You have a strained relationship with your father, but he recently developed health issues and needs someone to care for him. You don’t feel emotionally fulfilled in your marriage, but you’ve been with your partner for 10 years. You’ve made a new friend who’s nice most of the time, but is mean when she’s angry.
Should you step back from these relationships or stick them out?
These are the kinds of dilemmas that therapist KC Davis tackles in her book published earlier this year, Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen or End Any Relationship. It offers practical advice on how to move forward when relationships with family members, romantic partners or friends become difficult.
The book features a flowchart that Davis calls “The Relationship Decision Tree.” It consists of questions that Davis asks clients when their loved ones are behaving in a way that bothers them. It helps them “make decisions about whether to lean into this relationship or disengage,” she says.
Davis, author of the best-selling book How to Keep House While Drowning, talks through a few questions adapted from her framework.
This question can help you pinpoint exactly what’s “bothering you about a person you love,” Davis says, because often there are many reasons. Parsing through the “why” can help you decide how to proceed.
Let’s say your roommate isn’t doing their chores. Ask yourself what annoys you specifically about that behavior, Davis says. Is it just something you don’t like, or is it actually hurtful or harmful?
Once you start digging deeper, you might find that those dirty dishes in the sink “actually directly impacts me negatively,” Davis says. Maybe they’re starting to attract bugs.
Your next move is to have a conversation with your roommate. Are they willing to change their behavior? They may not do things exactly your way, so work on a solution together. Maybe you strike a deal where they cook and you clean, or they commit to doing the dishes before the end of the night.
Your most important values are your physical safety, your psychological safety and the physical and psychological safety of minor children, Davis says. “If I cannot meet those responsibilities, then it’s against my values to continue in this relationship.”
You may have other core values as well, like the safety of a dependent parent or sibling, or the keeping of your sobriety.
What happens if staying in the relationship doesn’t violate your values, but you still don’t want to maintain the relationship?
“This is where it gets really unique to you and the relationship,” Davis says. Think about what you feel you owe the relationship and consider your history. How long have you known the person? What are your obligations and responsibilities to them?
“If I was stood up by a first date, I’m not obligated to give that person a second chance,” Davis says. “But if my mom stood me up for lunch, it would probably be against my values to say, ‘that’s it, I’m never speaking to you again.'”
Let’s say it doesn’t go against your values to leave the relationship. And so you end up deciding to disengage. How do you do that, exactly?
Davis says every scenario will be different, so take a moment to think about how you want to handle the situation in ways that protect your values.
Disengaging from a marriage, for example, might mean getting a divorce — but it could also mean being platonic co-parents living in the same house.
Disengaging from your parents might mean cutting them off and never talking to them again — but it could also mean only seeing them on holidays, she says.
Disengaging from a friend might mean you stop talking to them all together, but it could also mean that you stop making one-on-one plans with them, but stay in the same social circle, she says.
Whatever you decide, give yourself permission to step back from the relationship. And remember, this doesn’t have to be a permanent decision. It can be something you do temporarily as you tend to your wellbeing, Davis says.
You might decide to stay in a relationship without disengaging because you feel like you have a responsibility to that person. Or, you might decide you’re fulfilled by the relationship in certain ways and it’s meaningful to you to maintain it.
In that case, it will be important to create boundaries, or rules you set up for yourself to protect your physical and psychological wellbeing, Davis says.
Let’s say your dad, who has dementia, is verbally abusive, she says. Your boundary might be to visit him once a week, then call a person whom you love and trust to debrief with you after the visit.
Or maybe you’re fed up with your partner who goes cycling for six hours every Saturday and isn’t doing his fair share of the housework, she says. Your boundary might be to limit doing his chores for him by hiring a housekeeper.
The idea here is to “not try to get them to change, but learn how to take care of yourself in the backend,” she says.
If you or a loved one is experiencing intimate partner violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1 800 799-SAFE.
