Therapy is supposed to help folks understand difficult relationships.

But what happens when the therapist begins helping the client end one?

A provocative new Wall Street Journal reportexamines whether some therapists are too readily encouraging adult children to cut off parents and other relatives in the name of self-care.

The question is combustible because estrangement is sometimes necessary. Families can be violent, abusive, coercive, addicted, or chronically destructive.

Nobody should be required to remain available for further harm simply because the person causing it has the same last name.

But the Journal is asking a more difficult question.

Has the threshold for permanent estrangement changed? And are some therapists helping to lower it?

The casket had not yet arrived, and someone was already furious about the flowers.

Another relative was contesting the obituary. A third wanted to know why she had not been asked to speak, despite having avoided the deceased with considerable success for most of the previous decade.

Then the family narcissist entered.

Within minutes, the funeral was no longer merely about the person who had died. It was about who had loved them most, who was grieving hardest, and who would control the official version of the past.

Funerals do not create dysfunctional family dynamics.

They place them in formal clothing.

For someone with strong narcissistic traits, death presents an especially difficult psychological problem. It redirects attention toward someone else, exposes helplessness, and rearranges a family system they may have spent years controlling.

The narcissistic person may respond by trying to possess the mourning process itself.

A necessary caution about the word “narcissist”

Not everyone who behaves badly at a funeral has narcissistic personality disorder.

Grief can make ordinary people irritable, self-absorbed, forgetful, or strangely invested in the placement of hydrangeas. One regrettable eulogy does not establish a personality disorder.

The casseroles had barely stopped arriving when the widower began calling his daughter three times a day.

His wife had handled the bills, remembered the birthdays, softened his quarrels, and translated his anger into language the children could tolerate. Now she was gone, and he was shattered.

But what, exactly, had shattered?

He spoke constantly about how lost he felt without her.

He spoke less often about what she had loved, feared, wanted, or endured. His grief was unmistakably real. So was the dawning realization that his wife had not merely been his partner.

She had been the entire emotional infrastructure.

When a highly narcissistic person loses a spouse, they may genuinely mourn the person who died.

They may also grieve the admiration, stability, status, domestic labor, emotional regulation, and dependable audience that partner provided.

Sometimes the person is mourned.

Sometimes the function is mourned.

Usually, it is an uncomfortable mixture of both.

The American Trickster: He Invented Himself—and Sent Us the Invoice

The American trickster is not merely a liar. Liars are common and usually tedious.

The trickster is something more gifted and more dangerous: a boundary-crosser who exposes the foolishness of respectable people while helping himself to their silverware.

He appears throughout American culture as the confidence man, the hustler, the outlaw, the snake-oil salesman, the self-invented millionaire, the political showman, the charming grifter, and—after a suitable infusion of venture capital—the “disruptor.”

America condemns fraud in principle and admires audacity in practice. We prosecute the fellow selling counterfeit watches on the sidewalk while putting the fellow selling an imaginary future on the cover of a business magazine.

The difference is often tailoring.

The American hero builds himself. The American trickster invents himself—and then sends everyone else the invoice.

Childhood trauma does not always enter adulthood wearing a name tag.

Sometimes it looks like rushing through breakfast when nobody is waiting.

Sometimes it is saying yes to an unreasonable request, then discovering your anger three hours later in the cereal aisle.

Sometimes it is making an entire dinner party laugh about the night your father broke a door—and wondering why your spouse looks stricken.

Trauma can be theatrical. But it can also be domestic, punctual, productive, and rather well dressed.

It may appear as the person who cannot rest without feeling guilty.

The person who becomes strangely blank when asked a direct question.

The person who can comfort everyone except themselves.

The person who has several distinct personalities—one for work, one for family, one for friends—and experiences mild cardiac weather when those groups threaten to meet.

These behaviors are easily mistaken for personality.

“I’ve always been this way.”

Perhaps. But “always” sometimes means since I had to become this way.

Many childhood trauma responses began as intelligent adaptations. Emotional delay allowed a child to remain agreeable until it was safe to feel.

Hypervigilance kept the household weather station running.

Humor made unbearable experiences tellable.

Dissociation provided a small internal exit when the actual exits were controlled by adults.

The child was not malfunctioning.

The child was improvising.

There was a brief and rather lovely period when gay marriage became boring.

This was the dream.

Not merely legal. Not merely tolerated. Boring.

Two men could marry, buy a sectional sofa, develop surprisingly rigid opinions about backsplash tile, and spend fifteen minutes outside a restaurant trying to remember where either of them had parked.

Two women could become wives and discover that equality included the right to ask, “Are you almost ready?” in a tone suggesting that diplomatic relations had deteriorated.

Marriage equality had reached its highest developmental stage:

Ordinary aggravation.

Gay couples had finally won the right to be mildly exasperated in public.

And then the background music changed.

There was a time when thirty years of experience made you senior.

Now it makes you a migration problem.

Somewhere in Human Resources, a twenty-eight-year-old with excellent skin is explaining that artificial intelligence will not replace you.

It will merely transform your role, democratize expertise and create exciting opportunities for continuous learning.

You recognize this language.

Your company used something similar before eliminating dental.

The presentation continues.

There are geometric shapes. An arrow points upward.

The word agility appears several times, which is rich coming from an organization that required six meetings to change the conference-room coffee.

Everyone is encouraged to embrace the future.

The younger employees are wondering how quickly they can learn the new system.

The middle-aged employees are wondering whether the new system has already learned them.

Because the fear is not simply that artificial intelligence might perform some of their tasks.

It is that the central bargain of adult life—work hard, become skilled, grow more valuable, protect your family—may no longer be honored.

Every relationship has a smell.

Some smell like coffee on a Sunday morning. Some smell like garlic, old books, damp Labrador retrievers, and the ordinary miracle of two people growing older without turning it into a documentary.

And then there are relationships with an ungodly pong.

Nobody is shouting. No plates are airborne.

If you ask the couple how things are going, they may tell you they are “fine” with the strained confidence of people attempting to pass a polygraph.

But something is off.

The odor is not coming from what is being said. It is coming from everything that is not.

Passive aggression is what happens when anger is denied admission through the front door and begins crawling through the air vents.

It appears in the theatrical sigh, the strategically forgotten errand, the frosted silence, the mysteriously unfinished task, and the sentence “Do whatever you want,” delivered in a tone suggesting that doing whatever you want will result in eventual identification by dental records.

Most people imagine murder as an explosion.

A moment of rage.

A terrible decision.

A weapon.

A siren.

Psychology has a less cinematic imagination.

It suggests that many acts of extraordinary violence begin years earlier—not with a fist or a gun, but with something almost invisible.

A failure of imagination.

Specifically, the inability to experience another human being as fully real.

That may sound abstract until you consider what empathy actually does.

Empathy isn't simply kindness. It is the remarkable psychological ability to remember that another person possesses an inner life every bit as vivid, frightened, hopeful, contradictory, and fragile as your own.

When empathy begins to erode, something subtle happens.

There is a particular kind of silence that arrives after betrayal.

Not the healthy silence that follows acceptance.

The other one.

The silence that says,You no longer exist.

No screaming.

No slammed doors.

No dramatic social media posts about "toxic people."

Just an invisible drawbridge quietly lifting until no one—not the offender, not old friends, sometimes not even family—can cross the moat again.

Most of us don't call this revenge.

Researchers may be telling us we shouldn't call it forgiveness, either.

A fascinating new study published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry suggests that hidden forms of antagonistic narcissism are linked less to retaliation than to something colder:

An automatic tendency to withdraw from reconciliation itself.

That distinction changes the conversation.

There is a question I've started asking folks.

Not only couples.

Friends.

Colleagues.

Sometimes complete strangers.

It isn't especially complicated.

Who notices when you don't show up?

The answers have become quieter over the years.

"My wife."

"My boss."

"My sister."

"My dog."

Occasionally, after an uncomfortable silence...

"No one, probably."

That answer stays with me.

Not because it is dramatic.

But because it has become increasingly ordinary.

Some buildings don't collapse because of an earthquake.

They collapse because, years earlier, someone ignored a hairline crack.

Water found it first.

Then frost.

Then gravity did what gravity has always done.

When the roof finally caves in, everyone points to the storm.

The storm gets blamed because it was loud.

The real damage happened quietly.

People are much the same.

We like to imagine that psychological breakdown begins with a divorce, a layoff, a diagnosis, or one spectacularly bad Tuesday.

It is a comforting story.

It may also be an incomplete one.