The Accountable Partner: A Guide to Healing Yourself and Your Relationships

Why do people who genuinely love one another keep repeating behaviors that damage their relationships?

After decades of working with individuals, couples, families, trauma, and addiction, psychotherapists Leigh B. Kadans, LCSW, and David R. Kadans, LMFT, LCAS, came to believe an important piece was often missing from the conversation about healing.

Trauma-informed therapy asks an essential question: What happened to you?

The Accountable Partner asks the question that must eventually follow: What are you going to do with what happened to you?

Drawing from trauma treatment, attachment theory, family systems, emotional regulation, addiction and recovery, and decades of clinical experience, the authors introduce an accountability-centered approach to healing. Readers learn to recognize how childhood wounds, protective behaviors, projection, resentment, defensiveness, and emotional reactivity can quietly enter adult relationships.

Accountability is not blame or shame. It is learning to understand yourself without continually excusing yourself-and turning insight into meaningful change.

Through the Seven Pillars of Accountability and practical tools for awareness, regulation, boundaries, and repair, The Accountable Partner offers a path toward healthier relationships and breaking intergenerational cycles.

You are not responsible for everything that shaped you.

You are responsible for what you shape next.