When Diagnosing Toxic Relationships Becomes Toxic

Key points

Blame doesn't yield solutions; it generally leads to emotional cutoffs.

Some therapy models overemphasize pathology.

Diagnosing others on the basis of hearing one-sided stories is fraught with problems.

When relationships become challenging, we want to understand what’s going on. We look for causes. And most of the time, we become convinced that our loved ones are to blame. We find ourselves thinking, “Our relationship would be easy if it weren’t for you.”

We can seem to have become obsessed with identifying whether or not the people in our lives are dysfunctional in some way. Compounding this, many therapists may listen to a client's hurts, disappointments, dissatisfactions, and anger with loved ones, and then, without ever having met them, offer diagnoses that confirm