent, the children become the most exposed bodies in the field. They are not equipped to hold this. They will reach for the only tool a child has, which is choosing.

I have written before about what happens to kids who get put in the middle of adult ruptures. A child who picks a side is not a child making a moral judgment. They are a child trying to make the pain stop the only way they know how. The grownups in their life are radiating distress so loud that the child's body is trying to lower the volume by eliminating one of the signals.

The adult work, brutally hard in a situation this severe, is to do whatever can be done to let the child love everyone they need to love at the pace their own body can tolerate. Not the pace the press demands. Not the pace the lawyers demand. The child's pace.

What the Reader Is Probably Carrying

You are not Melissa Gilbert. You probably do not have paparazzi outside your house. But if you are reading this, something in her note hit something in you. The ellipsis. The "you know."

You know because somewhere in your own life, you have stood inside a moment where the meaning of your marriage, your family, your friendship, your business partnership, just slid out from under you. You know because the body remembers vertigo even when the conscious mind has filed it away.

You do not need a Supreme Court case or a tabloid headline to qualify. You need only a moment where you discovered that the person you trusted with the architecture of your life was not the person you thought you were trusting. That moment lives in the body until something repairs it. Either with the original person, through painfully slow work. Or with yourself, by rebuilding interior ground.

If your version of this is happening right now in your own house, and you cannot tell whether the right move is to stay, to leave, to go quiet, to fight, the only honest thing I can tell you is that you cannot make a foundational decision from a flooded body. The physiology has to come down to a place where it can hear itself before the choices it makes will hold.

That is why moves like Gilbert's, the quiet leaving, the asking for time, the refusing to perform certainty, are sometimes the most clinically sound moves available. Not closure. Not strategy. Just enough floor to stand on while the body comes back online.

What To Do Next

If you are inside your own version of this, you do not have to handle it alone, and you do not have to wait for a therapist's calendar to open three weeks from now.

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

Gilbert wrote an ellipsis because there were no words yet. That is honest. That is the right move when the words have not arrived. The work, eventually, is what fills in after the ellipsis. Not a press release. Not a verdict. A floor. Find yours first. The rest of the decisions are downstream.

Tess Daly and Vernon Kay Split After 23 Years: The Relational Debt That Brings Down a Long Marriage

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 07:07:51 +0000

Tess Daly and Vernon Kay Split After 23 Years: The Relational Debt That Brings Down a Long Marriage

The news broke on Friday and the internet behaved exactly as you would expect. Tess Daly and Vernon Kay, 23 years in, two daughters between them, one of the steadier looking marriages in British showbiz, announcing they are going their separate ways. According to a recent Daily Mail piece, the pair agonised over the decision and are determined to be supportive parents to their girls. By the end of the weekend the manhunt was running. Old interviews combed for hints. Holiday snaps put through forensic analysis. Who smiled tighter. Who knew when. Who broke what.

After sixteen years sitting with couples in marriages of this length, I want to say something gently. The manhunt is almost always pointed at the wrong thing. A bond of this duration does not unravel because of a single bad week, a single cold winter, a single third party. It unravels through accumulation. Years of small, unfinished business that never got closed out. A quiet record kept in two nervous systems while the calendars and the cameras carried on. By the time anyone drafts a press release, the arithmetic is long since complete.

And the arithmetic almost never matches the tabloid version.

From the Public Story to the Private Architecture

If you want to grasp what likely happened with this couple, put the press release down and look at the architecture beneath it. Successful, visible, high-functioning couples are exceptionally competent at one specific thing. Logistics. The diary. The trips. The press. The kids' calendar. They run their lives from what I think of as the penthouse of the emotional building. Bright. Organised. Excellent views.

The actual relationship is not up there. It lives in the basement. And cognitive solutions do not reach a limbic problem.

Relational Debt: The Quiet Mechanism Underneath Long Marriages

Here is the frame I want to give you, because I think it is the one the culture is missing entirely.

Each time a couple sidesteps a hard conversation to keep things smooth, they are printing relational debt. Every sigh nobody names. Every reach that does not land. Every rupture covered over with a Sunday roast or a tropical holiday instead of a real repair. The debt does not disappear. It compounds, recorded inside two bodies that are paying attention whether the conscious mind is or not.

This is what I call Fiat Love. Love declared by decree, with no real underlying labor backing it up. From the outside it looks fine. It functions. The diary runs, the kids get to school, the smile arrives on cue at the BBC. But the foundation is being quietly debased.

Couples doing this are borrowing stability from their future selves so they can have comfort right now. The bill arrives. Hyperinflation hits. Trust collapses. You cannot print your way out of a wounded bond any more than a central bank can print its way out of structural rot.

A 23-year split, in my clinical experience, is most often the final collapse of a currency that has been losing purchasing power for a very long time. Not a sudden betrayal. A slow debasement. High time preference love that wanted intimacy without cost, closeness without exposure, repair without the discomfort that genuine repair demands.

I have written more about this slow erosion in a piece on what actually ends long marriages, because the public version almost always misses what the private body has known for years.

The Body Keeps the Ledger

Your body is the first ledger. Long before the mind has language for what is happening between you and your partner, the physiology is logging it. Every rupture. Every turn away. Every reach that found nothing.

Twenty-three years is a very long time to be keeping books.

The couples I see at this kind of mileage are almost never fighting about what is in front of them. They are fighting about thousands of small, never-closed entries on the ledger. A pair in my office last week sat at opposite ends of the couch, as far apart as the furniture allowed. Thirty-odd years married. He glanced at his watch every few minutes. She gazed past me out of the window. Not strangers. Just two people whose protective armour had grown so heavy that the door between them had been welded shut.

That, I suspect, is what was running underneath the holiday photographs. Two people, very well practised at being a public family, walking around in private survival states that had been on alert for years. The holiday was not a fake. It was probably a reach. A last attempt at something they could feel sliding away. Then the bags came off the carousel and the ledger was still there, open on the kitchen counter.

The Dance Nobody Picked

In any marriage this long, a pattern has set in. One partner reaches whenever they feel the bond go thin. The other moves away whenever the temperature climbs. The reaching makes the withdrawing partner retreat further. The retreat makes the reaching partner press harder.

I name the two roles the Relentless Lover and the Reluctant Lover.

The Relentless Lover reaches when connection feels under threat. They protest for closeness. Their body says: please do not leave me, please tell me I still matter.

The Reluctant Lover steps back when intensity rises. They protect through distance. Their body says: please do not see my flaws, please do not expose my not-enoughness.

Neither is the villain. Both are loyal protector parts, designed long before these two people ever met. Across decades these strategies collide and recollide, and the marriage becomes a staging ground for wounds that neither partner created but both partners keep activating.

Three things fire inside each person each time the loop runs. A negative read of the other. A reactive emotion in the body. An action tendency that follows from both. The Relentless Lover registers coldness, feels panic, leans in harder. The Reluctant Lover registers criticism, feels shame, slides further out the door. The infinity loop runs itself, and the longer it runs the more each partner stockpiles evidence for their worst story about the other.

No villain. No victim. Two people who matter to each other enormously, locked inside a cycle that makes complete sense from above. The problem is that inside the cycle, nobody can see it from above. They are submerged in it, gasping.

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

The Ugly Basket

I picture long-term bonds as living inside three containers. The good. The bad. The ugly.

Good is connection, ease, the body's felt sense of being held. Bad is friction, rupture, the disconnection that comes with any honest intimacy. It is a feature, not a bug. Couples shuttle between good and bad all the time. That is normal. That is alive.

The ugly basket is a different country. The ugly basket is where you stop giving yourself or your partner the chance to find your way back to good. The protector parts have set like concrete. The stories have become doctrine. The willingness to reach has been spent down to zero.

A 23-year ending is, in my experience, almost always a system that became permanently lodged in the ugly basket. Not because love evaporated in some abstract sense. Because the energy, the capacity, the willingness to soothe each other and repair the rupture was, at long last, used up.

The cruelty of it is that the ugly basket is not where marriages start failing. It is where they finish failing. By the time a couple is permanently living there, they have already spent years in the bad basket without enough repair, and years before that in the good basket without enough behavioural evidence to keep the good real.

Each of You Is the Keynote Speaker on the Other's Problems

Here is something I watch happen in my office every single week. Each partner arrives as the world's foremost authority on the deficits of the other.

If I held a conference next month on the problems of your partner, you would headline it. And your partner would headline the conference on yours. Both of you have decades of supporting material. Both of you are right, in your own particular way. And both of you are missing the actual game.

The Story of Other is seductive because it is easier. The cause sits out there. In them. In a third party. In some defect of character. The harder move is to step back and look at the whole system. The choreography that two bodies have been performing for two decades. The protectors that kept finding each other's wounds. The injuries neither person created but both of them have been living inside.

This is not the same as saying nobody is accountable for behaviour. People are accountable for what they do. Accountability lives at the level of action. But causation, in a long marriage, lives at the level of the system. And the system is almost always two scared people trying to survive a bond that stopped feeling safe long before either of them said the word out loud.

I unpack the difference between a depleted system and a structurally fractured one in this piece on how to fix a broken relationship. Diagnosis matters. The protocol for depletion and the protocol for fracture are different, and confusing them is how marriages that could have been rebuilt end up dying on the table.

Penthouse and Basement

The metaphor I keep returning to with high-functioning couples is the apartment block. The Relentless Lover lives upstairs in the penthouse. Up high, full of charge, demanding contact and visibility. The Reluctant Lover starts out in the basement. Tucked away, self-contained, working hard to stay out of view.

The clinical job is to build a well-appointed flat on a middle floor where both can actually live. Not the penthouse. Not the basement. The middle. Common ground where two sovereign selves can meet without one swamping the other.

But across 23 years without that middle-floor labor, the vertical distance becomes impossible to cross. The pursuer keeps shouting down the lift shaft. The withdrawer keeps the basement door bolted. Eventually both stop trying.

I have written more on what this distance does to the body over decades in this piece on what a long marriage ending actually does to a nervous system. The grief that follows a long bond breaking is not metaphor. It is biology. The organism that has spent 23 years orienting toward one specific person logs the loss as a survival event.

The Necessity of Suffering

Here is the cold clinical fact. Human beings change either out of inspiration or out of desperation. The number who change out of inspiration would fit on one hand.

Couples almost always come in after the bad thing happens. The crisis lands. The phone bill arrives. A message is left open on a screen. The body goes down. By the time a public couple is announcing a split, the suffering ceiling was breached in private quite a while ago. The statement is the last footstep in a process that began with thousands of smaller footsteps nobody could see.

This is why I push couples, even the ones doing well, to do the proof of work now. Not because their relationship is in crisis. Because every relationship is paying interest on its relational debt whether the partners are aware of it or not. The only question is whether you service the debt with small, steady repairs or let it compound until the whole structure caves.

You cannot resolve a content fight inside a body that has already gone offline. You have to return to the moment the rupture actually happened before you can move toward any kind of solution. Most couples I see are trying to negotiate diary items up in the penthouse while the basement is burning. Rearrange the furniture all you want. The smoke is coming up through the floorboards.

Bringing This Home

If you are reading this and seeing your own marriage in any of it, do not panic. Recognition is not collapse. Recognition is the first piece of real work.

Ask yourself the questions the tabloids never ask. Where is the relational debt piling up between us. What conversations have we been ducking to keep the temperature down. When did I last let my partner see something tender in me rather than something competent. When did I last reach for them in a way that actually cost me something.

If you live in the penthouse, what would it look like to stop yelling down the lift shaft and walk down a few floors. If you live in the basement, what would it look like to crack the door, let some light in, even briefly.

The work is not glamorous. It does not photograph well on a family holiday. It is small. Repeated. Mostly unwitnessed. It is the actual ongoing labor that backs the currency of love and keeps it from inflating into nothing.

What to Do Next

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

Tess and Vernon are not the story. Their split is the doorway. The story is the quiet ledger being written inside your own body, inside your own marriage, right now, while you read this on your phone. The ledger does not care about your photographs. It cares whether you faced your partner the last time they reached, or whether you let the moment pass because you were tired, distracted, certain it could wait.

It could not wait. It never can. The question is what you do with that tonight.

The James Handy Tragedy: What Happens When a Young Man's Protector Parts Have No Container, and Why Some Family Systems Cannot B

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:13:11 +0000

The James Handy Tragedy: What Happens When a Young Man's Protector Parts Have No Container, and Why Some Family Systems Cannot Be Therapized

The news landed hard this week. James Handy, the veteran character actor with credits in Top Gun: Maverick and Jumanji, was allegedly stabbed to death in his Tarzana home. The person police arrested was his girlfriend's son. According to reporting from E! News, the alleged attacker was the adult son of the woman Handy had been in a relationship with. A blended household. A mother. Her son. Her partner. And a knife.

I am not going to speculate about Handy. I did not know him. I will not diagnose the young man who has been arrested. What I want to do is take this moment, while the headline is fresh and the comment sections are filling up with cheap verdicts, and walk you into the territory underneath it. The territory where a therapist actually works.

Because this story, stripped of celebrity, is a story I have seen many times. A new partner steps into the orbit of a mother and her grown or near-grown son. The son already carries something. The mother already carries something. The new man arrives carrying his own history. And the household becomes a pressure cooker for everything none of them ever metabolized.

I want to talk about that pressure cooker. I want to talk about what it asks of a young man's body. And I want to be very clear about the hard line where systemic empathy ends and physical violence begins.

The Bridge: From a Headline to the Body That Did It

This is the part where most coverage stops and most therapy blogs would never start. There is a tendency, in the wellness corner of the internet, to talk about trauma in soft, redemptive tones. To make everything healable. To make every protector part lovable.

I love the work. I believe in the work. But I am also going to tell you the truth: there are systems where the work does not apply. There are moments where biology has so completely overwhelmed governance that no therapist should be in the room trying to facilitate a conversation. That is the first thing this article has to say plainly, because if I do not say it, nothing else I say will mean anything.

The Absolute Line: Where Systemic Work Stops

Let me start with the rule, because the rule is non-negotiable.

When physical violence is in a family system, systemic family or couples therapy is contraindicated. Full stop. We do not sit a man who has stabbed someone, or who is threatening to, across from his family and ask everyone to explore the cycle. We do not facilitate dialogue between a mother, her son, and her boyfriend if anyone in that triangle is blocking exits, raising hands, or using their voice as a weapon to a point that another person in the room is in survival mode.

There is a phrase I keep coming back to in my own work, and it lives at the heart of this article: ninety percent of the time, a person's sense of being victimized by a family member is not a clean read. It is their side of the cycle. It is their activation telling them a story. But ten percent of the time, when someone is being punched, when someone has been blocked from leaving a room, when someone has been threatened with a weapon, their perception is one hundred percent trustworthy and objective.

We do not run systemic empathy through that ten percent. We run police, lawyers, and physical safety through it.

If the headline this week is accurate, this household crossed every line. There is no version of this where a clinician shows up in the aftermath with a "both sides" framing. The job of the therapist in the room with the survivors now is grief work, trauma work, and the slow rebuilding of bodies that just experienced the unthinkable.

The Sibling Society: Why Young Men Are Showing Up Like This

So if not "both sides," then what? What does the work have to say about a young adult son who, allegedly, picked up a knife?

I want to borrow a frame from the poet Robert Bly, because it has stayed with me for years. Bly called modern American culture a sibling society. He meant that we have stopped initiating young men into adulthood. We have removed the elders. We have removed the rites. We have removed the firm, containing, loving structures that used to take a boy and walk him, over years, into being a man who can hold his own rage without being hijacked by it.

What we are left with is a society of half-adults trying to parent each other. Mothers raising sons without elders. Stepfathers stepping in without any cultural script for what their role even is. Sons drifting into their twenties having never met an authority figure they trusted enough to bend the knee to.

This is not an excuse for anything. It is a context. Young men who explode in lethal ways are almost always young men whose protector parts grew up in a vacuum. There was no Elder there to say, this rage of yours is real, and I will teach you what to do with it. There was no Father, biological or otherwise, who held the firm container that allowed the boy to feel his fear without weaponizing it. There was often a mother trying to do the job of two people while running on empty.

I have written elsewhere about what happens when a father is not involved with a child, and how the absence becomes a phantom limb. The child's body builds an entire filing system around the missing person. That filing system does not stay in childhood. It walks into every room the grown child enters for the rest of their life, asking the same brutal question: am I worth showing up for? If the answer was no for long enough, by the time a new man arrives in the house and starts sleeping in the mother's bed, the answer has hardened into something dangerous.

What a Protector Part Looks Like When It Hijacks the Organism

In the work I do, we talk about protector parts. These are the strategies a young body develops to survive an environment that felt unsafe, shaming, or out of control. The Rager. The Bull. The Vanisher. The Performer. None of them are pathology. They are intelligent adaptations to real conditions.

But here is what nobody tells you about protector parts. They are loyal. They were hired by a frightened five-year-old or ten-year-old, and they will work that job for fifty years if no one fires them. They do not know the war is over. They do not know that the threat they were guarding against in 1998 is no longer in the room.

So when a new man walks into the kitchen, the protector part does not see a sixty-something character actor making coffee. It sees the original threat. It sees every man who ever came into the mother's orbit and rearranged the floor. It sees the moment the boy's body decided the world was not safe. And if that protector part has never been seated, never been governed, never been integrated into something larger, it can take the whole organism in a direction the conscious mind would never authorize.

In session, when I meet a protector part this loud, I do not try to fight it. I try to thank it. I try to find out who it was protecting and from what. I go straight to the family of origin and look for the little boy of ten or twelve who was beaten, shamed, abandoned, or terrified. I ask the rager who he was guarding.

That clinical work, done early enough, can disarm the part. Done too late, with the part already in motion, it cannot. The protector has already taken the wheel. The rational brain runs behind the survival brain, and in those few seconds, irreversible things happen.

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

The Not-Good-Enough System: Why It Is Almost Never Just One Person

I want to be careful with the next thing I say, because it can be misread.

People do not heal from the inside out alone. People are shaped by the systems that raised them. When I work with families, I am always looking for what I call the not-good-enough system. Not the not-good-enough mother. Not the not-good-enough father. The system. The whole field a child grew up inside, including the financial pressure, the cultural pressure, the intergenerational ledger of grief that was never named.

A not-good-enough system is any environment that fails to provide stable, predictable, emotionally attuned safety. A child born into one will adapt brilliantly. The adaptation will look like hypervigilance, or collapse, or charm, or rage. It will keep them alive. And it will follow them.

When a violent act explodes out of a young adult, the system was almost always sending signals for years. There was probably a mother running on fumes. There was probably a father who was either absent or terrifying or both. There was probably an addiction or an undiagnosed mental health condition. There was probably a moment, or many moments, where someone should have intervened and no one did, because the elders are gone and the village is gone and we have decided in this culture that families should solve everything privately behind their own doors.

I am not saying this to spread blame. I am saying it because the alternative, the story that one bad person did one bad thing in a vacuum, is the version of reality that lets the next tragedy happen.

The New Partner in a Wounded System

There is a piece of this story that I want to name directly, because it shows up in my office constantly. A mother and her grown son, especially after a divorce, separation, or death, often form a bond that is closer to a marriage than to a parent-child relationship. The son becomes the man of the house. The mother leans on him. He leans on her. It is intimate, it is enmeshed, and it is rarely named for what it is.

Then a new partner arrives. And the new partner has no idea he is walking into a marriage. He thinks he is dating a woman. He is actually walking into a triangle, and the third point of that triangle is a grown son whose body reads him as a threat to the only attachment figure that boy has ever trusted.

I have written about this dynamic from a different angle in what happens when an ex's new girlfriend interferes with custody. The new person is rarely the actual problem. They are the lightning rod. They are the body the unfinished business of the original family system attaches itself to.

In a healthy version of this scenario, the mother does the work of separating from her son's physiology before she invites a new partner into her bed. She grieves the marriage-shaped thing that grew up between them in the absence of a real partner. She helps her son grieve it too. The new man is welcomed as a new man, not slotted in as a replacement for the boy's psychological role.

In the unhealthy version, none of that happens. The mother brings the new man home and the son's protector parts go to DEFCON 1. The new man, having no idea what container he just stepped into, tries to assert normal partner behavior. And the household begins to vibrate at a frequency that, if no one intervenes, can end in exactly the kind of headline we are reading this week.

What This Means for the Reader

If you are reading this article because the headline disturbed you, sit with that disturbance. It is information.

If you are a mother in a blended household where there is tension between your grown or growing son and your partner, please do not tell yourself it will work itself out. The bodies in your home are telling you something. Get a clinician involved. Get the son into his own work, separate from the family. Do not bring everyone into the same room to talk it through if there has ever been a physical threat. That is the moment to call someone whose job is safety, not insight.

If you are the new partner stepping into a family system like this, slow down. The pace at which you integrate matters more than almost anything else. The son needs time. The mother needs time. You need time to read what is actually in the room before you start trying to be in it.

If you are the young man reading this, the one whose protector parts are loud and whose survival response has been on high alert for as long as you can remember, please find someone. A therapist. A men's group. An elder. Someone who can sit with the rage and not be afraid of it. Your protector parts saved you. They are not the enemy. But they are not built to govern a whole life, and if you do not seat them, they will eventually move in a direction you cannot take back.

I have written more about how grief and rupture cascade through a family system in the piece on what sudden loss does to bonds, and the principle is the same here. The body keeps the ledger. The body waits. If we do not metabolize what the body is holding, the body will eventually act on it.

What To Do Next

The James Handy story is going to fade from the news cycle this week. The family it happened inside will be carrying it forever. The young man arrested will be processed through a legal system that is not designed to understand what brought him to that night, and the surviving family members will be left in a grief that has no clean shape.

We can use stories like this for sport, or we can use them as a mirror. If something in your own household made your stomach tighten while you were reading, that is the signal. Not to panic. To act.

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

The protectors in your house are not the enemy. But they are not built to govern alone. Seat them, or they will seat you.

Martin Short Breaks Silence on Daughter Katherine's Death: What the Aftermath Actually Asks of a Family

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:07:19 +0000

Martin Short Breaks Silence on Daughter Katherine's Death: What the Aftermath Actually Asks of a Family

Martin Short finally said something out loud. Ten months after his daughter Katherine died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at 42, the comedian who has spent his life making rooms of strangers laugh told the world what every grieving parent already knows in their bones. That you carry it. That you keep moving. That the public version of you and the private version of you are running on completely different fuel.

In a recent Page Six piece, Short called it a nightmare. Katherine left behind a husband and two children. Short lost his wife Nancy to cancer in 2010. Now this.

I will not speculate about Katherine. I did not know her. I will not diagnose her family from a magazine. What I will do is sit with this moment as a doorway into the work I actually do every week, with real families, in a real office, while the rest of the world is at brunch.

Because here is the part nobody tells you about losing someone to suicide. The death is not the end of the event. The death is the start of a second event, slower and quieter, that unfolds inside the surviving family. And how that second event gets carried determines whether a family stays a family.

A Statement Ten Months Later Is Itself Clinical Information

Ten months of silence, then a sentence. The gap is the story.

A parent's body, after losing a child, does not run on a news cycle. It runs on shock, then waves, then more shock. Speaking publicly about a child's suicide is not a milestone of recovery. It is one act among hundreds, performed inside a goldfish bowl, while the actual labor is happening in kitchens, on long drives, in the silences between people who used to be a family of more.

I want to talk about that actual labor. The biology of it. The traps. What I have watched families survive, and what I have watched families lose on top of the loss.

What Suicide Actually Is, Clinically

Here is the most useful definition of trauma I have ever found, and I lean on it with families trying to understand how someone they loved arrived at a place they could not stay.

Trauma is something bad from the past fusing with the present.

A nervous system that has been hypervigilant since childhood does not turn that off because the calendar advances. It keeps scanning. It keeps bracing. It keeps preparing for an annihilation that already arrived once before. People living inside that activation are doing exhausting, invisible work just to remain inside their own skin.

Sometimes the body wins and steadies. Sometimes the load is simply too heavy for too long, and the protective rage that should aim outward at the conditions that caused the pain reverses course and aims at the self.

That reversal has a name. It sits at the far end of what Donald Nathanson called the Compass of Shame. Shame is not a feeling. It is a biological event. The system loses altitude faster than the mind can catch it. And when shame floods the body, there are four directions of escape: attack other, attack self, withdraw, avoid.

A self-inflicted gunshot wound lives at the terminus of the attack-self road. Not weakness. Not selfishness. A survival response that ran out of asphalt.

Every shame event carries an attachment meaning underneath it. Every one. "I am not enough." "I am too much." "I am losing belonging." When that meaning cannot be co-regulated by a safe other, when the carrier has learned, often very early, that pain is a private affair, the system can give way altogether. And it can give way inside a body that, from the outside, looked fine. Praised, even. Praised for being the strong one. Praised for not asking.

I have written more about how these wounds get laid down in unresolved childhood trauma in relationships, because the pattern that ends a life on the worst day is the same pattern quietly running the show on every ordinary day.

The Airplane Baby

Here is a story I use to explain how pain becomes silent, and how silent pain can become fatal.

I was on a plane once. A baby was crying. Full-bodied distress. The parents were frantic, shushing, jiggling, offering pacifiers, offering bottles, offering anything that would stop the noise. They were communicating to the baby, without words, do not feel what you are feeling.

After a while the baby went quiet. And that was the part that broke my heart. He had not been soothed. He had given up. He had learned, in his small body, that no one was coming for the feeling he was having. That baby will grow up and be praised for it. The easy one. The good sleeper. The one who never needed much.

The deepest heartbreak is not always the loud cry. Sometimes it is the quiet child who learned too early not to ask.

When families lose someone to suicide, this is often the part they cannot reconcile. "He seemed fine." "She was the strong one." "She never asked for anything." That is not evidence the pain was absent. That is evidence the pain had nowhere safe to land for a very long time.

My Family's Silence

I will tell you something from my own line, because anything less would be cowardly.

My father's youngest brother, Tony, killed himself in his early twenties. I cannot remember my father, or anyone in my family for that matter, ever speaking of him. There were strict rules about expressing sadness or grief in our house. Basically you were not allowed to be sad or unhappy.

That silence is not benign. Un-metabolized grief does not evaporate. It travels the family line looking for a body willing to hold it. The cost of not speaking about Tony was paid by people who never met Tony. That is how it works.

So when I read that Martin Short finally said the word "nightmare" out loud, ten months in, I do not read it as a publicity beat. I read it as a man refusing to do what my family did. Refusing to put the death in a drawer. The naming itself is the first piece of structural work.

What Happens Inside a Family the Moment the News Lands

Here is a scene I use with grieving families to explain why survivors scatter instead of cluster.

Picture a small child on the kitchen floor with their mother. They are playing. They are connected. The world is right. The phone rings. The mother picks up and learns that her sister has just died.

The mother is still physically in the kitchen. Her body has not moved. But emotionally she has dropped through a trapdoor into her own private heartbreak. The child does not understand the phone call. The child does not understand grief. All the child knows is that mom is gone. She was here a second ago, and now she is not, and the relational ground just disappeared.

That is what death does inside a family in the first hours, days, weeks. Everyone who normally provides comfort becomes, temporarily, emotionally absent. The surviving spouse is gone into his grief. The surviving siblings are gone into theirs. The grandchildren feel the adults they depend on flicker and vanish behind their eyes.

This is when families fracture. Not because love stopped. Because briefly, there is no one left on the surface holding a rope.

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

The Real Danger for Survivors: Protector Parts

Here is the part of the work that gets the least attention and matters the most.

When a parent loses a child to suicide, the guilt is unbearable. I should have known. I should have called. I should have caught it. I should have been a different kind of parent thirty years ago. That guilt is not a thought. It is a flood. And the system, having no tolerance for the flood, reaches for a protector part. A character. A strategy. Something positioned between the survivor and the unbearable.

I think about this through Logan Roy in Succession. The whole engine of that man was built on a younger brother who came home sick and a sister who died and a child who blamed himself. To actually feel the weight of "I am the one who caused my sister to die" was so unbearable that becoming Logan Roy looked like a better option. You made a deal with the devil, because your life is miserable, and there is no way out, and you spend every day running away from your pain.

That deal is the trap waiting for every survivor of a suicide. The Stoic Dad. The Strong Mom. The One Who Holds It Together. The One Who Buries Themselves In Work. The One Who Drinks Tastefully But Constantly. These are not personality traits. They are containers built for grief the body could not hold raw.

The longer the protector runs the show, the more the grief calcifies. The body freezes around the trauma. The family system reorganizes itself around the unspoken thing. And a decade later, two decades later, you have a family that loves each other and cannot quite be near each other and nobody can say why.

That is what my family did with Tony.

The Compass Has an Off-Ramp, But Only Together

You cannot withdrawal-and-attack-self your way out of grief alone. The off-ramp runs through another nervous system. Not through being fixed. Through being held while you come apart.

This is where most families miss the turn. Left to their own devices, surviving family members retreat into separate suffering bubbles. Each person sealed inside their own grief, each one assuming the others are coping fine, because the others have their own protectors running.

The clinical work is moving people from two separate suffering bubbles into one shared suffering bubble. That is the whole game. Compassion for me. Compassion for you. Compassion for us. Empathy Cubed. Three axes at once. Three nervous systems being held inside one common grief, instead of three people each pretending they are okay so they will not burden the other two.

This is not a sentimental request. It is structural. Shared grief gets metabolized. Private grief gets stored, and storage costs are paid by the next generation.

What This Asks of the Public-Facing Family

I want to say something specific about families who lose someone in front of cameras.

You are doing the work twice. There is the actual grief, which is biology. And there is the performance of grief, which is theater. The two pull opposite directions. Biology wants to disorganize, fall apart, weep in a parking lot. Theater wants composure, a quote, a charitable cause, a graceful sentence ten months in.

The risk for public families is that the theater becomes the only acceptable channel. Composure becomes the protector. Charity becomes the strategy. The sentence ten months in becomes the official version, and the unprocessed grief gets stored in the body of whichever family member is least equipped to carry it.

I saw this dynamic with the Presleys. Priscilla used the word "separated" to describe what happened in her family after Lisa Marie died. Separated. The vocabulary of physics. Bodies that were near each other and somehow are not anymore, and no one can explain how the distance arrived. That distance is almost never built on purpose. It is built by bodies that got too overwhelmed to keep holding each other.

If Martin Short and his family are going to avoid that physics, the work is not in the next interview. It is in the rooms without cameras. The long, ordinary, undramatic work of staying in the same room with each other while the grief moves through, in whatever shape it shows up on whatever day.

What the Reader Can Take Home

You probably did not lose a famous child this year. But you may have lost someone. You may be carrying a grief from a generation ago your family decided not to speak about. You may be the parent right now of a quiet child who learned a little too early not to ask.

The work is the same in all three cases. Refuse the silence. Refuse the protector that says you are fine. Refuse the separate suffering bubble. The ground under grief is shared, or it is not ground at all.

If you are co-parenting through a loss, the systemic load doubles. The piece on co-parenting during the holidays walks through how to keep adult pain from leaking onto kids, which becomes existential after a family death. And if you are trying to figure out how to even be in the room with this kind of pain without numbing out, I would point you at the older post on why I don't treat patients, because the wounded-healer posture is what this work asks of you.

What To Do Next

If you are inside this kind of grief right now, or watching someone you love disappear into a protector part because it is the only thing standing between them and the flood, do not let silence be the answer. Silence is what made my family lose Tony twice. Once when he died, and again every decade after.

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

Martin Short said the word "nightmare" out loud. That is the first piece. The next piece is whether the family around him gets to fall apart together, or whether each of them retreats into a separate bubble and the distance between them quietly becomes the second loss.

The same is true in your house. Say the thing. Stay in the room. Refuse the drawer.