Depression is common enough to be almost unremarkable. Yet the guidance for what to do when you’re not the one depressed, but you’re confronted with it because it’s taken a loved one hostage, is thin. What advice does exist is often anecdotal, or written for the person with depression rather than the person loving them through it. Evidence-backed, written specifically for the partner? Rare.

Enter David Dozois, PhD, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Western Ontario, one of the leading researchers in cognitive vulnerability to depression, and author of the new book What to Do When Your Partner Is Depressed: Supporting Your Loved One While Caring for Yourself. David and I recorded an episode with me for , which comes out tomorrow. He covered the “righting reflex” and why it backfires, how to raise suicidal thoughts without making things worse, and how to stop moonlighting as your partner’s unpaid therapist.

But after we stopped recording, David mentioned that he was surprised I hadn’t asked more about acceptance, given how often it comes up on the show. Fair point. So I emailed him one more question, and he sent back this gem that I get to share with you all today.

[Edited lightly]

Yael: Let’s be honest: acceptance really isn’t something most of us want to think about when it comes to someone we love being depressed. What is the utility of accepting that depression may be along for the ride in a relationship, even though we don’t like it?

David: For me, the key is to check your thinking. If you recognize that your thinking is not aligned with the evidence (or isn’t helpful for you), then it’s important to work on that.

We can treat thoughts as hypotheses, not facts, and change our thinking accordingly. Sometimes, we may look at our thoughts and think that they are valid given the circumstances/evidence, in which case we may want to adopt some problem-solving strategies. For example, we can wonder: What can I do about this situation?

However, it’s often not this simple, and sometimes thinking isn’t the issue. Sometimes you have done what you can or problem-solving hasn’t worked. In these situations, I think we are better off working on acceptance.

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I mention Steve Hayes’ "unwelcome guest” metaphor in the book. We can live life more fully even with struggles with a depressed partner when we are able to accept that this is the situation and start living according to our values as an individual and as a couple. This is not resignation, but acceptance. Like the unwelcome guest, you may not like it, but you can get on with the party.

Often, so much energy, time, and focus is on the partner’s depression and trying to change it. Sometimes this is important, but sometimes it’s important to accept that this is your plight for now as an individual and a couple. You may not be able to change that fact, but you can shift your focus to living; you can both wrestle with having a partner with depression AND live life and you are more likely to do so when you accept.

It makes me think of someone with chronic pain. You can do physiotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, medication, and so on (that is, you can do everything you can possibly think of), but what we often don’t realize is how catastrophizing—that is, becoming so focused on the awfulness and injustice of the pain—often makes the pain worse. By accepting that it’s there, even though you don’t like it, you can minimize the worsening of the pain, even while having the chronic pain, AND live according to your values.

If you know someone loving a person through depression and could use a little evidence over guesswork, forward this one along.

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The full conversation with David goes deeper, including his answer to the question that’s probably on your mind right now: what do you do if your partner won’t get help at all?Again, that episode comes out tomorrow.

Paid subscribers: below is your shot at winning one of three copies of What to Do When Your Partner Is Depressed. (Last month’s winners of Cindy Ariel’s Autism and the Two of Us have already been notified, so if that’s not you, aim for this month’s!)

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This busy summer season is drawing to a close, and I’m entering an even more chaotic season, one filled with too many kid activities and the anxiety joy of a book launch.

In times of intensity, I tend to stress-read.1 So, naturally, I picked up Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.2

Marcus Aurelius (121-180) was a Roman Emperor, and today he’s basically stoicism’s favorite influencer. Stoicism as a philosophy often gets pegged as a solo sport: all discipline and gritted teeth, you against your own reactions. But Aurelius’ magnum opus, Meditations—which is really a journal he wrote for himself, so not a magnum opus in the traditional sense—has a lot to say about relationships, both with those we are close to and those whom we don’t much care for.

Aurelius was concerned about showing up in line with his relational values. But he was also keenly aware of the irritating and downright infuriating people who often hijacked his efforts to do so. He spends a considerable amount of time reflecting on how to work with his mind so that it doesn’t interfere with his ability to be generous in judgment and behavior.

Here are some of my favorite nuggets of relational wisdom from the guy everyone files under “individual morality and self-discipline.”

1. We were born for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. So to work in opposition to one another is against nature: and anger or rejection is opposition. (Book 2)

2. In the field of play an opponent scratches us with his nails, say, or gives us a butting blow with his head: but we do not ‘mark’ him for that, or take offence, or suspect him afterwards of deliberate attack. True, we do keep clear of him: but this is good-natured avoidance, not suspicion or treating him as an enemy. (Book 6)

3. You should meditate often on the connection of all things in the universe and their relationship to each other. In a way all things are interwoven and therefore have a family feeling for each other: one thing follows another in due order through the tension of movement, the common spirit inspiring them, and the unity of all being. (Book 6)

4. Whenever you want to cheer yourself, think of the qualities of your fellows — the energy of one, for example, the decency of another, the generosity of a third, some other merit in a fourth. There is nothing so cheering as the stamp of virtues manifest in the character of colleagues — and the greater the collective incidence, the better. (Book 6)

5. Try to persuade them, but act even if they are unpersuaded, whenever the principle of justice so directs. But if someone forcibly resists, change tack to an unhurt acceptance, so using the obstacle to bring forth a different virtue. (Book 6)

6. Accustom yourself not to be disregarding of what someone else has to say. (Book 6)

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7. Do not be ashamed of help. It is your task to achieve your assigned duty, like a soldier in a scaling party. What, then, if you are lame and cannot climb the parapet by yourself, but this is made possible by another’s help? (Book 7)

8. When someone does you some wrong, you should consider immediately what judgment of good or evil led him to wrong you. When you see this, you will pity him, and not feel surprise or anger. You yourself either still share his view of good, or something like it, in which case you should understand and forgive: if, on the other hand, you no longer judge such things as either good or evil, it will be the easier for you to be patient with the unsighted. (Book 7)

9. ‘No soul,’ says Plato, ‘likes to be robbed of the truth’ — and the same holds of justice, moderation, kindness, and all such virtues. Essential that you should keep this constantly in your mind: this will make you more gentle to all. (Book 7)

10. Gentleness is given as the antidote to cruelty, and other qualities to meet other offences. (Book 9)

11. Whenever you take offence at the wrong done by another, move on at once to consider what similar wrong you are committing — it could be setting value on money, or pleasure, or reputation, and so on through the categories. (Book 10)

12. Kindness is invincible — if it is sincere, not fawning or pretence. (Book 11)

An emperor needed a full book of private notes to stop taking things personally; maybe the rest of us could use some help too. After all, as Aurelius says, “Do not be ashamed of help.”

My own literary effort to help, Why Don’t You Understand Me?, comes out in exactly two months, October 27. If you preorder before then, you get some pre-order bonuses, including an outline of the cycle of misunderstanding and some conversation scripts for doing understanding better [Preorder here and then fill out this form to unlock the bonuses → LINK].

I’ll also be doing two in-person events for anyone in the Boston area: the pub-day event at Newtonville Books on the 27th, and a reading at The Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton on October 28th. And, I’ll be joined by Lindsay Gibson, author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child, at both events. Mark your calendars if you’re local— Lindsay and I would love to see you there!

In other relational riffing news, I am also beginning to hit the podcast trail, and some early episodes have already gone live, including one with the delightful Löw Tide Böyz: A SwimRun Podcast,3 and another on Alan Alda's Clear+Vivid. Talking to Hawkeye Pierce about how his book (best title ever: If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?) asks a question that my book answers was an entirely surreal experience. In both episodes, we discuss the roots of misunderstanding and share tools that help us understand better in our most important relationships.

Last week, we discussed the challenges of having one relationship that involved two very different brains. For those of you who are interested in hearing more of my conversation with the author, Cindy Ariel, who wrote Autism and The Two of Us, you can access that podcast episode here.

And now, on to today’s topic: Trust Falls.

Trust is not a thing with feathers

According to Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” According to social scientists, trust is the onion with many layers.

Here’s another way to think about it: Trust is a thing that works well when everyone agrees on what trust entails. When it comes to a trust fall, we want that agreement before anyone does the falling. If the agreement isn’t clear or else breaks down mid-fall, well, that’s the origin of many a hilarious YouTube video.

Relational trust operates in a similar way. When we fail to communicate or agree on the terms of trust, or we find ourselves re-negotiating the terms of trust while we’re already falling, it’s painful. And not in a hilarious way.

Relationship trust is, of course, more complicated than a trust fall (to put it mildly). The meaning of trust varies across people and across relationships, and expectations can change over time, particularly after a trust fail emerges. To manage the complexity in the face of a trust fail, our emotions come on the scene to help us, offering signals about whether restoring our faith is safe.

If someone dropped you before, it makes sense not to trust them again. Indeed, some research shows that forgiving partners who routinely engage in marital transgressions is associated with more relationship problems, rather than fewer, and a small daily diary study shows that forgiveness is associated with more negative behavior the very next day. Maybe the encouragement to let the feelings go leaves us at more risk of further betrayals of trust.

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Your emotions are doing their job.

Our feelings activate as signals that trust has been broken. They’re telling us to protect ourselves because we could get hurt again. That’s useful information. Anger at broken promises? Valid. Hurt over feeling deprioritized? Absolutely. Fear that things won’t change? Makes perfect sense, and often quite useful to use as a behavioral guide.

But when it comes to progress in relationships, we need more than the information provided by our feelings.

Our anger says “this mattered and it was wrong.” But it might also say “keep your guard up” and “you are unlikely to ever be safe.” The hurt says “I need you to see my pain,” but it also says “don’t let them close enough to cause more.” The fear says “be careful,” and it also says “don’t invest in something that might fail again.”

The trouble is, in order to rebuild trust, we have to take a risk. The risk is that things won’t change. But the possibility is that they will. Your feelings might be recommending armor that, on the one hand, protects you from further hurt. But it may also prevent the possibilities that would lead to healing and growth.

Entering back in without any protection at all can leave us too vulnerable. We need a way forward that uses feelings as critical information, while leaving open the possibility to grow a healthier version of our relationship.

The emotional signal is not the verdict

It helps here to separate two things we tend to conflate. Feelings and forgiveness.

Feelings are largely involuntary signals. They fire whether invited or not.

Forgiveness is different: it’s a choice, often defined as giving up the right to hold onto anger.

The feelings are the smoke detector. Forgiveness is the decision to switch it off (or at least not to hyperfocus on its irritating beeping).

Read this way, the research suggesting that forgiveness can open the door to more transgressions isn’t suggesting that our detectors are misfiring. It’s saying that switching off the smoke detector (or decide to ignore it altogether) without making sure that smoke won’t suffocate us or that there aren’t burning embers to snuff out leaves us too vulnerable.

The answer to what to do when your feelings suggest you’re not safe can’t be “just feel differently,” and it shouldn’t be to exit any building where a smoke detector is going off. It’s to treat the feelings as data about what still needs to change rather than as a verdict on whether change is possible.

That’s a crucial distinction this research points to. Forgiveness paired with tangible behavior change protects relationships. But forgiveness offered as a substitute for behavior change protects the transgression. The hurt feelings in the room are trying to insist we pay attention to that difference. We’d be wise to let them do their job.

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My extended family spans Israel, Canada, and three distinct regions of America. So when we get together, we bump into the fact that some of us speak English well and Hebrew barely at all while others operate in the reverse. Even those of us who do share a common language have different accents (Canadian “sorries” never fail to make me smile1), different senses of humor, different definitions of “on time,”2 and different rules about what counts as an argument versus a lively conversation. Same gene pool, but it’s a total Tower of Babel situation.

And yet, despite the challenges of connecting with people I hadn’t seen in decades, some of whom don’t share my native language, I felt so profoundly connected and nearly giddy with love and belonging. That remained true although nobody got more punctual.3 Nobody adopted my definition of a reasonable volume and kindness when debating. The love outweighed the friction that sometimes emerges from stark differences.

Part of why, I think, is that nobody at this once-in-a-lifetime reunion expected sameness. When your cousin barely speaks your language, you translate without taking it personally. The trouble starts when someone shares your language, your home, and your bed, and you assume the translating isn’t necessary. But some translation, it turns out, is always necessary.

Which raises the question germane to today’s newsletter: Can we love the people closest to us more than their different brains drive us crazy?

Multiple brains, one relationship

A couple sits in a therapist’s office. The wife is changing jobs and feels completely unsupported by her partner. The husband is dumbfounded. He researched openings for her. He offered to move. He built her a pros and cons spreadsheet.

She wanted him to ask how she was feeling. He gave her color-coded cells.

These two people come into the relationship with different hardware, each one hoping that the other’s can sync up with their own.

That example comes from my conversation with Dr. Cindy Ariel, a psychologist who has spent over thirty years working with neurodiverse couples, where one partner is autistic and one is not. Her new book is Autism and the Two of Us, and our conversation drops tomorrow on the Psychologists Off the Clock podcast.

Now, neurological difference runs deeper than accents and time zones, and I don't want to flatten that important fact. But the stance that worked at my reunion of expecting difference instead of assuming sameness is exactly the stance Cindy has spent three decades teaching couples whose brains are wired differently.

That stance is useful to all of us, because in a very real sense, every close relationship is neurodiverse. That is, you did not partner with yourself (probably for the best), which means you partnered with a brain that filters, prioritizes, and makes meaning differently than yours does. Sometimes that's a little differently. Sometimes it's spreadsheet-not-hug differently.

Research on a bias called closeness communication bias shows that we assume the people closest to us define words and interpret situations the way we do, more than they actually do. Ironically, we question our assumptions about our accuracy more with strangers than with people we love. With a partner or other close person, we simply assume we think the same. And so the gap between brains gets read as intent: he doesn’t care, she’s doing this on purpose.

Cindy’s reframe: recognizing that we have different brains helps us also recognize that difference, not malice, drives dissimilar responses and interpretations. It’s two brains moving through the world, marching to their own unique beats.

When you can see the difference as wiring, developmental, or cultural rather than a verdict on how much you’re loved, the resentment can shrink. You can begin to see the spreadsheet less as “they don’t care” and more as “this seems to be what caring looks like in their brain.”

Once you’re reading wiring instead of intent, collaboration options open up. One couple in Cindy’s practice replaced the card-dinner-roses Valentine’s script with picking out flowers together at the Sunday market, whenever that fell. Though it may not be the culturally approved version of romance, it was completely satisfying to both of them. As Cindy’s book explains:

The typical ways of loving must be redefined for success in a neurodiverse partnership.

And perhaps defining success must be done in every one of our partnerships because the “typical definition” was designed for a generic couple that does not actually exist.

But sometimes, differences are intolerable

Sometimes, though, the answer to the question of whether you can love someone more than you detest their quirks is ‘no.’ Cindy is direct about this: two lovable people sometimes don’t work together, not because either of them is fatally flawed, but because the friction that arises from the differences is too significant. Naming it kindly beats spending a decade trying to bang each other into different shapes.

In the episode, we also covered the red flags that mean a relationship has crossed from difficult into unhealthy (they have nothing to do with neurodiversity), what the research actually says about autistic adults and intimacy, and why couples therapy works better than most people think. The episode comes out tomorrow, wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the science, stay for two couples therapists geeking out in their natural habitat.

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What’s striking about Harrison isn’t just that he keeps his sense of humor, though he does:

Every marriage is a partnership of two broken assholes with good intentions and varying degrees of ability to deliver.

What amazed me most was his poignant explanation of the complex process of building back trust. Harrison needed to know Lauren would be faithful and give up the man in cargo shorts for good. Lauren, who gets her own chapter near the book’s end, needed to know she could be emotionally safe and feel loved despite being married to a man whose attention so often was directed at his laptop.

It was one repair project involving two different blueprints. That mismatch of blueprints is what today’s Riff is going to delve into. It’s something that shows up regularly in my therapy office, though few people see it coming.

When Trust Shatters

One of the common experiences that brings couples into therapy is a betrayal of trust. Sometimes it’s one person failing to honor a commitment of sexual fidelity. Other times it’s that one person had different expectations of what supporting one another’s careers meant. Sometimes it’s that one person grew out of drinking for fun while the other fell only harder into the habit. And sometimes it’s a more general shattering of the implicit trust to evolve together.

However trust is defined, the breaking of it hurts deeply. And the couples who enter into therapy usually yearn to rebuild it. But the path back is hard. It can be surprising in ways nobody warns you about.

For one thing, when trust shatters, so does the carefulness that kept partners from sharing their most honest thoughts and feelings: the complaints they’d been swallowing for years, the needs they’d been too shy or tired to name. Broken trust has a way of shoving those things out on the table. And that level of honesty forces a clarity that limbo never does. Which leads to a choice.

Obviously the choice of what to do is complicated, but (overly) simply put, sometimes both people decide the relationship is worth the unglamorous, unsexy work of rebuilding. Other times, they decide the relationship can’t be saved and part ways.

Couples who decide to do the work of rebuilding usually know it will be challenging. But what’s often entirely surprising is that partners are rebuilding different things.

Trust Isn’t One Thing

One research-based definition of trust, as articulated to me by researcher Peter Kim, who wrote the book How Trust Works, is that “the concept of trust has been effectively defined in the past few decades as a willingness to make oneself vulnerable in situations involving risk.” But what researchers have also discovered is that what feels risky to one person may be no big deal at all to another. To wit, when I ask couples what trust means to them, I get wildly different answers, sometimes from people who’ve been married for decades.

For some, trust means reliability: “I need to know you’ll do what you say you’ll do. If you say you’ll be home at 6, be home at 6.” “If you promise to handle the finances, handle the finances.”

For some, trust is about shared values: “I need to know that when you make decisions—even ones I’m not part of—you’re thinking about what’s good for us, for our family. That your choices reflect our shared life.”

For some, trust is about psychological safety: “I need to know I can share my true feelings and you won’t have a painful emotional reaction that makes me regret having said something.”

For others, trust means relational effort: “I need to know my partner will try, regardless of how hard things get.”

If this fragmentation sounds like sloppy thinking, it isn't. For decades, relationship scientists have found that trust in close relationships isn't a single belief but several stacked together. For instance, there’s predictability (you'll do what you usually do), dependability (you'll do what you say), and faith (you'll keep choosing us, even in situations neither of us can foresee yet). We can’t achieve a tidy typology because researchers define trust inconsistently, but also because trust manifests differently for different people in different relationships.

Different Definitions Aren’t “Being Difficult”

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Since the book came out, I find myself repeatedly recommending Harvard Professor Julia Minson’s How to Disagree Better.1 Julia studies the psychology of disagreement—how we engage with opinions that conflict with our own, especially around hot-button topics like politics, values, and health decisions. Her core idea is that people who disagree better are more receptive to opposing viewpoints, genuinely caring about and being willing to acknowledge where the other person is coming from.

I had the chance to talk with Julia for my podcast, . While you can listen to the full recorded conversation here, in today’s newsletter, I’ll share a piece of our conversation that wasn’t included in that episode.

Let’s start with the best definition of constructive disagreement I’ve ever encountered, one that comes from Julia’s work:

 Constructive disagreement is any disagreement that increases the parties’ willingness to talk to each other again.

Sit with that for a moment, if you can, because it reframes the whole goal of disagreement. It’s no longer about who is right or wrong or whether you’ve reached consensus. It’s about whether the conversation left the people involved not only open to talking again, but increasingly inclined to do so.

I find this goal of disagreement, as well as Julia’s body of research, transformative in shifting the measure of success in difficult conversations from winning to preserving the relationship as a space for future exchanges. Whether it’s conversations with people we’re close to or more peripheral, community relationships, this shift has the potential to foster more connections, even when we don’t see eye-to-eye.

According to Julia’s research, receptivity to other people’s points of view is the mechanism underlying it all. And one of the coolest things about receptivity is what happens when you practice it.

Julia agreed to a brief bonus Q&A after we stopped recording, in which she shared with me why "you're not listening to me" is so unlikely to ever produce a good listener, why receptivity is contagious, and what therapists know about modeling that political leaders apparently don't.2 [conversation lightly edited for length and clarity]:

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I bet you know the feeling: someone near you gets angry (your partner, a stranger at the airport gate, the friend who takes referee decisions personally) and your whole system does the thing. It’s shoulders up, eyes down, and a sudden intense interest in your phone. Because if you’re like most people, other people’s anger is deeply uncomfortable to be around.

Our own anger, though? Ours is different. Ours is justified. We’d like it received as important information, delivered with regrettable but understandable heat. Everyone else’s anger is a fire alarm; ours is a TED talk.

I’ll confess the double standard runs deep for me, even as I might like anger more than most. In fact, when someone recently asked my favorite emotion, I said, “Clinically? Easy: it’s anger.” In a couples therapy session, anger is a gift. It flags exactly what a couple hasn’t been able to say skillfully, but which really needs to be said.

Outside the office, though, I’d still prefer everyone submit their grievances in writing, on cardstock, with reminders that their anger is about my behavior, not my humanity.

So what’s going on here? Why do we prize our own anger and flinch at everyone else’s? A recent set of studies suggests an answer.

First, a Word in Anger’s Defense

A few years ago, I had a memorable exchange during a podcast interview with a relationship researcher, Kristi Coop Gordon. Gordon studies, among other things, marital infidelity.1 We were talking about anger in the context of affair disclosures, and I said something about anger being a secondary emotion to hurt feelings.2 But Gordon reminded me that anger can be primary, a reasonable and sometimes necessary response to injustice and harm.

Anger fires in response to real harm, real injustice, and real obstacles. It’s the appropriate response to profound relationship betrayal, but also to arriving at your destination and discovering your bags have not.3 Anger, according to Gordon, is often necessary when people would otherwise remain in situations that are not healthy, like when a partner too easily forgives a transgression. Anger prepares us and then motivates us to take action.

It also seems clear that anger has a uniting force. We use anger against opposition to galvanize action, and anger at sports opponents to bond fans and teams alike.4 None of that works if anger stays hidden. Expressing anger seems the obvious call.

That conclusion only gets more obvious when we consider the costs of not expressing our fury.

Suppression’s terrible reputation, briefly reviewed

If you’ve read anything about emotion regulation in the past twenty years, you know the party line: suppression is the bad strategy. Pushing feelings down is linked to psychological distress, physiological arousal, and even memory impairment. There are considerable social costs as well, from worse first impressions to lower social support and poorer romantic relationship quality. Socially, suppressors tend to be seen as less warm or agreeable. Anger suppression specifically carries its own bill: more depression, more stress, more physical health problems, and less support from others.

Suppression costs us internally, and it costs us socially. And yet we all keep doing it. Constantly. At work, on hold with the insurance company, or in the car behind the person who has apparently never encountered a green light before. Why?

We regulate emotions partly for the room. How we feel shapes how others feel (emotion contagion) and how they feel about us (impression formation). Emotion regulation is partly a private health behavior and partly a public relations department. But sometimes the two departments disagree.

And yet, the composed win the social game

Here’s where we get to a new study published in the academic journal Emotion, in which researchers ran seven studies with 2,613 participants. Participants read vignettes about people facing conflict, the kind of moment where anger would be understandable, maybe even justified. Some targets expressed their anger. Others suppressed it. Then participants rated the targets on the two dimensions that dominate how we size each other up: warmth and competence.

The result was consistent, and it complicates the “suppression is always bad” story. In the authors’ words, “people viewed those who suppressed (vs. expressed) anger as warmer and more competent.”

Two sets of findings deserve their own paragraphs.

First, the effects held across race and gender. Given what we know about cultural stereotypes, you might predict that women and Black individuals would pay a steeper price for expressing anger. In these studies, the suppression advantage didn’t differ by target gender (male versus female) or race (White versus Black). A caution worth holding: these were hypothetical people in vignettes, and how these judgments play out with real colleagues, real neighbors, and real partners may be messier. Still, the null result is notable.

Second, and most interesting to me, the mechanism. The suppression advantage ran through what the researchers call “mind ascription.” Participants ascribed more sophisticated minds to the people who held their anger in, and that attribution drove the warmth and competence ratings. As the authors put it, someone suppressing anger “even in a context where they might be justified in expressing this anger may be demonstrating higher order regulatory abilities indicative of mental sophistication.”

So it’s just a vignette study, but I urge you to pause on that because it’s a strange and also quite useful finding (more on that below). When someone visibly doesn’t lose it, it seems we don’t just think “how polite.” We think “what a deep and well-furnished inner life this person must have” or “wow, look at them being kind even when most people would be furious.” We treat composure as evidence of a kind of intelligence.

For the People You Actually Live With

An important from research-to-real-world caveat: these studies involved participants judging people inside of brief vignettes. Marriages are not vignettes, and your family member or close friend is not a stranger (however it may sometimes feel). But I do think the findings point to some interesting things:

The suppression tax gets paid somewhere. The costs of suppressing anger are intrapersonal (they live in the suppressor’s distress, physiology, and health). The benefits are interpersonal (they live in other people’s impressions of you). In a committed relationship, those two ledgers belong to the same household. Other people may experience you as warmer in the moment you swallow your anger. But, they may experience you as colder over the years you keep doing it. And perhaps chronic suppression is corrosive to intimacy in part because it works so well in the short term. This study helps explain why the bad strategy is so seductive: it gets rewarded in the moment.

Show your mind while you show your anger. Perhaps we don’t feel compelled to judge our own anger because we know the complex contours of our own minds in ways we cannot know others’. That’s why the mental ascription matters so much in our judgement of others.

This finding about mind ascription helpfully hints at a workaround for judging others, though. If composure earns credit because it signals a sophisticated mind, then the goal isn't to hide the anger; it's to let the sophistication show alongside it. In practice, that might mean narrating the complex thoughts that accompany the angry ones: "I'm really angry about this, and I also know you didn't mean for it to happen," or "I'm furious, and I want to understand your side before I decide what to make of it." You get anger's benefits (the signal, the motivation, the honesty) while displaying exactly the regulatory capacity that observers reward. It's expressing the feeling and the thinking at the same time, which, not coincidentally, is what I spend half my clinical hours teaching couples to do.

Watch the judgment you’re importing. If suppressors get credited with sophisticated minds, then expressers get debited. That means when your partner, your kid, or your colleague shows anger, some part of you may be quietly downgrading not just their behavior but their competence and their character. The angry person in your life is then left fighting two battles at once: the thing they’re angry about, and your freshly revised opinion of their mind.

So the research offers insights that discomfort with other people’s anger isn’t a personal quirk. It’s standard-issue human person perception. Knowing the mechanism helps. When we catch ourselves wishing an angry person would just be kind, maybe what we’re actually doing is downgrading them for expressing themselves.

You know what, though? I still don’t like it when the people around me are angry. See: World Cup viewing, or any given Red Sox game. All that fury at the opponent makes me wonder whether anyone remembers that the opponent’s fans are hating on us with equal conviction and equally little cause. In those moments, I find myself wishing angry people would see the humanity in their athletic opposition, that they’d choose kindness.

But, when I’m mad? Total TED talk.5

Your turn.

This all leaves me with questions I’m still sitting with, and they’re ones I’d love to share:

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This past week I was interviewed on a podcast and the host asked me the question: what's one book that changed your life? It’s a question I’ve been asked before, and one of my favorites.

Often, I find mys…

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Quick housekeeping before we get into it: and I are doing another Live this Wednesday at 12pm ET, digging into the psychology of Toy Story 5—what it says about attachment, nostalgia, and why a movie about toys keeps making grown adults cry in theaters. Come join us live, using this link, or catch the replay after!

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Last week and I hopped on a Substack Live for a new discussion series we’re calling . In this series, we dive down the rabbit hole of entertainment, exploring why we love it and why it’s good for us to love it. In fact, this series was inspired by a 2013 study comparing three interventions to a control condition.1 The interventions: two active couples treatments and… a watch-and-discuss-movie intervention. And guess what, the movie condition did just as well as actual therapy for relationship outcomes! If research shows watching movies together is good for us, who are we to argue?

Our first discussion focused on the 1991 classic starring Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss, What About Bob? But one thing we didn’t have time to get to was the real-life relationship between Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss. It was, shall we say, not good.2

Celebrity lives and relationships fascinate us. Which is the perfect segue to this week’s topic: why writer, actor, and director is sometimes loved, sometimes reviled, and quite often just entirely misunderstood.3

The Need Beneath the Noise

’s hard-to-put-down4 new memoir, Famesick offers a treatise on what it's like to be desperate to connect yet too often misunderstood.

Dunham burst onto the celebrity scene at age twenty-four, with her semi-autobiographical film, Tiny Furniture. It won the Independent Spirit Award for best first screenplay and led to all sorts of offers, including from HBO, where she came up with the idea of a series that would fully launch her into the public eye: Girls.

In surreal fashion, Dunham writing, directing, and starring in Girls meant she was creating art about twenty-something women trying to find themselves while simultaneously being a twenty-something-year old trying desperately to find herself. But unlike the characters she was writing, she wasn’t just barely making it in New York—she had made it. And the fact of her success meant she was responsible for the livelihoods of hundreds of people working on the series.

As the pressures and publicity mounted, she tried to keep her head above water and sustain the relationships that were, for her, the very heart of it all. As she writes:

Contrary to what some people believe, I never got into this to offend anyone. I did it to connect.

[Note: I listened to this book rather than read it, so quotes are transcribed as carefully as I could manage rather than copied directly. Apologies for any inaccuracies.]

The need for understanding is as universal as the need for belonging, because really, they are one and the same. And Dunham describes herself as exquisitely hungry for understanding, deeply wounded when the need is thwarted. She recalls an instance of meeting up with old friends during a busy season of Girls in which she had lost her voice. She didn’t bail because she wanted her friends to know they were a priority. But later, she learned they viewed her showing up and writing to communicate as a form of attention-seeking rather than a sign of friend-devotion.

When More Backfires

As Dunham’s success grew, so did her struggles: trauma, a chronic illness that took years to diagnose, an addiction born of trying to manage both. Through it all, Dunham continued to fight to be understood, to give others enough that they would love and understand her as worthy, whether the offers were artistic, financial, or energetic.

In 2016, after the presidential election where she threw her celebrity status behind Hilary Clinton, the misunderstanding and rejection reached a new crescendo. She writes:

I knew the internet had become, once and for all, a place where I was absolutely guaranteed to find pages and pages daily of abjectly cruel messages, things the meanest teenager wouldn’t even say to the most deserving mother… It seems to me, looking back, that I thought the cure for such widespread disdain—some of it personal, some of it political, a lot of it the result of toxicity breeding only more toxicity—was not to show less of myself but to show more, as if revealing myself down to the guts would allow for some kind of renewed understanding. I was, in hindsight, just begging. And what are we humans better at than averting our eyes from a beggar?

Her experience reflects an unfortunate but predictable feedback loop: pursuing understanding so intensely can all but guarantee misunderstanding.

The Closest Knife

Among the most painful misunderstandings Dunham describes wasn’t with strangers on the internet or the doctors who didn’t listen to her. It was with Jenni Konner, the Girls showrunner.

From the start of the series, Dunham and Konner’s lives became intertwined professionally and personally and with what seemed like a true and caring devotion. But as Dunham looked back in the aftermath of illness, addiction, and heartbreak, she could see that Jenni’s motivations were a mix of love and professional ploy. In hindsight, she could see that Konner had pushed her to keep working even when she was sick, to take medicine rather than slowing down to wonder what was really going on medically, and dismissed the cruel analysis being foisted on her from every direction rather than appreciating the pain of it. The person who she thought understood her most unconditionally, it turned out, also had motivations not to understand.

Dunham describes begging Konner to try:

The triad of illness, trauma, and addiction was more than I had been able to bear. Everything that had happened publicly was harder than I let on. But it was real—it could be clearly laid out on a timeline, like in a history book or a true-crime podcast… And now, I told her, I was still dealing with the physical pain of an incurable condition, a condition I had never taken a moment to consider the emotional implications of.

Konner responded:

But you keep saying you’re sick… like you still believe it’s physical.

She thought Dunham was “clinging to this random diagnosis like it’s an answer.”

When strangers misunderstand you, it’s often because they lack information or don’t think it’s worth putting in the energy to understand. But someone who knows you, who has invested in you, and who still won't see you? That's a wound that can feel intolerable.

The research bears this out: on days people feel better understood, they report higher life satisfaction and fewer physical symptoms. When researchers experimentally induce feelings of being misunderstood and then ask participants to complete seemingly unrelated physical tasks, they find that those who feel misunderstood show reduced pain tolerance.

Dunham didn’t give up on understanding easily. Hurting but still hopeful, she told Konner that she would like to meet in a therapist’s office to figure out what to do with their shattered relationship. Minutes in, the therapist notes that the question seems to be whether they can salvage a friendship from their wrecked business partnership. To this, Jenni simply… shrugs.5

Dunham writes about what happened next:

She turned to me. ‘I have just one request.’

‘Anything,’ I said. ‘Really, anything.’

‘Please don’t write about this immediately. I know how you work and that you will, but please, just not right away.’

She knew me, she knew my process better than anyone…. I felt myself say goodbye to all of this knowing and being known and tried to summon a perfect response, something that expressed that I knew all the ways this had been hard, all the ways I had been hard—hard to corral, hard to understand, hard to love—all the ways she had been my best and always, had confounded me and terrified me, made me my best and worst.

But then she began to gather her things: purse, phone, a CVS bag, and stood. ‘Thank you for your help,’ she said to the therapist.

With 47 more minutes left to go in their first session, Konner departed. Dunham, doing her best to abide by Konner’s request, waited seven years to write about it.

Upgrade to keep reading: the realizations that save relationships and what research says about finding the people worth the understanding effort. (I wrote a whole book about this, out October 27th. Pre-order if you are able!)

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Thank you to all who responded so supportively about my book announcement last week. It meant the world to me.

I want to make a different kind of announcement today. My fellow Substack writer and one of my favorite humans to chat with (because she’s brilliant, funny, and allergic to bullshit), and I realized we both take the psychology of e…

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I wrote a book and it comes out October 27th. I’ve mentioned it before,1 but consider today my official announcement.

And the official cover reveal!

Today I want to spend time talking about what it’s like to be in midst of …

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Stories of deception, cheating, and gaslighting are like car accidents on the highway: we know we should look away. We cannot.

The betrayal memoirs keep coming. Belle Burden’s memoir, Strangers followed her viral Modern Love essay about a marriage that, overnight, transformed from mutually loving to something her husband had lost interest in being part of.1 The book was an instant bestseller. A recent Modern Love essay offers a reckoning with a decades-old affair that was never revealed. An excerpt in The Atlantic from the new book, Legs Hearts Minds by Chris Jones, shares the devastation of discovering a wife’s affair in real time, sitting in a leather chair in the dark of the night, watching her live-texting with her lover from a MacBook synced to her iPhone.

We can’t help but remain transfixed, inhaling, judging, parsing the carnage.2

I’ve been thinking about why we can’t look away. I think it’s this: We rubberneck because we believe, somewhere, that if we look hard enough, we'll find the explanation that makes it make sense. The problem—and this is the part that takes longest to accept—is that the person who hurt us often doesn't have that explanation to give.

A Social Contract

The truth is that accelerating onto the highway would be a much more terrifying enterprise if we didn’t have a social contract of driving that kept mutual safety possible. The same is true for relationships. Entering into a serious relationship, and especially a marriage, means attaching your life to someone else’s. You make sacrifices based on the assumption that they will make sacrifices too. You trust that your interests are somewhere near the center of their decision-making. You build a life around that assumption.

This is what makes betrayal so destabilizing. It’s not just the act itself. It’s the discovery that the social contract you thought everyone had agreed to may not have existed at all. The agreement you thought was being honored dissolved and made you roadkill, even as you continued naively thinking “I am safe.”

In the couples therapy room, I see this regularly. It’s the partners working through discovered affairs. And betrayals aren’t limited to infidelity. It’s also financial secrets, partners who quietly resumed drinking after committing to abstinence, and even the slow realization that values assumed to be shared (around sex, around parenting, around privacy) have been modified without notification.

In every case of betrayal, there is an agreement (sometimes formal, sometimes informal) that was broken, revealing that we are not as protected inside our relationships as we’d like to believe.

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The Villain We Need

When we’ve been hurt by people we trust, the pain can be profound. Researchers consider betrayal by a partner to be a form of interpersonal trauma, with effects that can be both immediate and long-lasting. To tend to our psychic wounds, we seek out coherence.

We have an innate drive to try to understand, to make sense of something that feels so incomprehensible. The drive aims to help us regain a sense of predictability in the world, to reassure us that we can prevent such devastation from happening again.

Humans are wired for storytelling because organizing our world through story helps us make sense of what otherwise feels nonsensical. And the simplest stories we turn to when we are in pain have a clear villain and a clear victim. It’s the car accident with a perpetrator who drove badly and a victim who suffered the consequences. In a close relationship, we categorize the story into the person who cheated and the person who was cheated upon. Simple. Clear.

That clarity doesn’t undo the pain of betrayal—of course not. But it provides a strange kind of comfort. If the person who hurt you is a psychopath, a skilled liar, or someone who knew exactly what they were doing and didn’t care—then your judgment wasn’t broken. You were simply outmaneuvered by someone better at deception than you were at detection. We yearn for this kind of clarity. A story to make it all make sense.

In Strangers, Burden describes having pursued understanding with a compulsive intensity, persistently calling and texting her ex-husband to ask him to explain until he stopped taking her calls, digging around the internet for information about his affair partner, talking to friends to try to gain insight. In one passage, she shares a text she wrote to him a year after he had left:

‘You never told me what I did wrong in our marriage, why you stopped loving me. It’s such an awful thing after twenty-one years not to know.’ I had hoped something had changed, that he would give me the answer, the lost frames of the movie, something to help me understand what had happened. He wrote back: ‘I wish I could answer your question. Something broke in me. It was me and not you. You did nothing wrong.’

It should have been a relief, hearing again that it was not my fault, but it felt like a fresh blow, the answer without an answer, the refusal to fill in the blanks.3

If you've ever found yourself searching for an explanation that never quite came, you're in good company. The rest of this piece is about what we do with that. Paid subscribers read on below.

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The Opacity Problem

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Last week, we dug into the unsettling reality that the people we love have inner worlds we are simply not privy to, and that our maps of them are always a little out of date, always a little incomplete. Most of the time, we can sit with that. We assume good faith, fill in the blanks charitably, and move on.

Today we’re going to discuss one common response in close relationships when something feels… off.

Maybe it’s a story that doesn’t quite add up. A mood you can’t account for. A charge on the credit card statement that stops you mid-scroll. A change of behavior that feels out of the blue. And once that suspicion takes root, a very human instinct kicks in: we start investigating. We go through the emails, or the texts, or the browser history, or the receipts hoping to find something that will settle it

And we often do find something. A conversation that looks ambiguous. A name we don’t recognize. A gap in the timeline. And then we feel worse, not better, because what we’ve found is evidence without context. We’ve collected clues without a narrator. We have data and no meaning, which, as anyone who has stared at an ambiguous text thread at midnight knows, is its own particular form of torture.

This is not a coincidence. It’s what happens when we’re inside of a situation involving suspicion and uncertainty. In those contexts, the human brain does what human brains do: they fill in the gaps of information with constructed information.

But there’s a problem with the conclusions we can arrive at through independent investigation: the only person who can actually tell us their truth is the person who’s holding it. That was a central point in the post last week about love maps and inner worlds. It’s just as true in today’s post. Surveillance doesn’t get us to true understanding of other people or situations. It only leads to guessing at truth.

The Othello Error

What keeps us doing it anyway is a psychological phenomenon that researchers call the Othello error. It comes from Shakespeare’s tragedy, in which Othello interprets Desdemona’s distress and tearfulness as proof of her guilt rather than recognizing that her emotional response could just as easily be that of an innocent person confronted with devastating accusations. He reads the signals of anxiety as signals of deception. He’s wrong. She dies.

The Othello error names something that often happens when we’re already suspicious: we don’t evaluate evidence neutrally. We look for confirmation of our suspicions and we find it everywhere: in the hesitation before an answer, the defensiveness after a question, the vagueness of an explanation.

Our certainty that something is wrong shapes what we see. But anxious and truthful looks, it turns out, a great deal like anxious and guilty.

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Enter the Actual Investigator

The Relational Riffs discussion of the Othello Error caught the attention of , a fraud investigator and former narcotics detective in Tel Aviv who reached out after reading this earlier piece on lie detection.1 As he put it, the Othello error isn’t just a problem for tragic Shakespearean heroes. It shows up constantly in professional investigation. And the consequences of getting it wrong are significant.2

Dudu comes from a family of investigators. His father served in Israeli Tel Aviv policing, specializing in undercover and intelligence work, and Dudu was drawn from an early age to detective novels, crime series, and spy stories.3 After compulsory military service, he joined the central unit of the Tel Aviv district narcotics division, where he served for 13 years before eventually turning to private investigation and teaching investigative thinking.

What struck me most about Dudu is that years of experience have made him more suspicious of his own certainty, not less. His moments of confidence, he told me, are “exactly the moments when I try to pull myself back to the ground and challenge my own thinking. I ask: what might I be missing, what other explanation could fit these facts, and where am I just trying to prove that my first impression was right?”

He described the investigative culture that can form around a suspect: “We would receive intelligence that ‘this person is dealing drugs’ or ‘this person is stealing cars.’ For some people on the team, that information became a kind of truth, and the whole investigation turned into a project of proving that this person was guilty. There wasn’t always much space to ask, ‘What if the information is wrong?’”

That social pressure to prove wrongdoing real. Studies consistently show that even subtle, nonconscious pressure can prompt people to conform, and that our drive to get things right is in constant negotiation with our drive not to be the person who says actually, what if we’re wrong? Add confirmation bias, the distorting effects of stereotypes, and the known phenomenon of false confessions,4 and you have a powerful system for seeing guilt… even when it isn’t there.

Dudu’s strategies for counteracting this are worth borrowing, even without a badge. He tries to maintain a nonjudgmental stance, noting when he’s entering a conversation with the verdict already written. He actively seeks out what psychologists call disconfirmatory evidence: facts that challenge what he already thinks. He has a thinking partner whose explicit job is to poke holes in his reasoning, not validate it. And when suspicion is running high, he has a rule: no final conclusions, no final report, on the same day. He forces a pause. He goes home. He lets things settle.

Sometimes he makes a two-column table with evidence supporting one version in column and evidence contradicting it in the other. Only after writing both sides out does he allow himself to arrive at a conclusion.

He gave me an example of a moment his assumptions almost cost him:

“A few months ago, I was assigned to investigate a stolen vehicle claim. The insured lived in a neighborhood with a ‘difficult reputation,’ my background check turned up some negative mentions, and I’ll admit — old patterns from my years in the police kicked in. I walked into that meeting already half-convinced it was fraud. But when I sat down with him and his family, something shifted. He cooperated fully, let me go through his phone, and we found plenty of evidence supporting his version. I left that house with a very different feeling — and a reminder of how easily I can be wrong when I let assumptions lead.”

None of these strategies requires a badge or a case file. But notice what they share: they’re all about managing what happens inside you before you walk into the room. The nonjudgmental stance, the two-column table, the forced pause — these are ways of arriving less certain, less prosecutorial, less committed to the story you’ve already written. And that matters for close relationships not just because it makes you more accurate, but because it changes what the other person encounters. You become someone it’s actually possible to tell the truth to.

Which is only half the work. The internal half. Slowing down the investigation gets you to the door. What happens when you walk through it is the other half — and that’s where last week’s idea about inner worlds becomes practically urgent.

[If you’ve been on the fence about upgrading to a paid subscription, today is the last day to grab an annual subscription at 80% off. $10 for the year!]

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So What Does This Have to Do With Your 11pm Phone Check?

The Othello error doesn’t confine itself to professional investigators. It lives in every relationship where trust has gone a little shaky; where we’ve begun scanning for evidence of the thing we already fear.

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His parents, of course, were devastated. They were also profoundly confused. The initial ruling of suicide didn’t make sense to them from what they had known about their child. And soon after his death, new, even more bewildering information began emerging. It seemed that Zac had been leading a secret life they had known nothing about.

As a kid, Zac had loved telling fabulist stories, mostly to entertain those he loved. But an entire secret life? Nothing his parents had ever worried about came close to that. Following a frustratingly inconclusive and error-ridden inquiry by Scotland Yard, their desperation for answers as to why Zac had perished eventually led them to investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe.

You might know Keefe from the investigation of the mysterious death of Jean McConville during the Troubles that became a book and then a miniseries called Say Nothing.1 In a new book, London Falling, Keefe pieces together Zac’s journey from a bright, funny, well-loved child in a well-off family to something much darker. Perhaps the fall began when Zac didn’t get into the prestigious school his older brother attended and instead ended up at a less academically competitive school on the outskirts of London, where wealthy foreign families sent their children. Keefe surmises that Zac may have come under the spell of a world in which the veneration of wealth and status reigned supreme. From there, it seems, Zac built himself into a serial fabulist, eventually constructing an entire alter ego of “son of an oligarch.”2

After Zac’s fall into the Thames—a fall caught on a security camera in London’s MI6 building—his parents began to capture whispers of one surprising piece of information after another. For one thing, the two older businessmen Zac had been with that night turned out to be not friends and not forthcoming business associates (as Zac may have assumed), but instead a bankrupt businessman and a notorious gangster, respectively. According to Keefe’s investigation, these two men had bought into Zac’s alter ego in hopes of doing business with him. And Zac, for his part, seemed to have bought into their created personas, too. Keefe’s reporting suggests that it all fell apart just hours before Zac’s death.

The Child We Thought We Knew So Well

The Brettlers were parents who loved their son yet had cavernous gaps in awareness of how he was negotiating his everyday life. But rather than pointing to parental negligence, Keefe’s reporting points to something more universal: those we love have inner worlds we are simply not privy to.

Many parents know the ache of discovering how much they didn’t know about their children. Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, discovered her diary written during their years in hiding after she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Upon his reading, he described discovering “quite a different Anne than I had known as my daughter.”3 The father and daughter had always been close, and then they had lived in extremely close quarters, sharing walls, meals, and fear. And yet, she had been, in some essential way, unknowable to him.

The tragedy of these stories isn't only what happened to these children. It's also the particular grief of discovering how much was not known about someone so beloved.

Which leaves us with an unsettling but also generative question: what don't we know yet about the people still here?

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I Never Knew You Felt That Way…

That unsettling yet generative question shows up in living relationships, too. I never knew you felt that way is a sentence often uttered in couples therapy. It’s often said without malice, but rather with genuine bewilderment. Research consistently shows that people think they know more about others than they actually do (no, you are not the exception 😉).

Two weeks ago, I shared a piece of my conversation with bestselling author Lindsay Gibson about her new book, How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child (out today! Paid subscribers, scroll to the bottom and enter to win a copy)4. Beneath the practical advice is a powerful insight: we know our children less well than we assume we do. And we often forget that they have an inner life that we can’t know but that is worth wondering about.

Gibson put it this way:

 If you conceptualize your child as having an inner world, it makes you stop and think for a minute when you're about to do or say something because it reminds you that there is stuff going on inside them, just like it is with you.

This wisdom of wondering about others’ inner lives applies just as much to a spouse of twenty years as to a ten-year-old. Most of the time, we think we already know—in fact, our brains are programmed to be overconfident.5 Our minds fill in the blanks with assumptions. and then we relate to the person we've constructed rather than the person actually in front of us.

Marital researcher John Gottman calls this the "love map"—our internal charting of a partner's inner world. And those maps have a tremendous upside: we travel the relational terrain during the course of our relationship, learning other’s likes and dislikes, habits, hopes, and values. That information helps us create inside jokes and shared history, not to mention an ability to anticipate.

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But there’s a danger, too. We can assume we’ve mapped all territory worth exploring. We can assume that others’ inner worlds are static. Usually, however, there is always much more to know. And the territory keeps changing.

If you’ve been on the fence about upgrading, I’m offering 80% off an annual subscription for a limited time (expires next week. That’s $10 for a full year. Slightly more than the cost of a fancy coffee, but definitely less than whatever camp deposit you just forgot to pay.]

Maycember Discount ($10/yr)

Your Map Needs Regular Updates

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Have you, too, been feeling those Maycember vibes?1 The vibes that the days are careening past so quickly that you’re shocked to discover that everyone has signed their kids up for summer camp while you’re still in winter mode?2

Well, if your idea of re-centering involves peer-reviewed studies about dating and jealousy rather than, say, gettin…

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Which raises an obvious question: okay, but how do we raise emotionally mature children in the first place? That question can feel especially urgent for people who grew up without great models, who are parenting largely by trying not to repeat what was done to them, which turns out to be a pretty incomplete blueprint.

Lindsay’s new book, How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child (out May 19th!), is the most comprehensive answer to that question, among many of our thorniest parenting questions, I’ve come across in years. And this book is most fundamentally a book about relationships. Because, as it turns out, the best thing we can do as parents is learn how to actually connect with our child in a way that helps them grow (and helps us remain as loving as possible through the teen years!2).

I have a podcast conversation with Lindsay dropping May 20th (the day after her book comes out). But first, a sneak peek for Relational Riffs readers.

As a thank-you to paid subscribers, we’re giving away a copy of Lindsay’s new book. Scroll to the bottom of this newsletter to enter. All others, you can pre-order your copy anytime!

Order Your Copy!

(Full disclosure: I should admit that I am an over-the-top Lindsay fan. I love her writing, and after I first had her on my podcast, she mailed me a copy of Carl Rogers, unprompted, proving to me that some of the best relationships start with good books.3 Our friendship has resulted in many thought-provoking conversations, and one of my favorite Relational Riffs Q&A’s on how not to become estranged from difficult people.)

I'll stop gushing now, or this intro will become longer than the Q&A…

Yael Schonbrun: I recently did a Q&A with another lovely author, Harvard professor and psychologist about her wonderful book, Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing. Leslie’s book delves into the benefits of sharing more than we think we should—sharing our authentic selves, and our own internal experience.

[Anyone want to ‘fess up on oversharing experiments? I often try to do it when I podcast… and then edit out what I overshared. Can that count as my overshare for the day?]

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But the balance in parenting, perhaps very similar to that of the therapeutic relationship, is not one-to-one as it might be in other relationships. And that creates this tension: On the one hand, we want to develop authentic relationships with our kids and share our own struggles with them. On the other hand, we don’t want to overburden or parentify them.

So my question to you is: what’s the balance between letting our children see us be human and overburdening them, especially if they’re highly empathic?

Lindsay Gibson: Oh, that’s such a good question and goes to the idea that children are just as emotionally sensitive and emotionally vulnerable as we ourselves are. Especially if a parent is in distress, or is having a hard time, or the parent is feeling insecure, a child can take that in very deeply. Because although children are not fully developed intellectually, they have all the emotional ingredients that we do at a very early age.

That means that a child is likely to take on the emotional load of whatever it is that you tell them. But they don’t have the reasoning power or the perspective or the experience to be able to do anything with it. While we would process it the way adults can, children are more likely to be stuck with feeling bad for their parent and wishing there was something they could do or working hard to try to make things better for their parent in their imagined ways.

So, if you’re telling your child a family story that you might share as part of their history or as part of your history, no harm done. But if you can be alert to whether or not you are leaning on that child emotionally, or you’re looking to them for that empathic connection to, you’re looking to them to hold your pain or to resonate with how bad it was for you—to be the empathic witness to your pain—that’s where we really need to be aware and find another place to get that need satisfied.

You need to have someone give you that kind of empathy for your suffering—that’s a legitimate need. But you can get that need met through a therapist, a friend, a partner. It really should not be your child because children take all that in emotionally and they feel very burdened by it. There’s nothing worse for a child than to see a parent who’s suffering. And if the parent turns to the child as a confidant or they let all of the emotional intensity out around the child, that’s overwhelming.

Children are immature systems that are trying to work on their own self-control and their own emotional integration. They don’t have the ability to hold a parent’s emotion like adults do. Asking them to do that is a form of parentification where the parent is turning to the child as if the child were the parent and the parent were the child looking for comfort.

In contrast, if the child is looked to as a helper with younger children, for instance, or helping around the house or whatever, that could be very affirming to the child and can lead to increased feelings of competence and efficacy. But it’s the emotional burdening that really causes the problem.

Yael Schonbrun: To that end, what are some ways that we can let kids in on our internal world? Because one thing that you discuss in your book is letting your child know, for instance, how their behavior is affecting you and how you feel about the relationship.

So this is almost like the reverse of the question because I think to some extent parents might conclude that we shouldn’t let our child know that their bad behavior has an impact on us. Yet part of parenting involves teaching our kids to be relationally skillful, which also means teaching them to recognize that what we do or don’t do and how we treat the people who are in close relationship with us matters.

So, how do you advise parents to give feedback to their kids about the way that they are having an impact in a way that doesn’t overburden them, but also that offers a learning opportunity?

Lindsay Gibson: When we do that teach relational skills consciously, that’s a great thing. For instance, we can teach kids that, “Hey, when you command me, ‘Bring me a sandwich,’ it doesn’t make me feel like making you a sandwich. However, when you say, ‘Mom, uh, would it be possible for you to make me a sandwich?’ I might be more inclined to do that.”

By explaining that to your child at a teachable moment, everybody learns something. But what often happens is that the parent gets reactive to a behavior that is demanding or doesn’t feel good, and then they get defensive. They’ll say, “Don’t talk to me like that,” and it can become a shaming thing.

So teaching looks like saying, “When you ask me without a please or when you tell me to do something, it doesn’t make me want to do it for you. Can you try a better way to ask me for that?” That’s teaching. Whereas “Don’t you dare talk to me like that, I’m not your servant,” now we are shaming. Now we’ve become antagonistic.

This book is available encapsulates so much good wisdom and belongs on the shelf of every parent who wants to be more emotionally present in their relationships. The principles she lays out don’t stop being useful once your kids turn 18.

For everyone: You can pre-order Lindsay’s book. And if you haven’t yet read Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, that’s your weekend sorted.

How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child

Adult Children of EIPs

For paid subscribers: We’re giving away a copy of How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child to one lucky reader. Enter below. We’ll announce the winner at the end of the month!

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But something has clarified for me over the years—not a predictor of success exactly, but a predictor of whether therapy is even the right intervention at the moment. It’s this: whether you can tolerate someone neutral (that is, your therapist) seeing your partner's humanity, including their pain.

A hardened narrative

Research shows that couples wait several years after a significant problem has emerged before seeking treatment. By the time a couple makes it into my office, the narrative each partner holds about what’s gone wrong in the relationship has likely hardened. When you’ve been hurting for a long time, it’s natural to begin to view the person across the room from you not just as frustrating or hurtful but as being, in some fundamental way, the problem.

This is understandable. People rarely seek couples therapy when things are going well. They seek therapy after accumulated months or years of unmet needs, of hurts compounding, and of calcifying beliefs that try to make sense of all that pain. After extended periods of unhappiness, people often arrive at stories about what happened that cast their partner in an unflattering light (just as their partner’s story does to them).

A safe assumption I’ve developed over many years of this work is that both people’s stories emerge from trying to make sense of genuine hurt, and worry that they are not ever going to be safe from further harm. This means the early work of couples therapy is almost always about acknowledging the pain both partners are carrying—sometimes naming that the hurt has come directly at the hands of the other.

This acknowledgement doesn't mean excusing bad behavior. But in order to treat a relationship, a therapist has to be able to see past the bad behavior to the hurt driving it. And that can be excruciating to witness when you feel that seeing their humanity is undeserved, and when it feels like it leaves you vulnerable to being hurt again.

[Have you ever had the experience of feeling betrayed by someone showing compassion for another party that hurt you?]

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When neutrality reads as betrayal

Social psychologist ’s research on moral typecasting shows that when we cast people into villain or victim roles, we often assume victims feel pain but lack agency, while villains have agency but do not feel pain. The categories can feel mutually exclusive: if my partner is the one who wronged me, then I am the one who hurts. And the inherent assumption is, we can't both be hurting.

This typecasting feels protective. When someone has betrayed or repeatedly hurt us, stripping ourselves of the obligation to perceive their capacity for suffering makes it easier to protect ourselves. It's harder to feel guilty about the cold shoulder, the contempt, or the disparaging comments we make about them to friends if the person on the receiving end isn't fully human to us.

But it creates a specific problem in the therapy room. If your partner is a villain incapable of suffering, then a therapist who reflects their pain back isn't doing her job. They’ve been duped.2 They’re taking sides. And you might conclude: I'm not safe in this therapy.

A therapist’s ability to see decency in both people, for some partners, isn't experienced as a clinical skill. It's experienced as a dangerous betrayal.

When Compassion for the Enemy Feels like a Threat

Social psychologists have documented this dynamic well beyond the therapy room. Research on intergroup conflict shows that when members of an ingroup extend empathy toward an outgroup, others in the ingroup tend to perceive that empathy not as generosity but as disloyalty. You haven’t just understood the enemy. You’ve joined them. You are not to be trusted.

The peace-building literature puts the starkest face on this. When a former Israeli Defense Force major from a Holocaust-surviving family began working publicly for reconciliation with ex-Palestinian fighters, a family friend told his parents:

“I think they should put them against the wall and shoot all of them, all these traitors.”

The social pressure to maintain the other side as villains, incapable of suffering, is that powerful. The therapy room is a smaller stage for the same dynamic.

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What It Costs Us

The reality is, most of us, at some point, ask others to ally with us by seeing the people who have hurt us as “bad.” We want our best friend to be outraged on our behalf. We want our family to see our ex the way we see them. We feel safer with those who align with our view of what is threatening.

In contrast, a measured response like I can see why you’re upset, and I also wonder if there’s another way to look at it can feel like evidence that this person won't be able to keep us safe. Because they can't, or won't, see the danger.

When the threat we feel is profound enough, this instinct makes complete sense. But as reasonable as it is to stop perceiving the humanity in someone who has harmed us, it's worth working toward getting it back. Because the costs of not getting there run higher than most of us realize.3

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A Litmus Test for Healing Potential

Jon Stewart recently gave President Trump public credit for making it easier for veterans to access psychedelic-assisted treatments. That Stewart could find something to applaud in someone he generally opposes — however grudgingly — is a small but meaningful sign of the kind of openness that journalist Amanda Ripley describes in her book High Conflict.

[Feelings about Stewart giving credit to Trump? Share here!]

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