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A Utah judge looked at two people who once shared a child, a bed, and a life, and called what they were doing to each other “toxic.” In a recent Page Six piece, the court detailed how Taylor Frankie Paul and Dakota Mortensen had filed dueling restraining orders against each other, with mutual allegations of domestic violence flying in both directions. The judge’s frustration is understandable. From the bench, the optics are simple. Two adults. Two restraining orders. A small child caught in the middle. A label gets applied. Toxic. Dysfunctional. Done.
I want to sit with that word for a minute, because in my therapy office in San Francisco, I rarely meet “toxic” people. I meet two terrified bodies who have run completely out of road. I meet protector parts in full armor, charging at each other because somewhere underneath, two scared kids are convinced that if they lose this fight, they will not survive it.
Answer:
A couple in my office last week sat at opposite ends of my couch, each
clutching thick folders filled with printed text messages and legal threats they
had meticulously compiled against each other. The husband aggressively demanded
that I formally diagnose his wife as a toxic abuser, while she proudly explained
that her lawyer was already drafting a restraining order. I let them litigate
their mutual destruction for a few minutes before I gently intervened. I have
watched this hundreds of times in my seventeen years of clinical practice. Pop
psychology blogs and internet commentators will constantly tell you that when
legal threats start flying both ways, you are simply dealing with two inherently
toxic people. As a clinician, I have to tell you that this common assumption is
completely wrong. When you fiercely weaponize the legal system against the
person you love, you are almost never dealing with clinical pathology. You are
looking at two terrified human beings experiencing a profound biological
panic.
To understand how a romantic relationship escalates into mutual restraining
orders, you must understand a severe negative cycle that I clinically call the
Waltz of Pain. In this ancient survival system, your nervous system does not
view relationship conflict as a simple disagreement. It detects a literal, life
threatening emergency. When the anxious partner perceives a massive loss of
connection, their amygdala fires, their prefrontal cortex goes entirely offline,
and they pursue relentlessly with aggressive demands to forcefully reestablish
the bond. To the avoidant partner sitting across the room, this intense pursuit
feels like a suffocating wave of engulfment. Crushed by the immense weight of
feeling like an utter disappointment, their survival brain triggers an equally
fierce defensive reaction. You are not fighting over facts. You are fighting a
neurobiological war where both partners are using extreme behavioral armor to
survive a crushing attachment wound.
I know exactly how destructive this cycle can become because I grew up as the
child of two broken homes, carrying my own profound childhood wounds of
abandonment and shame. When your attachment system is pushed to its absolute
breaking point, your protective strategies will force you to do unimaginable
things to secure your own emotional survival. The tragic reality of the therapy
room is that couples do not drop legal bombs on each other because they do not
care. They deploy these catastrophic weapons precisely because the relationship
matters so deeply that its failure feels like a literal death sentence to the
terrified nervous system.
You simply cannot fix a shattered emotional bond by treating your partnership
like a courtroom battlefield where a judge must declare a definitive winner. If
you want to understand what the recent ruling between Taylor Frankie Paul and
Dakota Mortensen actually reveals about human attachment, we have to look
entirely past the sensational legal drama to safely examine the hidden
biological pattern controlling them both.
Conversation: 2d6d572e-0615-40d0-857d-57a25ae124cd (turn 1)
That is not a defense of anyone’s behavior. The legal system is doing exactly what it should do when physical safety is in question. I am asking a different question. Not “who is the villain?” but “what actually happens to a human being when the bond they depend on most becomes the thing that frightens them most?”
That is the question worth answering, because the same dynamic that lands a couple in front of a Utah judge is, in a quieter form, running underneath thousands of relationships that will never make a tabloid.
The Dynamic Underneath the Headlines
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When the culture sees mutual restraining orders, it reaches for diagnosis. He is a narcissist. She is borderline. He is abusive. She is manipulative. The internet supplies the labels and the algorithm rewards the certainty. People walk away feeling they understand something. They do not.
What I see clinically, after seventeen years and more than three thousand couples, is that high-conflict ruptures are almost always two people whose attachment systems have gone into full survival mode at the same time. Human beings are an interdependent species. We are wired from the first breath to need a good enough other on the other side of us, or the organism panics. That wiring does not turn off in adulthood. It just gets quieter, until the bond is threatened.
When the bond is threatened, the people we love most can frighten us most. The people we depend on most can dysregulate us most. The people we reach for most intensely can fail us most painfully. That is not pathology. That is the price of being built for connection.
So when two people are in court accusing each other of harm, here is what I am almost always looking at, regardless of who is technically right on which incident: two protector parts in a fight to the death, each one convinced that survival depends on defeating the other.
From Empathi’s own research: in 58,221 completed relationship assessments, 58.4% came out as pursuers and 41.6% as withdrawers of the 53,495 people typed. Pursuers who collapse often look like withdrawers.
The Versus Illusion
In couples therapy, I call this the Versus Illusion. The mind has decided it is you against me. My safety depends on your defeat. Your restraining order means I need a bigger one. Your story to the court means I need a louder one. Each escalation feels like self-defense, because to a flooded nervous system, it actually is.
The truth underneath the illusion is that it was never you versus me. It was always the two of us versus the dynamic that is killing the connection. But once panic takes over, that frame is impossible to hold. You cannot see your partner as a fellow human in distress when your own body is screaming that they are the threat.
I have seen this in my office in less extreme forms a thousand times. People scream so loudly the room rings. People grab pillows and slam them against the wall while looking at their partner. People say things they do not mean and cannot take back. None of this is “toxic” in the sense the internet uses the word. It is two survival systems that have collapsed, and the relationship has become a re-enactment of wounds neither partner caused.
The Waltz of Pain in Hard Mode
Most of my readers know the Waltz of Pain. One partner reaches with intensity. The other retreats to manage overwhelm. The reach gets louder. The retreat gets colder. Both partners are protesting the same thing, the loss of safe connection, but their protests look like attacks to each other.
In its everyday version, this dance looks like a Tuesday night argument that will not resolve. In its extreme version, it looks like a courtroom. The choreography is the same. Your protector meets your partner’s protector. Their protector meets yours. Two childhood strategies collide. The relationship becomes the stage where ancient material plays out at full volume.
The reason this matters for a story like Paul and Mortensen is that the public discourse cannot tell the difference between protector parts and pathology. A man going cold and silent in a fight is not necessarily a narcissist. A woman escalating when she feels abandoned is not necessarily borderline. They are, far more often, two people whose bodies learned a long time ago how to survive disconnection, and those survival strategies are now ruining the thing they love.
The courtroom cannot do this work. The courtroom is for safety. It is right for the courtroom to draw hard lines around physical harm. What it cannot do is interpret the inner experience of either person, and we should be careful about pretending that a ruling tells us who someone is.
The Frog and the Scorpion, Both at Once
There is an old fable about a frog who agrees to carry a scorpion across a river. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog, and as they both drown, the frog asks why. The scorpion says, it is my nature.
I have used a version of this with clients caught in destructive cycles. The mistake the culture makes is wanting to assign one person the role of frog and the other the role of scorpion. The wounded innocent and the destructive predator. The victim and the abuser. Cleanly. Permanently.
Real couples are almost never that clean. In high-conflict ruptures, each partner is usually both the frog and the scorpion at different moments. You participated and got hurt, and that is terribly unfair. You also could not help your nature in moments and engaged in conflict from your most armored, shame-ridden, anxious or avoidant places. Both are true at the same time.
This is not moral relativism. There are absolutely cases of one-directional abuse, and those require an exit, not couples work. I have written about how to tell if you are in a relationship like that. The question I ask people is whether the pain is one-directional. Whether one person’s distress consistently costs the other person their safety, wellbeing, or sense of self. Whether you feel anxious or whether you feel afraid. There is a difference, and if it is fear, the conversation changes.
But in the murky middle, where most high-conflict couples actually live, the frog-and-scorpion question gets uncomfortable. You were hurt. You also hurt. Your partner was the scorpion. Your partner was also the frog. Both at once. Holding that complexity is the beginning of any real work, and it is exactly what the algorithm refuses to let people do.
Why Diagnosis Feels So Good and Helps So Little
One of the newest ways the algorithm shapes relationships is through diagnosis. Someone scrolls for ten minutes and walks away certain their partner is a narcissist, a covert narcissist, a borderline, a sociopath. Diagnosis gives certainty when the bond feels threatened. It turns pain into a story with a villain. It validates withdrawal, contempt, and self-protection.
The story of “the other is the problem” never leads to growth. Never leads to healing. Never leads to standing on your own ground. It is the path the lab rat keeps running, finding no food at the end, and running it again anyway because at least it is familiar.
When you read about Taylor Frankie Paul and Dakota Mortensen, you are watching this play out in public. The comments will diagnose both of them. The fans will pick a side. The judge gave the public the word it wanted. Toxic. Now everyone has a label and no one has a real understanding.
If reading this just made your chest tighten because you recognize the dance you are in, even in a quieter form, you do not have to wait to do something with that. Try Figlet, my AI relationship coaching tool. It uses the same EFT and PACT frameworks I use in my office, available the moment your body goes online and you need somewhere to land that is not a comment thread.
The Hard Line on Safety
I want to be unambiguous about something, because this is where my clinical voice gets very firm. When a relationship has reached the point of mutual allegations of physical harm, when there are protective orders in place, couples work is not the next step. That is not what I am arguing for here.
There are clear contraindications for couples therapy. The main one is any ongoing domestic violence or risk of domestic violence. We should not begin to explore the relational dynamic together when it is not safe to do so. The first work is individual. Each person, separately, getting their physiology settled enough that we could even study what happens inside the system without putting anyone at risk of doing something unacceptable.
In therapy, we talk about the container. Walls so no one runs out the sides. A floor so no one falls through. A ceiling so no one flies off into the infinite. When the container has already been breached, when the floor is gone, you do not start by trying to talk things through. You start by rebuilding ground, and you do that separately first.
A judge issuing protective orders is, in the most blunt institutional way, doing exactly that. Drawing a wall. Saying, no contact, because the system between you is not safe enough to hold what you are doing inside it.
That is not the end of the story. It might be the beginning of one. But the beginning happens individually, with each person doing the slow work of asking what their protector parts were trying to defend against, and what the wound underneath the protector actually is.
Coming Back to Ground
For readers who are nowhere near a courtroom but recognize the shape of what I am describing, here is what the work actually looks like.
It is not learning better communication scripts. The communication is downstream. Upstream is whether you can stay present in your body when your partner says something that lands like a threat. Whether you can feel the urge to withdraw and still stay present. Whether you can feel the urge to escalate and still keep your seat.
This is what secure functioning actually means. Not two healed people who never trigger each other. Two people who have agreed, explicitly or implicitly, that they will protect the relationship and each other even when it is hard. The Couple Bubble, in Stan Tatkin’s language. A protective membrane around the bond that says, we come first, we are each other’s go-to, we do not outsource the relationship to the internet, the in-laws, or the comment section.
You cannot build that membrane in court. You cannot build it through diagnosis. You build it slowly, in thousands of small moments, by turning toward each other when every instinct says run or attack.
For couples already deep in the cycle, the first move is not toward each other. It is inward. What is my protector part trying to defend? What is the wound under the armor? Who in my history taught me that this is what survival looks like? You answer those questions on your own ground first, before you can stand next to someone else’s.
What the Headlines Cannot Tell You
The Paul and Mortensen ruling is the doorway. The home is the question of what we do with the pain of love when it goes wrong, and whether we let the algorithm tell us a simple story or whether we do the harder work of holding complexity.
Two people made a child together. Something about how they fit together once felt like home. Now it feels like war. Both things are true. The judge can rule on the legal facts. The internet can pick a villain. Neither will tell you what it actually felt like to be inside that relationship in the moments it was working, or in the moments it broke.
I do not know either of them. I will not diagnose them. I will tell you what I know from seventeen years of sitting with couples in extreme distress. Almost no one in my office is bad. Almost everyone is scared. The work is teaching the scared parts that they are not, in fact, fighting for their lives. They are fighting for love. And love is not won by defeating the other person. Love is won by both people putting their weapons down at the same time, slowly, and seeing if the ground underneath them will hold.
That is a much harder story than “toxic.” It does not fit on a screen. It does not get you clicks. It is, in my experience, the only one that is actually true.
This is not a you problem or a them problem
“Round and round they go. Escalating judgments. Reaffirming worst fears. Two people throwing emotional boomerangs, doing exactly what makes logical sense to survive their own pain, only to gut their partner and ensure their own continued suffering. The way you try to get out of feeling hurt and threatened usually hurts and threatens your partner.”
“The fight is never about the content. It is always about the bond.”
Figs O’Sullivan, LMFT
What to Do Next
If reading this brought up something honest about your own relationship, start where the work actually begins. Inside yourself.
Take the free relationship quiz. In about ten minutes you will get a personalized map of your protector parts, your position in the cycle, and the specific attachment fears that are running the show underneath the fights. This is the same assessment work I do in a first session.
Start AI Relationship Coaching today. Figlet uses the EFT and PACT frameworks I have spent seventeen years practicing in my office. It is not a replacement for therapy when therapy is what you need. It is a place to land in the moments your activation is loud and you do not want to scroll your way into a story about who the villain is.
The courtroom decides who broke the law. It cannot decide who you are, who your partner is, or what is possible between you. That decision is still yours. Make it from ground, not from panic.
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