When Love Ends in Handcuffs: What the Tom Sandoval Restraining Order Reveals About Nervous Systems That Have Run Out of Road
The story broke this week and the internet did what the internet always does. It reached for its favorite word. Toxic. In a recent Daily Mail piece, Tom Sandoval was granted a restraining order against his girlfriend Victoria Lee Robinson, who was arrested after an alleged attack he says left him bloodied and bruised. The reporting includes an accusation that her father was involved. It is the kind of story that goes from Page Six to your group chat in about eleven minutes.
I want to be careful here. I have no clinical relationship with anyone in this story. I am not going to sit in my San Francisco office and diagnose Sandoval, or Robinson, or her father, off a tabloid write-up. That is not my job and it is not honest work. What I can do is speak clinically about the pattern the headline points at, because I have watched a version of it in my therapy room for sixteen years. Two people who once shared a bed. Legal documents flying. Blood on someone's face. A public trying to figure out who the villain is.
Let me be perfectly straight with you at the top. If physical violence is in a relationship, we are no longer in the territory of couples work. We are in the territory of safety. That distinction changes everything about what I am about to say, and I want you to hold it the whole way through.
From the Headline to the Thread
Most of the couples I sit with are two scared bodies hurting each other in a loop. We can work with that. We can slow the loop down, find the tender thing underneath the armor, and build something new. Physical violence is a different animal. When one person's fists land on the other, the field changes. The systemic view I use with most couples gets set aside. The goal is no longer connection. The goal is bodies not being hit, and eventually, exit.
That said, there is something worth saying about how two humans end up in a scene like this one to begin with. Not to excuse it. To understand it. Because if you are reading this and something in your own relationship is escalating in ways that scare you, you deserve a real explanation, not a hashtag.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
The Three Baskets, and the One Where Therapy Stops
I teach couples that a relationship lives in three baskets. The good basket, where connection flows. The bad basket, where two lovers scare the daylights out of each other with old attachment wounds and clumsy protests. Most of my clinical work happens right there. Then there is the ugly basket. Violence lives in the ugly basket. So do threats of violence, weapons, and restraining orders.
I screen for the ugly basket before I begin work with a couple. I am blunt on the intake call. Any domestic violence. Any risk of it. Any moment in your fights where you feared for your body. Short of that, we can begin. Not short of that.
This is not a stylistic preference. It is clinical ethics. My work asks both partners to open into the softest part of themselves. If one person cannot hold their own reactivity, and revealing that softness might get someone hit, the work cannot happen. There is a crocodile in the room. You do not ask anyone to bare their chest in front of a crocodile.
So when the headline lands with claims of a physical attack, I don't want to hear about communication skills. I don't want to hear about rebuilding trust or reading each other's love language. I want to hear about physical distance, legal protection, and real support for whoever is in the ugly basket. If you're recognizing your own dynamic in any of this, How to Tell If You're in a Toxic Relationship is a more useful place to start than any celebrity commentary section.
The Biology of How People End Up Here
Now, the harder question. How do two people who once looked at each other with real love end up bloodied on the floor of a house they shared?
You have to understand the biology. We are wired from cradle to grave to feel emotionally bonded to a primary attachment figure. That is not sentiment. That is survival wiring. When your body detects that this person is not there for you, or that you are a total disappointment to them, it doesn't register a mild inconvenience. It registers an existential threat. You feel like you might die, because from your body's read of the room, you might.
Your rational brain runs behind your survival brain. By the time you have decided to be calm, the amygdala has already fired. Heart rate has already climbed. The parts of the brain that do reflection, empathy, and responsible action have gone quiet. Your limbic system is a small mammal in the dark, feeling around for safety. It doesn't see well. It just moves.
Under threat like that, humans act brilliantly for survival. But survival logic optimizes for short-term relief, not long-term thriving. Some people scream. Some people block exits. Some people lash out. They are pulling from a repertoire of protests, trying to survive the terror inside. Biologically it makes sense. Relationally, it is a disaster.
This is what I mean when I say most of the hurt in a relationship comes from impact without intention. When people hurt deep down, they deploy strategies to escape the hurt. They think they are holding a can of water to put out the fire. The can is actually labeled gasoline. When you're terrified and you lash out, your partner does not see the scared little kid inside you. They see a monster. Your protest becomes their existential threat. Then they double down on their own survival move, and both of you confirm your worst stories about each other.
In extreme cases, the gasoline doesn't just burn the emotional bond. It burns the house down. Sometimes literally. If you want to name your pattern first, you can take the free Figs Quiz.
Why "Just Communicate Better" Is Dangerous Advice Here
The pop-therapy response to a story like this is predictable. Have you tried couples counseling. Work on your communication. Read up on each other's attachment styles. Where there is violence, none of that applies. It is not just useless. It is actively dangerous.
There is a concept I lean on called the window of tolerance. It is the range where the nervous system can stay present, feel a hard feeling, and still think. In couples therapy I need both people inside that window to do any meaningful work. Maybe one is at a five and the other is at an eight, but both are inside. When a couple is throwing things, or calling police, or leaving marks, they are miles past the window. You cannot solve a limbic problem with a cognitive tool. You cannot ask two flooded people to slow down and use I-statements. Their bodies are not available for language.
At that point the intervention is not connection. It is separation. Physical distance. Legal boundaries. Individual work. Sometimes for a long time. Sometimes forever.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
The Trap of Diagnosing From a Distance
Whenever one of these stories breaks, the internet immediately arms itself with its favorite eighteen-year-old expert on TikTok. He's a narcissist. She's borderline. Her dad is a monster. As a clinician, I spend most of my time asking couples to quit pathologizing each other and instead see the system they are both trapped inside. I am going to ask you to do the same with this story.
I want to hold one caveat, though. Maybe ten percent of the time, there is real, severe pathology in play. Actual abuse. Violence that is not a mutual dance but a one-directional pattern of harm. Those situations require real protection, real legal intervention, and real support. When I talk systemically, I am not talking about that ten percent. I am talking about the much larger group where two scared people are wounding each other in a loop neither one chose.
The problem with the internet's diagnosis game is that it flattens both. It slaps "narcissist" on every abuser (often wrong, always unhelpful) and "codependent" on every survivor (worse). Both labels do the same thing. They file a person under a category so we can stop feeling the situation. They give us the illusion of understanding. They do nothing for the people actually inside it.
I've written about this at more length in a related piece on mutual restraining orders, because dueling legal filings between partners have become common enough to deserve their own conversation.
What Actually Happens to a Body That Lives Near Violence
If you have lived with a partner whose rage lands on you physically, your body is not malfunctioning. It is doing precisely what a survival system is built to do.
Trauma, the way I use the word, is when something that happened before merges with the present. The body keeps a ledger. Loud voices. Doors slammed hard. Sudden movement near the face. It all gets filed. Eventually the body stops waiting for confirmation. It starts predicting.
That is why someone who has lived with a violent partner can look, from outside, like they are overreacting to small things. They read his moods obsessively. They can hear the keys in the front door and already know what kind of night it will be. They arrange the day around managing his temperature. The culture calls this codependency. I call it a human organism doing magnificent, exhausting, accurate threat detection inside a home that was never safe.
That is not a character flaw. That is survival intelligence. It deserves fierce defense, not a diagnosis.
When Family Gets Pulled Into the Ring
The Daily Mail reporting alleges that Robinson's father was somehow involved in the incident. I won't speculate on specifics. But I will say something about what happens when a parent gets physically pulled into an adult child's relationship crisis.
In a secure family, the parent's job around an adult child's partnership is to offer perspective, a soft place to land, and a clear voice on safety. That is very different from stepping into the fight itself. When a parent walks into the ring, the dance turns much more volatile. The adult child regresses. The physiology that had spent years slowly building its own ground floods with old family patterns. Everyone gets younger, fast.
This is one of the reasons a secure adult partnership needs what Stan Tatkin calls the couple bubble. Two adults agree the pair comes first, and outside parties, including well-meaning family, don't get to breach the container. When violence enters, that bubble was already ruptured. When family enters the violence with you, we are past bubbles and into full systemic collapse. If you want to see what a functional adult partnership actually looks like on the ground, What Is Secure Functioning in Relationships walks it through in real detail.
What the Rest of Us Do With This
Here is the honest reason this story matters to you, sitting there reading it on your phone. Almost nobody reading this will ever be in a physical altercation with their partner. But plenty of you know the feeling of the bad basket. The escalation. The moment where the fight jumps a rail and something ugly leaves your mouth. The regret a second later. The way your partner's face changes and you know, in your body, you just did damage.
The gap between where you are and where the ugly basket lives is smaller than most people want to admit. It is not a canyon. It is a series of small choices, made while your body is flooded, with no repair afterward. Over years. That is how ordinary couples arrive at extraordinary situations.
The work is building the capacity to notice you are flooded before you act. Exiting the room instead of escalating. Naming what happened afterward and actually repairing it. Learning that the person across from you is not the threat your body has decided they are. That last piece, learning your partner is not the enemy, is most of the actual labor of a long relationship. And it starts with knowing your own reactivity well enough to catch it before it catches you.
What to Do Next
If any part of this article made your stomach drop because you recognized yourself, that is information. Not shame. Information. Recognition is the doorway into a different possibility, not proof that you are broken.
If you are the person afraid of your partner's rage, you deserve support that begins with safety, not communication tips. Find a therapist who screens for domestic violence and knows how to work with survivors. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
If you are the person who scares yourself with your own reactivity, take that just as seriously. Individual work. A therapist. A men's group if that fits. The willingness to look at your own gasoline, rather than your partner's fire, is where change actually starts.
And if you are somewhere in the bad basket, caught in a loop of pursuit and withdrawal that scares you but hasn't tipped into violence, there is real work to do. Not next year. Now.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
The ugly basket is not somewhere ordinary people go. It is somewhere ordinary people arrive, one small choice at a time, when the biology gets loud and the repair never comes. Know your own gasoline. That is the work.
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