5 Ways to Destroy Relationships: When Good Intentions Go Wrong in Therapy

How Therapy Damages Relationships (With the best of intentions)

When: February 9 at 1 PM NZ | 11 AM Sydney

Duration: 90 Minutes 

Audience: LMFTs, Counselors, Psychotherapists, and Social Workers

Continuing Education: Australia Counselling Association OPDs Pending

Where: Online via Zoom | Recording available 10-15 after presentation

When Helping a Client Can Unintentionally Harm Their Relationship

Imagine a client leaving therapy feeling understood and validated. For the first time, they feel certain their partner is responsible for their unhappiness. They return home, explain what they've learned, and another argument begins.

The therapist intended to help. But did the intervention increase understanding, or reinforce the division?

This is one of the uncomfortable questions at the heart of relationship-informed counselling. Supporting an individual's autonomy matters. So does understanding the relationship system in which their choices take place. Good therapy requires us to consider both.

In his article, “How Therapy Damages Relationships (With the best of intentions),” Dan Gummo explores how familiar therapeutic strategies can sometimes contribute to relationship deterioration, and why therapists need to remain curious about the person who isn't in the room.

Read Dan's article 

Course Description

What if the intervention that feels most supportive in session is actually making a client's relationship worse?

Therapists enter the room intending to help. Yet even compassionate, well-meaning interventions can unintentionally reinforce blame, increase emotional distance, or push clients toward decisions they may not have otherwise made.

In this provocative 90-minute training, 5 Ways to Destroy Relationships: When Good Intentions Go Wrong in Therapy, we examine five common clinical pitfalls that can undermine relationships in both individual and couples therapy.

Participants will explore how one-sided validation, therapist overidentification, premature advice, poorly framed boundaries, and unbalanced therapeutic alliances can inadvertently intensify relational distress. Through realistic clinical examples, the course examines how therapists can support individual clients without reinforcing rigid narratives about absent partners, and how couples therapists can maintain balanced alliances while addressing destructive interaction patterns.

Special attention is given to distinguishing potentially repairable relationship distress from abuse, coercive control, and situations where separation may be the safest or healthiest choice.

This engaging, clinically focused training challenges therapists to examine the unintended consequences of their interventions and offers practical strategies for promoting relational understanding, informed decision-making, and client autonomy.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this 90-minute training, participants will be able to:

1. Identify five well-intentioned therapeutic practices that may inadvertently contribute to relationship polarization, emotional disconnection, or premature separation.
2. Differentiate empathic validation from therapist overidentification and reinforcement of one-sided relationship narratives in individual therapy.
3. Describe strategies for maintaining balanced therapeutic alliances and reducing blame, triangulation, and polarization in couples therapy.
4. Evaluate how interventions involving boundaries, empowerment, and relationship decision-making can become overly directive, and identify more collaborative alternatives.
5. Apply a safety-informed clinical framework to distinguish relationship distress from abuse or coercive control while supporting client autonomy and appropriate treatment planning.