Learn: Your Adversary, The Negative Cycle
All relationship is a feedback loop. Relationship, by it’s very nature, is a dance, a call-and-response, whether we are talking contact between spouses, family members, neighbors, colleagues, nations, and affiliations. In relationship, that feedback loop, or cycle, can have one of three qualities: connection, disconnection/alienation, and open conflict.
You know the quality of connection, the pleasure of the positive feedback loop and its feelings of play, curiosity, mutual understanding, trust, and safety.
You also know the quality of disconnection, the confusion and alienation when something happens that undermines your trust and safety in the relationship. You may take a step back, create space to re-evaluate and re-negotiate the dynamic. If effective and open communication occurs, connection is re-established. All too often, however, a negative cycle develops, and when it does, it tends to escalate disconnection and lead to hurt feelings, and then to conflict.
In open conflict, the negative cycle has intensified to a degree that in those moments of heightened conflict, we may feel no care or understanding from our partner. Negative cycles, when they go unchecked, can escalate and destroy trust and safety to a degree that they tear apart the fabric of connection, the love, that two people share, leaving them with little else but the heart-breaking decision to separate. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The work of couples therapy is to break the negative conflict cycle, because by doing so, we begin to restore the fabric of connection, stitching back together the trust, safety, and understanding which the negative cycle has taken away. When couples begin this work, partners usually see each other as the source of their pain. One of the things that makes Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) so effective is that it retrains you both to see that your enemy is the negative cycle itself – not each other.
When we are stuck in conflict or disconnection with our partner, we tend to be very clear about what our partner is doing that hurts us and causes us pain, and we tend to feel very confused about why and how they can be so callous, rude, and uncaring towards us. We tend to replay in our mind what they have done and said that was so painful, so hurtful, so selfish. We weave a narrative of thoughts and meanings that question whether they are reliable, whether we can depend on them, whether they really want us or appreciate us in the way that we need to feel wanted and appreciated.
When we are in the pain of the negative cycle, we are super focused on our partner’s patterns of hurtful behaviors. We can remember all of the different times they’ve done that thing that is so insensitive and so wrong. All of the times they have been unavailable or dismissive or uncaring. This focus on our partner leaves us in a dire position of feeling rejection from the very person we need and depend on most for comfort. No wonder its so hard to settle and calm – no wonder it’s so hard to focus on own patterns of behavior, and how our patterns are hurtful triggers for our partners, who then react with those hurtful behaviors we hate so much.
The negative cycle is where couples get stuck. This is where couples therapy can be so effective.
If you can get skilled at learning our part in the negative dance – how it happens, why it happens, and how your moves impact your partner – you can begin to make moves that, rather than triggering your partner’s pain and anger, instead softens them and brings them closer. As they soften, they begin to show up for you in a way that is more understanding, which in turn relieves your fears and worries, and makes it even easier to show up for them in a way that is more caring and responsive. Goodbye, negative cycles of conflict. Hello, positive cycles of connection.
The first step is to learn how the human emotional response to conflict can get you and your partner stuck in your negative dance. The next article does just that…