Existential Therapy for Unhealthy Relationships in Singapore
Understand what this relationship is costing you and what you can choose.
You can love someone and still feel that staying close has begun to cost too much of you. Existential therapy offers a space to explore what is happening, what has kept you in the relationship, and what you want to choose next.
Why People Seek Therapy for Unhealthy Relationships
You can care deeply and still question what this relationship requires.
Perhaps you have become the dependable partner, the accommodating family member, or the person who keeps the peace. The role may have helped preserve something important. Yet each compromise can make it harder to know what you feel, what you want, or whether there is enough room for you in the relationship.
That uncertainty is worth taking seriously before another decision is made for you by habit, guilt, or fear.
You might replay a conversation while walking along the Singapore River Promenade, wondering whether you were too sensitive or whether something important was dismissed. Therapy gives the relationship a place to be examined with care. I consider the attachment, responsibility, cultural expectations, and choices involved without forcing a quick answer about staying or leaving.
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Who Unhealthy Relationship Therapy Is For
This may be helpful if you recognize yourself in any of the following:
- Saying yes before you know what you want.
- Keeping the peace by setting aside concerns that still matter.
- Feeling guilty whenever a limit disappoints someone.
- Questioning your judgement after difficult conversations.
- Staying responsible for another person’s feelings, choices, or reactions.
- Feeling caught between family loyalty and your need for more room.
- Repeating a familiar role across partnerships, family relationships, or work.
- Knowing the relationship needs attention while feeling uncertain about what should change.
Daily Life Can Feel Different as Patterns Become Clearer
Before Unhealthy Relationship Therapy
- Replaying conversations and searching for what you said wrong.
- Agreeing quickly to avoid conflict, then feeling resentful afterwards.
- Measuring choices by how someone else might react.
- Carrying guilt whenever your own needs become visible.
- Doubting whether your limits or concerns are reasonable.
- Moving between resentment and self-blame without speaking openly.
After Unhealthy Relationship Therapy
- Recognizing patterns before automatically stepping back into them.
- Naming needs more directly, even when the response is uncertain.
- Distinguishing care for another person from responsibility for every reaction.
- Making decisions with greater awareness of values, limits, and consequences.
- Remaining connected without abandoning what feels true for you.
- Approaching staying, changing, or leaving as a conscious choice rather than an emergency.
How Existential Therapy for Unhealthy Relationships Works
I examine the relationship alongside the life around it.
Existential therapy begins with what is happening here and now. Together, you and I look at the role you have taken, the choices that still feel available, and the meaning this relationship holds within family, culture, responsibility, and belonging. If you would like a fuller introduction to the approach, you can read more about what existential therapy is.
This can involve:
- Naming what happens before, during, and after difficult interactions.
- Understanding how loyalty, fear, care, and duty shape your decisions.
- Noticing adaptations that once protected belonging and what they cost now.
- Examining freedom without ignoring real responsibilities and consequences.
- Choosing how you want to relate, communicate, set limits, or step away with greater awareness.
About Encompassing Therapy & Counselling
Hi, I'm Dr Magdalen Cheng.
I am a licensed psychologist and existential therapist. I work in bringing steadiness and attention to questions that may not have simple answers. These conversations make room for love, resentment, duty, grief, identity, and cultural expectations. And finally be able to sit together, so you can understand the relationship without reducing yourself or the other person to a label.
What I offer:
- Individual therapy for adults examining relationship patterns, identity, meaning, and choice.
- Couples therapy for communication, conflict, connection, and cultural differences.
- Family therapy for intergenerational conflict, cultural tension, communication, and connection.
- In-person and online therapy options.
Existential therapy keeps choice, meaning, and relationship in view.
This draws from existential therapy because relationship decisions often involve more than reducing distress. They involve questions about who you are, what you owe others, what you owe yourself, and how you want to live with the consequences of your choices.
Existential therapy considers how you want to live within realities that cannot simply be removed. In unhealthy relationships, that may mean examining freedom alongside responsibility, belonging alongside self-respect, and love alongside anger or grief. Dr Cheng does not prescribe the correct decision. Existential therapy helps you meet the decision with greater honesty about what matters, what has shaped you, and what remains yours to choose.
What this looks like in sessions:
- Speaking about the relationship without needing to defend or simplify it.
- Asking what your choices reveal about meaning, values, freedom, and responsibility.
- Examining inherited roles and whether they still fit the life you are living.
- Making room for uncertainty while considering what a more conscious response could be.
The Therapeutic Approach Used for Unhealthy Relationships
Patterns Unhealthy Relationship Therapy Can Help You Examine
Unhealthy relationship patterns can appear in partnerships, families, friendships, and professional roles. Therapy focuses on the patterns that are shaping your choices and the kind of relationship you want to have with yourself and others.
Some relationships gradually become organised around one person’s needs, moods, or expectations. You may still be making decisions, yet the available options feel narrower because every choice is measured against conflict, disappointment, or withdrawal. Therapy helps you notice where choice has become constrained, understand why that adaptation made sense, and consider how to take your own experience seriously without pretending that relationships carry no responsibilities.
Guilt can appear whenever your needs affect someone you care about. Duty can keep you connected to commitments that matter, while resentment signals that the arrangement may be costing more than you can continue to give. Therapy makes room to speak these feelings openly. The aim is to understand what each one is protecting, what belongs to you, and what you have carried out of loyalty for a long time.
In Asian and collectivistic contexts, relationships are often understood through family, duty, care, and belonging. A decision that appears personal may affect parents, children, extended family, reputation, or practical support. Dr Cheng takes those realities seriously. Therapy examines how cultural expectations have shaped the relationship, where they still feel meaningful, and where they may be leaving too little room for your own voice.
Repeated uncertainty in a relationship can leave you reviewing conversations, anticipating reactions, or doubting your own judgement. The focus in anxiety therapy is broader than calming the worry. Therapy considers what the anxiety may be responding to, how the relationship affects your sense of choice, and whether staying alert to every shift has become the price of maintaining connection.
Deciding whether to stay, change the relationship, or leave can disturb identity, routine, family ties, and the future you expected. It can become one of the life transitions that asks who you are beyond the role you have occupied. Therapy does not rush the decision. It gives you time to understand the consequences, responsibilities, grief, and possibilities involved before choosing what comes next.
Unhealthy relationship patterns can also appear at work, especially when being dependable has become central to professional identity. You may absorb conflict, take on too much for others, or remain available long after your limits are clear. Conversations about work-life balance can examine the relationships beneath the workload, including authority, responsibility, loyalty, and the fear of disappointing people who rely on you.
A relationship can reinforce the belief that acceptance depends on being capable, agreeable, or easy to rely on. Over time, the role may begin to feel more secure than speaking honestly. Similar questions can appear in imposter syndrome therapy, where confidence depends heavily on performance and approval. Therapy examines who the role helped you become and whether it still leaves enough room for you.
Understanding Unhealthy Relationship Patterns
A label may offer a starting point, but it rarely explains the whole relationship. These questions can help you look at the repeated patterns, the reasons they may be difficult to name, and the human adaptations that keep them in place.
A relationship may become unhealthy when repeated patterns make honesty, mutual respect, choice, or basic limits increasingly difficult. One incident rarely tells the whole story, so it helps to notice what keeps happening and what the relationship repeatedly asks you to give up.
- Concerns are repeatedly dismissed, minimized, or turned back on you.
- Limits are met with guilt, pressure, ridicule, or withdrawal.
- Resolving conflict falls mostly to one person.
- Conflict repeatedly ends because one person gives in, goes quiet, or takes the blame.
- You feel less able to trust your own perceptions, needs, or choices.
Care and harm can exist in the same relationship. That contradiction makes the experience difficult to explain, especially when outsiders see only the parts that work or when the relationship has been part of your life for many years.
- The relationship also contains love, history, loyalty, or practical support.
- Difficult periods may be followed by closeness, apology, or renewed hope.
- Family or cultural expectations make the relationship larger than two people.
- The role you adapted to has become familiar and difficult to question.
- Changing the relationship would carry emotional, social, or practical consequences.
People often adapt before they have language for what is happening. A pattern may begin as a way to preserve connection, reduce conflict, or remain accepted. Repetition can make that response feel like personality rather than something learnt within a particular relationship.
- Keeping quiet becomes the quickest way to restore calm.
- Taking responsibility prevents another person from withdrawing or escalating.
- Reading the room begins before noticing your own response.
- Being useful becomes closely tied to feeling secure in the relationship.
- Avoiding disagreement gradually narrows what can be spoken honestly.
Existential therapy treats freedom as something exercised within real relationships and consequences. Choice does not erase loyalty, care, children, finances, culture, or shared history. It asks how you want to respond while acknowledging everything that response may affect.
- Freedom includes recognizing where a choice still exists.
- Responsibility includes considering the impact of that choice on yourself and others.
- Belonging can remain important without deciding every part of your life.
- A boundary can protect a relationship as well as the person setting it.
- Uncertainty can remain present while a decision becomes more conscious.
What to Expect in Your First Chemistry Session
The first conversation can begin with the uncertainty itself.
- Sharing what has brought you to therapy and why the relationship needs attention now.
- Describing the relationship in your own words without needing a complete or tidy account.
- Considering the family, cultural, professional, or practical context around the concern.
- Hearing how Dr Cheng approaches relationship questions through existential therapy.
- Deciding whether continuing the conversation together feels appropriate for you.
By the end, you can expect a clearer sense of how Dr Cheng works and whether the conversation feels useful to continue. This is a paid chemistry session. Encompassing Therapy & Counselling does not offer free consultations.
Frequently Asked Questions About Unhealthy Relationship Therapy in Singapore
A toxic relationship is an everyday label for repeated patterns that reduce trust, mutual respect, honesty, or a person’s room to choose. It does not describe every difficult relationship or every period of conflict. The more useful question is whether criticism, blame, control, fear, or self-doubt have become the usual conditions of staying connected, and whether repair is shared or left to one person.
These patterns can appear in a romantic relationship, family, friendship, or work relationship. Therapy looks at what keeps happening and what it costs, without using the label to diagnose someone.
Signs are usually found in repeated patterns rather than one argument. You may notice that honesty leads to punishment, limits are ignored, or conflict ends only when you accept blame. The effect can be growing self-doubt and pressure to keep the peace.
The Feeling That Nothing You Do Is Right
- Criticism or ridicule makes ordinary needs feel unreasonable.
- Blame shifting leaves you responsible for conflict you did not create alone.
- Limits are met with guilt, pressure, threats, or withdrawal.
Controlling and Manipulative Behaviors
- Isolation, gaslighting, or financial control narrows your freedom and support.
- You find yourself walking on eggshells to prevent conflict or escalation.
- You increasingly doubt your memory, judgement, or right to name emotional abuse.
People stay for many human reasons, including love, loyalty, hope, children, family members, finances, housing, culture, fear, or concern about what leaving will cause. Periods of constant criticism or emotional chaos may also be followed by apology and closeness, which can renew hope that the relationship will become different.
Staying does not prove that the relationship is healthy, and it does not mean a person lacks emotional strength. Sometimes the same adaptations that preserved safety or belonging make change feel dangerous. Therapy can help untangle those meanings without shaming the person or forcing a decision.
Therapy can help by giving you a place to examine the relationship pattern, its effect on your wellbeing, and the choices that remain. In existential therapy, the aim is to understand what the relationship means within love, duty, identity, freedom, and responsibility, then consider how you want to respond.
Therapy cannot guarantee that another person will change or that a relationship will be repaired. If there is emotional abuse, coercive control, or immediate danger, relationship therapy does not replace specialist safety support. Individual therapy may help with clarity, boundaries, grief, and personal agency while safety needs are addressed.
A relationship can sometimes become healthier when both people can recognize harmful patterns, take responsibility for their own behavior, and keep acting differently over time. Repair cannot be carried by one person alone, and an apology matters less if the same behavior continues.
Couples therapy may help when both people can speak freely and participate safely. Where there is fear, intimidation, coercive control, or violence, joint sessions may not be the safest starting point. Dr Cheng can help you consider what repair would require, whether trust is being rebuilt in practice, and what choices remain if the relationship does not change.
There is no single safe way to leave, especially if an abusive relationship involves threats, stalking, financial control, or escalating behavior. Safety may require planning with someone who understands family violence rather than announcing a decision alone. A final conversation is not required when it could increase danger.
Reach for Support
Consider telling a trusted person, arranging practical essentials, protecting access to money, documents, medication, devices, and transport, and choosing communication based on risk. In Singapore, MSF’s Family Assist lists the 24-hour NAVH at 1800-777-0000. If there is imminent danger, call Police at 999 or SMS 70999.
You do not need a universally accepted reason to leave. Immediate safety concerns such as threats, physical or sexual violence, stalking, coercive control, or escalating fear warrant urgent support. A relationship may also need to end when repeated harm continues, responsibility remains one-sided, or staying depends on abandoning basic limits, trust, or dignity.
Existential therapy does not decide on your behalf. It helps you consider what staying, changing the relationship, or leaving would mean within the realities of family, children, finances, culture, care, and responsibility. If life or safety is in danger, practical protection takes priority over a therapy decision-making process.
Healing after a toxic relationship can involve grief, relief, anger, doubt, loneliness, and a gradual return of trust in your own judgement. There is no fixed order and no guaranteed timeline. This may include understanding why you adapted, rebuilding boundaries, reconnecting with people and interests, and deciding what you want future relationships to make possible.
Creating Healthier Relationships
Personal growth does not require turning the past into a positive lesson. It can mean recognising old patterns sooner, treating your needs as real, and creating healthier relationships with more room for honesty, mutual responsibility, and choice.
It can be hard to let go because attachment is formed through history, care, hope, routine, family ties, and the future you imagined together. A toxic relationship cycle can alternate distress with apology, closeness, or promises, making each better period feel like evidence that the relationship can still become what you hoped.
Fear of loneliness, financial or practical dependence, cultural expectations, and concern for the other person may also matter. Therapy can help you understand these bonds without treating them as proof that you should stay. Understanding the attachment can make room for a more conscious decision.
People can change, but change cannot be produced by another person’s love, patience, or sacrifice. It requires the person to recognize the impact of their behavior, take responsibility without blame shifting, accept limits and consequences, seek appropriate help, and sustain different choices over time.
Some people know that their behaviour causes harm, while others minimise, justify, or do not fully recognise the pattern. Awareness alone is not the same as change. It can be more useful to look at repeated behaviour, accountability, and whether the relationship is becoming safer and more mutual.
Unhealthy relationship therapy can be helpful when it supports clearer understanding, greater agency, more honest communication, and decisions that reflect your values and circumstances. What counts as effective will differ depending on your goals, the relationship context, safety, and whether the therapy feels like a good fit.
Existential therapy does not promise to fix another person or guarantee that you will stay, leave, or repair the relationship. Its focus is on understanding the choices, responsibilities, meanings, and consequences involved so that your response can become more conscious.
There is no standard number of sessions for unhealthy relationship therapy. Some people arrive with a specific decision to consider, while others need time to understand a long-standing pattern, its family or cultural context, and the grief or uncertainty attached to change.
The paid chemistry session is the first opportunity to understand how Dr Cheng works and whether continuing feels appropriate. The total length of therapy depends on the concerns you bring and what you want from it. No fixed recovery or relationship outcome is promised.
Yes. Dr Cheng offers online unhealthy relationship therapy throughout Singapore and across Asia, with a focus on Southeast Asia. Online sessions can make the conversation accessible when travel, work, relocation, or different locations would otherwise make meeting more difficult.
The therapeutic focus remains the same: understanding relationship patterns within meaning, culture, responsibility, belonging, and choice. The appropriate format depends on the concern and who will participate, since Encompassing Therapy & Counselling offers individual, couples, and family therapy.
Yes. Dr Cheng offers in-person therapy at a physical office in Singapore, at 16 Mohamed Sultan Road, #06-02 (238965), in Fort Canning. It is close to Robertson Quay, Clarke Quay, and the Singapore River, about a five-minute walk from Fort Canning MRT, with parking at Lam Ann Building or along Mohamed Sultan Road.
In-person appointments are available during Dr Cheng’s stated hours: Monday, Tuesday, and Saturday from 8am to 2pm, and Friday from 8am to 3pm. These hours may help you decide whether in-person or online access is the more practical option.
Encompassing Therapy & Counselling is private-pay and does not accept insurance. The first step is a paid chemistry session; free consultations are not offered.
Pricing
- Session rate: SGD 220 for an individual chemistry session or ongoing individual session with Dr Magdalen Cheng before 5pm (SGD 240 after 5pm). Couples and family sessions are SGD 330 before 5pm (SGD 350 after 5pm). Doctors, nurses, counsellors, and social workers receive a 5% concession.
- Session duration: 50 minutes for individual sessions; 75 minutes for couples and family sessions.
Insurance
- Insurance status: Private pay only. Encompassing Therapy & Counselling does not accept insurance.
- Reimbursement documentation: Yes. Dr Cheng can provide a receipt for you to submit to your own insurance provider for potential reimbursement; Encompassing Therapy & Counselling does not bill insurers directly.
- Accepted plans: None.
Location
- Office address: 16 Mohamed Sultan Road, #06-02, Singapore 238965.
- Office neighbourhood: Fort Canning.
- Nearby areas: Robertson Quay, Clarke Quay, and the Singapore River heritage area.
- Transit: Fort Canning MRT (Downtown Line), about a 5-minute walk.
- Parking: Car park at Lam Ann Building, or public carparks along Mohamed Sultan Road.
- In-person therapy: Available at Dr Cheng’s physical office in Singapore.
- Online therapy: Available throughout Singapore and across Asia, with a focus on Southeast Asia.
Begin Existential Therapy for Unhealthy Relationships in Singapore
A relationship can matter deeply and still need a closer look.
If you are ready to look more carefully at what this relationship asks of you, the next step is a paid chemistry session with Dr Magdalen Cheng. Email hello@encompassing.co to begin the conversation. Online therapy is available throughout Singapore and across Asia, with a focus on Southeast Asia.