Cognitive Distortions in the Application of Separation: When Help Turns into Harm
Dina Veksler
ABSTRACT
This article analyzes a clinical case in which the template-driven application of psychological separation produced systemic iatrogenic harm and legitimized an already unstable marital configuration. Two independent specialists, working separately with a mother and her adult daughter, applied a conventional autonomy–separation framework without conducting structural analysis of power asymmetry within the marriage.
The husband entered the marriage with unresolved separation from his own maternal system. Rather than being addressed, this internal tension was externalized through the scapegoating of his mother-in-law and reinforced by econ\omic control, threats of expulsion, and interpretive monopoly within the couple. The marital instability and psychological deterioration that followed were not analyzed as products of structural imbalance. Instead, therapeutic attention was redirected toward separation from the mother.
When the mother sought help, distancing was recommended. When the daughter later entered therapy amid depressive episodes and emotional breakdowns, the focus again centered on separation from the maternal figure. The unhealthy marital environment that had preceded the deterioration of the daughter’s mental state was not examined as a causal factor. Through professional validation, the husband’s interpretive framework was institutionalized: the supportive maternal bond was reframed as toxic, and the daughter’s crisis was retrospectively reclassified as childhood trauma.
Crucially, the initiating party did not seek therapy. Nevertheless, the therapeutic process indirectly resolved his internal conflict. By removing the maternal figure from the system, structural dominance within the marriage was stabilized. The harm was not merely an increase in vulnerability but a reorganization of roles in which a previously functional woman became positioned as a chronic trauma patient, and the origin of present systemic dysfunction was relocated into the past.
This case illustrates how psychotherapy, when guided by unverified assumptions rather than systemic analysis, can become a legitimizing instrument of existing power structures—resolving the conflict of the dominant party while pathologizing and destabilizing those who sought help.
