A few years ago, I went to Los Angeles to attend Terry Real’s Relational Life Therapy training. He is world-renowned for his insightful take on male depression, healthy relationships, and narcissistic personalities in marriage, and has written several books on these subjects. (1) All are profound. Terry’s work is based on Pia Mellody’s’ model of Childhood Developmental Trauma; both he and I were trained in trauma by her, in his case many years before I did, and took what he learned and expanded it into a strategy for couples therapy. The fact that he has a plan for dealing with narcissists provoked curiosity because, in grad school, we were told those marriages couldn’t be repaired, and my personal experience has been that narcissists are in the top rung of most difficult people to do therapy with. Do they change? Not in my experience. I have met therapists who claim to love working with narcissists, but I find it hard to believe. I liken it to wrestling with someone four times my size with my hands tied behind my back. As soon as I pick up on the fact that I am dealing with someone with narcissistic traits, I take a deep breath and wonder why I became a couple’s therapist — it’s that hard.

So, no wonder I was willing to pay thousands of dollars to travel to get training from someone who has figured out a way to do it where you don’t come out blistered and bruised, and, you have a small chance at success. In the past, I would encourage each person to get individual therapy, but what I really wanted was for the spouse of the narcissist to get help to learn how to deal with their narcissist partner. They need to know if they are in an abusive relationship, find emotional support, and make sure they know how to get their emotional needs met on their own. Often, couples come in for couples therapy, stay briefly until I say something the narcissistic spouse doesn’t want to hear, and later, the long-suffering non-narcissist spouse returns on their own. They usually say something like, “You hit the nail on the head about my spouse’s narcissistic habits, and since you’ve met them, I want to do individual therapy with you.” That’s always a good idea.

Money and fame can be a blessing and a curse, and world-famous Jonas Brothers singer and United States citizen Joe Jonas and Game of Thrones actress and British citizen Sophie Turner are learning this the painful way. For years they have been media darlings, the public soaking up their beauty, fashion, romance, and celebrating the births of two young children. Now, since early September, we get to see their impending divorce and legal battles over who gets custody of the children. I’m sure now that they wish they weren’t so famous.

This celebrity divorce, just like all the others, provokes gossip-filled articles about divorce proceedings and any unfortunate legal disagreement, and is all over the Internet, talking about who did what to whom. Whether you’re talking about any celebrity couple, like actress Turner and Little Bird singer, Jonas, Hugh Jackman and Deborah Lee-Furness, or anyone else, I can tell you one thing for sure about all of them, we have no idea what happened or what’s going on. Anything you see on social media is a rumor, conjecture, worthless information, and page and space-filling, click-baiting garbage. The only facts we know are the court documents that have been filed, but again, just because something is filed doesn’t mean the information contained within it is true. Our legal system is a cat-and-mouse game meant to wear people down so they will stop fighting for the justice they deserve. I implore everyone to regard the speculative narratives about all celebrities as the garbage it is, but still, as a Marriage and Family Therapist who specializes in marriage crisis and the divorce decision, I see where we can all learn a few things from other people’s breakup stories, and that’s why I’m here.

Here are a few takeaways from my point of view:

1. No one knows what’s happening in any couple’s divorce. I work with couples who divorce and don’t even understand it entirely themselves. Stay out of the why and what for discussions and offer emotional support to your parting friends. The kind where you can listen to someone in obsessed anguish talk about the same thing 215 times in the morning and then go on to do the same in the…

Done the right way, separation can save marriages. Haphazard separations, with no time frame or guidance from an experienced family therapist, and a couple ends up playing Russian Roulette with their family. I know for a fact that couples end up divorced who shouldn’t have, and my career is dedicated to preventing that from happening. To that end, I’ve managed many separations over the years and created a plan for how to do it mindfully and with a purpose. It’s called a Managed Separation Agreement and is designed specifically so a struggling couple has the best chance for success. I define success as healthy reconciliation, where kinks have been worked out, root issues dealt with, healing and understanding have taken place, and things are forever different and positive moving forward. The more I’ve used it, the more I’ve tweaked and refined it, to the point that it may offer couples who separate the perfect next option before throwing in the towel. Still, I don’t want people to use it if they don’t need it, and there are certain things that must be going on for it to be appropriate.

Why should a couple separate, anyway? I’ve had couples come in wanting to separate who shouldn’t and couples who needed to separate who wouldn’t. My number one goal every time is to diagnose the marriage issues, stabilize whatever marriage crisis is going on, and decide if separation is appropriate in their situation. We also want to stop couples from doing even more damage to their marriages than already exists, which is likely to happen with two people who are emotionally freaking out and relying on what friends, family members, and non-therapist-endorsed Internet searches tell them to do. Separation is a big step. It is serious business, and if we decide to go that route, it will be done for the right reasons, in the right way, and it will be one of the hardest things a couple has ever done.

The dynamics of a couple who need to separate.

When a couple is in crisis, there is almost always one person who is leaning out of the marriage while the other spouse is desperately leaning in. The unhappy spouse has made an announcement of their unhappiness or wish to divorce, or they have been caught communicating…