Photo: Hayden Panettiere 2009 (Straighten Crop).jpg by Toglenn, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The internet has spent the week chewing on Brian Hickerson’s recent confession. In a Page Six piece, Hayden Panettiere’s ex revealed an incident of abuse that he says he asked her to leave out of her memoir. He was arrested multiple times during their relationship for domestic violence against her. The story is horrifying. The detail he didn’t want printed is worse.
And the algorithmic conversation around it has fallen into the same shape it always does. Why did she stay so long. What does this say about her childhood. Was she codependent. Did she have anxious attachment. The pop-psychology comment section starts diagnosing the victim before the news cycle even finishes loading.
I want to stop that conversation in its tracks.
I’ve been a couples therapist in San Francisco for over sixteen years. I’ve worked with more than three thousand couples and a lot of individuals after they’ve survived something like this. When a story like Hayden’s hits the feed, my clinical instinct is the opposite of the comment section’s. I don’t want to analyze her. I want to fiercely defend the brilliance of what her body did to keep her alive. And I want to talk honestly about something most therapy content gets wrong: domestic violence is not a relationship problem. It is a safety problem. And the rules for working with it are completely different.
From the Headline to the Thread
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Most of the couples I see are caught in a painful dance where two scared nervous systems are hurting each other. We can work with that. We can slow it down, find the tender thing underneath the armor, and build something new.
Domestic violence is not that. When one person hits another, the entire field changes. The work is no longer relational. The work is protection. The systemic view, the “we’re both hurting and we’re both hurting each other” frame I use with most couples, gets suspended entirely. So before I go anywhere near the wisdom, I want to put that line down clearly. What follows is not relationship advice for women like Hayden. It is an attempt to name what actually happened inside her, and why the cultural diagnosis of “codependent” needs to be burned to the ground.
The Hard Line: When Couples Work Stops
In my office, before I ever begin work with a couple, I screen for this. I’m blunt about it on the intake call. Is there any domestic violence, any risk of domestic violence, any moment in your fights where one of you has feared for your physical safety. Short of that, let’s do this. But not short of that.
This isn’t a stylistic preference. It’s clinical ethics. The work I do with couples involves accessing the deepest vulnerability in both people. If one partner cannot regulate their reactivity to the point that exposing the other’s softness might result in them being hit, you don’t get to do that work. You can’t. The room has a crocodile in it. You don’t ask a person to open their chest in front of a crocodile.
This is why so much of the pop-therapy advice circulating around stories like Hayden’s is not just useless but actively dangerous. “Have you tried couples counseling.” “Work on your communication.” “Read about each other’s attachment styles.” None of that applies. The presence of violence is the one absolute contraindication. The goal is no longer repair. The goal is survival, and eventually, exit.
Why Her Body Knew Before She Did
Here is what I want you to understand about anyone who has lived with a violent partner. Their nervous system is not malfunctioning. It is doing exactly what a nervous system is built to do.
My working definition of trauma is simple. Trauma is when something that happened to you in the past merges with the present. The body keeps a record. Every loud voice, every door slammed too hard, every sudden movement near the face gets logged. After enough incidents, the body stops waiting for proof. It starts predicting.
This is why a survivor of violence will often look, from the outside, like she is overreacting. She tracks his moods obsessively. She knows from the sound of his keys in the door what kind of night it’s going to be. She organizes her day around managing his temperature. To the culture, this looks like codependency. To me, it looks like a human organism doing magnificent, exhausting, accurate threat detection in an environment that was never safe.
There are levels of this. With most clients, we’re working through what I’d call level one, level two, level three trauma. The everyday wounds that two people in a relationship inflict on each other without meaning to. Level four is different. Level four is what happens when you have lived with someone who could genuinely hurt you. At level four, you are not in a relationship. You are mastering the survival of an abuser. Your full cognitive and somatic bandwidth is occupied by one project: predicting and preventing the next blow.
That is not codependency. That is a feat of biological intelligence.
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Codependent My Arse
I want to say this as clearly as I can. If you have survived violence and you have ever called yourself codependent, I will not hear it. I won’t hear it.
The word has become wallpaper. It has been wrapped in pathology and then handed back to victims as a self-diagnosis. Codependency, smendency. Or as we’d say in Ireland, codependent my arse.
When the person you share a home with is dangerous, you are going to become hyper-focused on them. Of course you are. You are going to track their breathing. You are going to scan their face. You are going to forget what you wanted for dinner because what you actually want is to make it through the night. That is not a disease. That is one flavor of how a human being learns to survive not being loved the way she needed to be loved. It is one of the most ancient survival strategies our species has, and to call it pathological is to insult the intelligence of the body that produced it.
I’ve written about this in a different context in The Red Flag Trap. The internet has built an industry on pathologizing survivors. It sells. Fear sells, certainty sells, diagnosis sells. And so women who have already been brutalized by a partner get to come home, open TikTok, and discover that on top of everything else, they were the broken one all along.
No. The person who hit her was the broken one. She was the one keeping a human alive in a house with a crocodile.
The Little Girl in the Cubbyhole
When I sit with someone after she has finally gotten out, my job is not to be neutral. My job is not to help her see his side. My job is to be ferociously on her side, and on the side of the smaller, younger version of her that learned, long before this man ever entered her life, that the way to survive love was to make yourself useful, watchful, quiet.
I dive in with her. I validate the reactive part of her that finally said no. This is so unacceptable, I tell her. What he did to you is so unacceptable. And then, when she trusts me enough, I get to talk to the little girl in her little cubbyhole, the one who learned to hide there a long time ago. I get to love her there. I get to tell her she was right to hide and she doesn’t have to hide anymore.
This is the work. Not analysis. Not communication tools. Not getting him into couples counseling. The work is finding the part of her that was made small by a series of impossible nights, and giving that part of her the absolute safety that the abuser destroyed.
The Memoir, the Withheld Detail, and the No
There’s a particular detail in the Hickerson story worth sitting with. He says there was an incident he asked her to leave out of her book. She included other things. She left this out, allegedly at his request. And he is now disclosing it himself, years after the relationship ended.
I’m not going to speculate on either of their motives. I will say this. One of the most important developmental moments in any survivor’s recovery is the moment she gets to say no to the relationship. Not the legal no. Not the restraining-order no, though those matter too, and I’ve written about that dynamic in When Restraining Orders Fly Both Ways. I’m talking about the interior no. The body’s no. The day her system finally registers that the bond is over and her bandwidth is hers again.
That no often takes years. It can take a memoir. It can take three more incidents after the one she swore was the last. It can take watching him get arrested and still feeling a pull toward him, because the body that was bonded to him does not get a memo from the courts. When a client is approaching that no, my job is to support it. If no is what she needs to say, I will help her say it. I will help her say it loud enough that her own body believes it.
What I will not do is rush her there. The no has to emerge organically. A no that is performed before the body is ready does not hold. It collapses the first time he texts. The work is making the interior conditions where a real no can grow.
What This Means for the Reader Who Is Not Hayden
Most people reading this are not in a relationship with someone who has been arrested for hitting them. Most people reading this are in something quieter and more ordinary. A dynamic where two scared bodies are stepping on each other’s wounds, where the fights feel terrible but no one is in physical danger.
For you, the work is different. For you, the dance can be slowed down and changed. The Relentless Lover and the Reluctant Lover can find each other again. Communication, vulnerability, repair, all of it is available to you, and the protector parts inside both of you can be invited to step back when the room is safe enough.
But I want you to take one thing from this article, even if your situation is nothing like Hayden’s. Stop diagnosing yourself. Stop diagnosing your partner. The word codependent, the word narcissist, the word toxic, these are blunt instruments that the algorithm sells you because they feel like power. They aren’t. They flatten the human being in front of you, and the human being inside you, into a label that no living body can grow out of.
And if your situation is like Hayden’s, if there is violence, if you are afraid, the rules I’ve described for the rest of my work do not apply to you. You do not need couples therapy. You need a safety plan. You need people around you who will not flinch at the truth. You need someone who will look at the watchful, exhausted, hyper-focused person you’ve become and call it brilliant survival, not pathology.
The Last Word
The culture wants a tidy story. It wants Hayden to be either a victim it can pity or a codependent it can analyze. She is neither. She is a woman whose body did extraordinary work to keep her alive inside a house she should never have had to survive. The memoir is hers. The disclosure is his. The recovery is hers alone, and it does not owe the comment section a timeline.
If you are reading this with your own version of that house in your history, hear me. The hyper-vigilance, the people-pleasing, the way you still flinch at certain sounds. That is not who you are. That is what you did to get out alive. The little girl in the cubbyhole is still in there. She is waiting for someone to come find her and tell her the truth.
Go find her. That part is on you.
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