When the Therapist Has Already Decided Who the Villain Is

Saturday, August 22, 2026.

A recent Wall Street Journal article asks a question that should make the mental-health profession uncomfortable:

Is your therapist biased?

The immediate answer is yes.

Every therapist is biased.

We arrive in the consulting room with a history, a temperament, a politics, a theory of human suffering, and a private collection of people we have not entirely forgiven.

Training does not remove these things.

It is supposed to help us notice them.

That distinction matters because therapy is an unusual form of power.

One person arrives distressed and uncertain. The other sits in a comfortable chair with credentials on the wall and a vocabulary capable of making ordinary human conflict sound clinically conclusive.

Therapeutic bias can end marriages. It can separate parents and children. It can turn a painful season into a permanent identity.

The danger is not that therapists possess values.

The danger begins when we mistake our values for psychological truth.

The New Therapeutic Certainty

Elizabeth Bernstein’s Wall Street Journal article describes therapists pushing clients toward estrangement, judging political opinions, taking sides in couples therapy, and diagnosing family members they have never met.

One woman sought help for anxiety, depression, and communication problems with her boyfriend and mother. Her therapist—who had cut off her own mother and regretted a long relationship—reportedly encouraged the client to cut off both people.

When the client asked whether the therapist’s history might be influencing the treatment, the therapist became defensive.

At that moment, the client was no longer being helped to understand her life.

She was being asked to protect the therapist’s understanding of herself.

Therapists inevitably have reactions to clients. They remind us of our parents, former spouses, difficult children, younger selves, and roads not taken. Countertransference is not a professional scandal.

Unexamined countertransference is.

Therapy Has Never Been Value-Free

It would be comforting to believe this is entirely new—that earlier therapists were neutral scientists while today’s clinicians have been captured by politics and TikTok.

Therapy has always carried cultural values.

Previous generations elevated independence, self-expression, authenticity, sexual freedom, and self-esteem. These were not neutral discoveries about human nature. They were moral preferences presented in psychological language.

What has changed is the speed and confidence with which new ideas travel.

A therapist learns a new vocabulary on Tuesday and begins reorganizing families with it on Wednesday.

“Narcissist.”

“Trauma bond.”

“Gaslighting.”

“Emotional abuse.”

“Unsafe.”

“No contact.”

Every term can describe something real. Each can also become a conceptual crowbar.

A disagreement becomes gaslighting. Selfishness becomes narcissism.

Relational discomfort becomes emotional danger. A painful but complicated parent becomes toxic.

Estrangement becomes boundary-setting, as though changing the noun settles the moral question.

Language that clarifies suffering can also manufacture certainty.

Experience Does Not Make Us Innocent

After many years around couples therapy, I do not believe experienced therapists become unbiased.

If anything, experience creates another danger. We have seen certain patterns so many times that we begin recognizing them before they have fully appeared.

Sometimes this is clinical wisdom.

Sometimes it is merely prejudice with a long résumé.

The work is knowing which one is speaking.

A competent therapist needs a clinical framework. A framework helps us decide what to notice, which questions to ask, and how apparently unrelated events may fit together.

But a framework is not an ideology.

A framework generates questions.

An ideology already knows the answer.

What Is the Self of the Therapist?

Self of the therapist is the unavoidable presence of our own personality, history, values, intuitions, and emotional reactions in the therapy room.

The therapist is not merely applying techniques; the therapist is part of the instrument through which treatment occurs.

But that instrument must be carefully calibrated.

My protectiveness toward one spouse, impatience with the other, or sudden certainty about a family may contain useful clinical information—or it may be my own biography trying to become someone else’s treatment plan. And because so many therapists are wounded healers, this puts an even finer point on it.

The disciplined question is always: What belongs to this client, what belongs to me, and what are we creating between us?

A mature therapist risks using the self without imposing the self.

The Absent Person Is Easy to Diagnose

When a therapist labels an absent husband narcissistic or an absent mother borderline, the problem is not merely possible inaccuracy.

The label reorganizes the relationship.

Conflict becomes pathology. Ambivalence becomes victimization. Repair begins to resemble self-betrayal. Once the diagnosis enters the room, curiosity often leaves it.

This is especially dangerous in individual therapy.

The therapist receives one person’s pain in exquisite detail. The absent partner becomes known primarily through the injuries attributed to them. Therapist and client may gradually form a small, emotionally satisfying coalition against someone who has never been interviewed.

That does not mean the client is dishonest.

It means every relationship looks different when viewed through one nervous system.

Couples Therapy Has Its Own Temptations

Couples therapists are not immune.

One partner may be more articulate. One may cry more convincingly.

One may remind us of someone we love. The other may remind us of someone we emphatically do not.

We may admire the wounded spouse and quietly prosecute the avoidant one.

We may decide within twenty minutes who has been carrying the marriage and who has been sitting in the cart.

Then we spend the next ten sessions collecting evidence.

Good couples therapy requires resisting this seduction. The useful question is not simply, “Who is suffering?” Both people may be suffering, although not equally and not always innocently.

The better question is:

What happens between these two people, and how does each person’s protection recruit the other person’s worst response?

This does not mean mechanically dividing responsibility. Violence, coercive control, chronic deception, and abuse are not communication problems. Complexity should never obscure danger.

But neither should the language of danger flatten every difficult relationship into perpetrator and victim.

A serious therapist must be able to tell the difference.

Neutrality Is Not Silence

A therapist should be cautious about directing decisions involving divorce, estrangement, marriage, religion, sexuality, or parenthood.

The therapist does not have to live with the consequences after the session ends.

But good therapy is not a long series of sympathetic noises.

There are times to speak plainly.

Violence is dangerous. Coercion is not intimacy. Children should not be recruited into adult warfare. An affair cannot be repaired while it is still being concealed.

Therapeutic neutrality should not become moral anesthesia.

I am a blunt, plain speaker. I am not a squishy therapist.

My distinction is not between therapists who have opinions and therapists who do not. It is between therapists who offer judgment transparently and tentatively—and therapists who smuggle judgment into the room disguised as diagnosis.

Estrangement Is Never Trivial

Some family relationships are genuinely destructive. Some parents remain cruel, intrusive, manipulative, or dangerous. Estrangement may be necessary.

But necessary is not the same as uncomplicated.

Cutting off a parent does not remove the parent from the psyche. It often relocates the relationship from the outer world to the inner one, where the arguments continue without witnesses.

A therapist should approach estrangement with sufficient gravitas.

What has been attempted?

Would limited contact be possible?

Is the client seeking safety, punishment, relief, or recognition? Is the decision emerging from sustained clarity—or from the emotional temperature of this week?

The therapist’s task is not to preserve every family at any cost.

Nor is it to hand out permission slips for disappearance.

The task is to help the client understand the price of every available choice.

When Only One Answer Counts as Healing

A therapist’s bias is not revealed merely because the therapist disagrees with you. Good therapy occasionally interferes with the story we prefer to tell about ourselves.

The revealing question is what happens when you disagree with the therapist.

Can the therapist become curious?

Can an interpretation be revised?

Can you question an assumption without being called resistant, avoidant, dysregulated, or unready to heal?

Be cautious when a therapist reduces complicated people to labels, treats reconciliation as weakness, or seems more emotionally invested in a decision than you are.

The clearest warning sign may be this:

Only one conclusion is permitted to count as progress.

The Authority of Psychological Language

If I tell a client, “Your husband sounds selfish,” the client may consider my opinion.

If I say, “Your husband appears to have narcissistic traits,” the same opinion arrives wearing a laboratory coat.

The sentence may change a marriage.

Credentials make interpretations heavier.

Our words can relieve shame and illuminate patterns.

They can also harden temporary pain into permanent identity.

A client may forget ten compassionate observations and remember forever that the therapist called her mother a narcissist.

We are not merely describing reality in these moments.

We may be helping to construct it.

FAQ

Is it normal for a therapist to have biases?

Yes. Therapists are human beings with personal histories, values, and emotional reactions. The professional obligation is not to become entirely unbiased, but to recognize and manage those biases so they do not begin directing a client’s decisions.

Should a therapist tell you to end a relationship?

A therapist may identify danger, coercion, abuse, or destructive patterns. But except in urgent safety situations, the therapist should help you understand your choices rather than make life-changing decisions on your behalf.

The therapist will not be living with the consequences after the session ends.

Can a therapist diagnose a spouse or parent they have never met?

A therapist may discuss behaviors reported by a client, but should not formally diagnose someone who has not been evaluated. Labels such as “narcissistic,” “borderline,” or “autistic” can create false certainty and significantly alter how a client understands the relationship.

How can you tell whether your therapist has an agenda?

Notice what happens when you disagree.

A trustworthy therapist can become curious, reconsider an interpretation, and keep the treatment focused on your goals. A warning sign is that only one decision is permitted to count as healing.

What should you do if you believe your therapist is biased?

Raise the concern directly and observe the response. A thoughtful therapist should be willing to examine how personal assumptions may be influencing the work.

Defensiveness, shaming, or pressure to accept the therapist’s preferred conclusion may indicate that another clinician would be a better fit.

The Better Standard

The best therapist is not free of values. No human being truly is.

The better therapist understands that entering another person’s life with credentials, confidence, and psychological language creates enormous influence. That influence should make us more careful, not more certain.

We should notice when a client’s marriage resembles our failed one. We should hear a political opinion without turning the session into a referendum on moral worth. We should be able to say, “I may be wrong.”

And when a client wonders whether our history is coloring the treatment, we should not require the client to comfort us.

A good therapist helps you see choices you could not see before.

A biased therapist gradually makes one choice feel morally permissible—and all the others feel like evidence that you have not yet healed.

The best therapy leaves you with more agency, more complexity, and more responsibility for the life you choose.

Which means you should leave therapy sounding more like yourself.

Not more like your therapist.

Why Work With Daniel?

Couples therapy should not be an audition for the therapist’s approval.

I help couples examine what is actually happening between them without forcing their marriage into a fashionable diagnosis or deciding prematurely who is right, who is wounded, and who has become the designated villain.

After many years of working with distressed relationships, I know that easy labels rarely improve them.

Couples need careful assessment, intellectual honesty, and a science-based couples therapist willing to remain curious when certainty would be more comfortable.

If your marriage has reached a point where every conversation becomes another trial, we can slow the pattern down, understand what each of you is protecting, and determine what repair would genuinely require.

Schedule a free introductory call.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.