Why Your Couples Therapist Might Not Call Out Toxic Behavior the Way You Wish They Would

One of the criticisms I hear about couples therapy, including Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, is that couples therapists are not always as direct as they should be. A partner is engaging in name-calling, DARVO, contempt, shame collapse, or other behaviors that feel very clearly harmful, and the therapist weaves in something about an attachment wound. The therapist wonders aloud what fear is underneath the behavior, or redirects the couple back to their cycle. 

Meanwhile, the person on the receiving end is sitting there thinking, Are we all really going to pretend that what just happened was okay? Does my therapist not see this?? Why are we talking about their fears when they just called me an idiot??

I completely understand this criticism, and at times I think it is deserved. Couples therapists can become so committed to a sense of neutrality, attachment language, or preserving the therapeutic alliance with both partners that they fail to adequately name what is happening in the room. Harmful behavior can get softened into “protest,” “protection,” or “the cycle,” leaving one partner feeling as though the therapist has joined the relationship in asking them to understand the person who is harming them while their own experience once again becomes secondary.

At the same time, there is another part of this work that is much harder to see from the client’s chair. At least when it comes to my own practice, I often see the dynamic with crystal clarity. Believe me: I am honed to see the entitlement, blame-shifting, contempt, shame collapse, narcissistically organized behavior, and the way one partner’s emotional reality is repeatedly eclipsed by the other’s. As a human being, I may have my own very personal thoughts and feelings about what I am witnessing. But my personal reaction is not the treatment plan.

My job is not to come into the relationship, announce who is right, diagnose one partner from across the room, or push the couple toward the decision I would make in their situation. My job is to understand what the two people sitting in front of me say they want, assess whether conjoint therapy is safe and appropriate, and help them see whether the ways they are behaving are moving them toward or further away from those goals.

I want to be extremely clear about the population I am discussing here. I am not talking about relationships organized around coercive control, entrapment, intimidation, retaliation, or fear. I am not talking about a person who cannot speak honestly in therapy because they are afraid of what will happen when they get home. I am not talking about someone whose finances, movements, relationships, sexuality, medical care, or access to leaving are being controlled by a partner.

As someone who trained at Peace Over Violence in intimate partner violence, I am continually assessing for signs that a person is stuck in a relationship and does not know how to get out safely. The ability to leave is not as simple as whether someone technically has access to a car, a job, or another place to stay. Coercive control can profoundly restrict a person’s agency even when an outsider believes that leaving should be possible.

When coercive control and fear-based loss of agency are present, standard couples therapy is inappropriate and unsafe. That situation requires specialized assessment, individual support, resourcing, and safety planning that centers the person experiencing abuse. A therapist should not use attachment language to distribute responsibility equally across a relationship in which one partner is exercising coercive power over the other.

This article is about a different, admittedly complicated group of relationships: relationships in which both people retain meaningful agency, but one or both partners may engage in deeply harmful behavior. There may be name-calling, emotional volatility, contempt, DARVO, threats of ending the relationship, intense blame, or forms of aggression that are corrosive to the bond. Sometimes those behaviors are more pronounced on one side. Sometimes both people participate in a highly escalated pattern, although not necessarily in the same ways or with the same impact.

The people in these relationships have agency and resourcing to leave and are choosing to stay. Perhaps they remain because there is a genuine felt sense of love and commitment or perhaps staying aligns with their values or religion. Perhaps there are children, shared history, financial realities, or a life they remain deeply invested in preserving. And sometimes people stay because the relationship reenacts an attachment pattern from childhood that feels extraordinarily familiar, even while it is painful.

My role is to understand all of that without deciding what their choice should be.

A colleague I recently consulted with used language that I have found profoundly useful and agency-oriented: clients get to choose their hard.

Leaving a relationship can be hard and choose to stay and try to repair it can also be hard. Accepting that a partner may have significant limitations is hard, and remaining in a relationship while continuing to hope that those limitations will change can be hard. There is not always a clean decision available, and there certainly is not always a decision that eliminates pain.

I operate from a harm-reduction lens as a therapist. If an autonomous adult understands the relationship they are in and decides that they are not prepared to leave— or that they genuinely want to stay— that choice belongs to them. 

I can help them see the pattern more clearly and understand the costs. I can support them in becoming more assertive and boundaried, identifying DARVO, building outside resources, and recognizing what is and is not changing. But I cannot take over the authorship of their life because I am uncomfortable with their decision.

This is part of my postmodern orientation as a therapist. I do not see myself as the final authority who gets to define the “correct” relationship, the “correct” life, or which type of pain another adult should choose. Clients are not children who need me to make their decisions for them.

And, hold the nuance with me: that does not mean I am neutral about harm, but it does mean I am not the author of my clients’ lives.

There is an important difference between directly confronting behavior and defining the person engaging in it. I do not need to call someone “a narcissist” in order to confront narcissistically organized behavior. I do not need to use the word “toxic” in order to say that contempt, name-calling, intimidation, or sustained emotional degradation is destroying safety in the relationship.

In fact, identity-level labels can sometimes make the actual behavior harder to address. Once the conversation becomes, “You are a narcissist,” the session may become a trial about whether the label is accurate. The partner being labeled becomes preoccupied with disproving it. The other partner becomes increasingly invested in getting the therapist to confirm it. We can spend an extraordinary amount of time debating the person’s identity while moving further away from what they actually did, the impact of it, and what must change for them to reach their mutually-agreed upon goals.

I am often much more interested in saying something like:

“I am hearing that you want a relationship in which both of you are treated as equals– that’s a value you’ve named. When you scream at your partner and call them an idiot, that behavior is objectively degrading as it places you above them and moves you further away from the equal partnership you say you want. Are you able to see that? [assessing for whether this behavior is egosintonic/ egodistonic] Help me understand what happens inside you at that moment, because we need to find another way through it.”

That is not an indirect intervention. It names the behavior, its impact, and the contradiction between the person’s actions and their stated goals. It does not ask the receiving partner to pretend that the name-calling is merely a misunderstood bid for connection. But it also does not humiliate the person engaging in it or turn the therapist’s moral outrage into the center of the session.

When a couples therapist does not use the language you wish they would use, it may be worth asking whether they are failing to address the behavior or whether they are addressing it through a different clinical route. Those are not the same thing.

My goal as a couples therapist is to support people in the higher-self goals they are explicitly naming. If both partners tell me that they want a safe, secure relationship in which they are treated as equals, that becomes an anchor for the work. When behavior appears that is profoundly at odds with that goal, I bring the discrepancy into the room.

I may say something like,

“You have told me several times that you want closeness, but when your partner tells you they are hurt, you immediately begin listing everything they have done wrong, which pushes them away. Is any part of you able to see that this is pushing you further away from what you want?” Or, “You have said that mutual respect is one of your central values, and you called your partner stupid three times during this conversation. Let’s make this make sense.”

I am not asking the client to stop because I have personally decided what kind of relationship they should have. I am asking them to examine whether their current behavior is compatible with the relationship they have asked me to help them build– usually, it’s not.

Of course, therapists are not value-free, and a postmodern stance does not require us to pretend otherwise. I bring commitments to dignity, safety, consent, and accountability into my work. I also remain attentive to patriarchy, racism, ableism, heteronormativity, financial power, and the many cultural systems that enter intimate relationships with us. But there is a difference between helping clients examine the power structures shaping their relationship and using the therapy room to impose my preferred political, cultural, relational, or moral outcome.

If I come in guns blazing, convinced that I know what is best for the couple, I am no longer collaborating with two autonomous adults. That is not culturally-informed, nor is it frankly effective in my experience. In fact, what that does is allow my countertransference, biases, and personal values to take over the treatment unit.

As an Internal Family Systems-informed and attachment oriented EMDR therapist who works extensively with ego states, complex trauma, and dissociation, I know that the “adaptive adult self” is not always the part of the person most available during a couples session. Sometimes I have what feels like a frightened four-year-old network showing up in one chair and a rebellious teenager network showing up in the other.

Their chronological ages have not changed. They remain adults who are responsible for their behavior. But in that moment, their access to adult capacities— perspective, curiosity, impulse control, empathy, long-term thinking, and their own larger value system— may become profoundly limited.

One partner may be blended with a very young part who experiences feedback as catastrophic rejection. The other may be blended with a protective adolescent state that refuses to be controlled, shamed, or made responsible for anyone else ever again. The adult relationship goal may be secure attachment and mutual care, but the protective networks in the room are fighting an older battle.

My job is not to infantilize either person or to allow a child state to excuse adult harm. It is to recognize who, metaphorically speaking, is in the room and help both partners regain access to enough adaptive adult capacity to do something different.

If I respond to a shame-organized four-year-old state by effectively saying some version of, “Let me be direct: this is highly toxic behavior” as though I am talking to a rational adult mind, I am unlikely to get much traction. It’s unlikely that a super direct approach like that is going to help them access empathy for their partner (and self), accountability and more adult-led behavior, but rather, it’s more likely to intensify the very defensive organization that is already harming the relationship and showing up in session. That person may attack, withdraw, reverse victim and offender, collapse into self-condemnation, or leave treatment altogether. Their partner will then experience the consequences of that explosion both inside and potentially outside the session.

Again (can you tell I’m drumming in a call for nuance) this does not mean the behavior goes unnamed. It means I have to be astute, thoughtful, skilled and deliberate about how, when, and from which doorway I enter to do so.

This is where couples therapy can easily lose the partner who has been harmed. When therapists begin exploring the terror, attachment wound, or young part beneath someone’s harmful behavior, it can sound like we are offering an excuse. The receiving partner may think, Of course they have trauma. I also have trauma, and I am still the one being called names… which is traumatizing!

That is a completely fair response.

Understanding what drives a behavior is clinically useful only if that understanding helps us interrupt the behavior. A trauma history or neurological diagnosis can explain why someone becomes intensely defensive during conflict, but it does not make contempt acceptable. A young part can explain why feedback feels annihilating, but it does not make the partner responsible for preventing every shame response. An attachment wound can help us understand why someone desperately protests disconnection, but it does not grant permission to degrade the person they are afraid of losing.

The adult who carries the young part remains responsible for what that part does in the relationship. Therapy should increase that responsibility, not dilute it.

One of the things I am assessing is whether the harmful behavior is ego-dystonic: does the person experience what they did as fundamentally out of alignment with their values and desired sense of self?

If someone calls their partner an idiot and later says, “I hate that I did that. I saw their face change, and I know I hurt them. I do not want to be a person who treats my partner that way,” there may be shame present, but there is also a possible opening. Can they remain in contact with the impact on their partner? Can they take responsibility without immediately asking to be reassured that they are still a good person? Can they become curious about what happened inside them while remaining clear that the behavior cannot continue?

This differs from an ego-syntonic response in which the person experiences the behavior as justified, appropriate, or consistent with how they believe the situation should be handled. They may say, “I called them an idiot because they were acting like one,” or focus entirely on how the partner provoked them. They may dislike the consequences of the behavior— perhaps their partner becomes distant or threatens to leave— without experiencing much meaningful conflict about the degradation itself.

And even here, I am careful not to confuse emotional intensity with accountability. A person can cry, apologize profusely, and appear devastated while remaining primarily focused on what the behavior means about them. Feeling terrible is not the same as feeling remorseful. Shame turns the attention inward: What does this say about me? Whereas, remorse helps a person turn toward the partner and the impact: What did this do to you, and what must I change?

If I cannot locate empathy, remorse, or concern for the partner’s experience, that absence becomes clinically significant. I may say, “I am noticing that I have not yet heard concern for what this was like for your partner. I want you to look at them and tell them honestly what happens inside you when you see the impact.”

Sometimes bringing that absence of empathy or remorse into the room helps the person access something that was protected. Other times it gives the receiving partner painful but essential information and data: I am choosing to stay with someone who, at least right now, cannot or will not feel with me when they hurt me.

Let me be very clear that it has taken me a long time to develop the skill of calling in certain behaviors effectively. Working with rigid personality defenses, profound shame, complex trauma, and dissociation is specialized and delicate work. Even highly skilled therapists may find some couples extraordinarily difficult to treat, particularly when there is limited outside support, little capacity for self-reflection, or no willingness to participate in individual work.

But if I respond to name-calling by saying, as clinically and beautifully as possible, “That was a horrible thing to do. Why did you do that? You are destroying this relationship,” I am probably not going to get anywhere useful with the couple. I may feel satisfyingly direct, and may reap the cheering of social media audiences when I post how direct and different I am on my social media. The harmed partner may initially feel vindicated too. 

But if the intervention intensifies shame without increasing responsibility, I have not necessarily helped either person reach the relationship they say they want.

With certain personality organizations, poking directly into the belly of the bear can cause the treatment to explode. The person’s defenses become more rigid, and the other partner is left living with the aftermath. The therapeutic alliance ruptures before we have enough stability to use the rupture productively.

I have found that usually, the most effective path is not to compound shame, but to help the person become more anchored in an integrated, adaptive adult state that can tolerate seeing the harm without disintegrating beneath it. From there, we can work with accountability, repair from the behaviors previously enacted, empathy, limits, and actual behavioral change.

That approach can sound gentler from the outside, but gentle is not the same as permissive.

There is a real danger that all of this clinical care toward the shame-sensitive partner becomes another system in which everyone organizes around their fragility. Their individual therapist attends to their trauma. The couples therapist carefully manages their defenses. Their partner learns increasingly sophisticated ways to avoid activating them. Meanwhile, the person receiving the name-calling, contempt, or blame is once again asked to be patient.

That is not acceptable treatment.

The partner on the receiving end needs support becoming more assertive and boundaried. They may need help recognizing DARVO, tracking when conversations are being reversed, and refusing responsibility for regulating the person who harmed them. They need room to describe what the relationship is doing to them without immediately being asked to empathize with why their partner behaves that way.

In some cases, I strongly recommend or insist that both partners have individual therapists so there is sufficient resourcing around the couples work. With appropriate releases and consent, collaboration with individual providers can allow the deeper trauma, dissociation, personality defenses, or shame structures to receive more focused treatment than couples therapy alone can provide.

The couples room cannot be the only container for acute complex trauma while simultaneously trying to protect the relationship from the behaviors that trauma helps generate.

This kind of work is often very slow. It needs to be collaborative, paced carefully, and handled with a tremendous amount of care. A person may understand cognitively that name-calling is harmful and still lose access to that understanding when a young, defensive state takes over. Integration takes more than insight, and behavior may not change simply because the person agrees with the therapist when everyone is calm.

But “slow” cannot mean directionless.

I am looking for evidence that the work is moving somewhere. Is the person noticing the defensive shift sooner? Are they becoming more able to pause before attacking? Can they return and repair without requiring their partner to soothe their shame? Is the name-calling becoming less frequent and less severe? Is the harmed partner becoming more able to set a limit without losing access to their own reality? Is the relationship becoming meaningfully safer, or are we developing increasingly sophisticated explanations for why the same harm continues?

Careful pacing cannot become an endless request that one partner tolerate degradation while everyone waits for the other person’s trauma to heal.

There are times when a couples therapist is too indirect. If your therapist never names the observable behavior, continually reframes cruelty as attachment distress, pressures you to understand your partner before your own experience has been acknowledged, or treats your boundaries as part of the relational problem, your concern may be warranted.

A therapist does not need to call your partner a narcissist, but they should be able to say that name-calling is degrading. They should be able to recognize when one person’s shame repeatedly eclipses the other person’s pain. They should assess for coercive control, fear, and retaliation rather than assuming all conflict is symmetrical. They should help you identify what choices are actually available and support your access to outside resources.

They should also be willing to evaluate whether couples therapy is helping. If the work is increasing danger, reinforcing the relationship’s existing power structure, or giving the harmful partner more psychological language with which to avoid accountability, continuing the same treatment is not neutral.

Clinical tact should create more room for truth. If it continually requires the harmed partner to carry the truth alone, it has become collusion.

If you are sitting in couples therapy wondering whether your therapist recognizes what is happening, you are allowed to ask. You might say, “When my partner calls me names, I hear us talking about the cycle, but I do not feel that the harm of the behavior is being addressed. Can you tell me how you understand what is happening and how the treatment is intended to change it?”

A thoughtful couples therapist should be able to explain their formulation without disclosing private conclusions, diagnosing recklessly, or becoming defensive. They should be able to distinguish understanding the behavior from excusing it. They should also be able to tell you what indicators of change they are watching for and what would make them reconsider whether the current treatment remains appropriate.

You may not receive the exact label you want. But you should not be left wondering whether your reality exists in the room.

When I do not come in guns blazing and announce that a behavior is toxic or narcissistic, it is not necessarily because I have missed it. Often, I am making a clinical decision about how to bring the behavior into focus without reinforcing the defenses that keep it alive.

I am trying to help two people regain access to the adaptive adult capacities that can hold their values, long-term goals, and fuller understanding of the person sitting across from them. I am trying to help them see the relationship they are actually creating and compare it honestly with the relationship they say they want. I am trying to support accountability without humiliation and compassion without excuse.

And then, ultimately, the choice belongs to them.

Clients get to choose their hard. They may choose to stay and engage in the slow work of repair. They may choose to remain while accepting limits that I wish were different for them. They may eventually decide that the relationship cannot become what they hoped it would be. My role is not to force any of those outcomes.

My role is to help them make the choice with as much access as possible to their agency, their values, the reality of the behavior, and its actual cost.