Finding Simplicity Amid the Complexities of Relationship Dynamics

My last four blog posts were concerned with the four different attachment styles and how they show up in relationships – one style per post. In the past I’ve written about the Five Losing Strategies which get in the way of loving and effective communication. I could also have written about the four quadrants of the Relationship Grid. But for now I’m going to leave that for another day. So you see, the dynamics of a relationship can be pretty complex.

The point of all this is to help you understand the value of simplifying things when you want to change the way you’ve been behaving so that you can get closer to your partner. After all you want to get to the win-win situation as soon as possible.

I should also point out that much of what we do in adult relationships stems from adaptations we made as children to the challenges we faced in our families. These are what we call 'adaptive child' behaviours. Understanding how your behaviour evolved in this way is helpful and is important for self-compassion. But it's not necessary to understand it fully in order to change it. If you want to change some of these old habitual patterns you can do so right away.

The behaviour which lets us down

The Five Losing Strategies are five ways we communicate or behave which create unhappiness in our partners. The commonest ones are Needing to be Right and Trying to Control Your Partner. If you want to find out more about them you can download my one-page guide.

And if you really want to know which ones you’re most prone to using, there’s my quiz.

But at the end of the day, you don’t need to know which losing strategy you’re about to use. You just need to know that what you’re about to say or do is not relational. That simply means asking yourself something like “is it likely that my partner will be hurt if I say this?” Or maybe “would I be hurt if my partner said this to me?”

You don’t need to be right about this one! You don’t need to know 100% that what you’re about to say will upset your other half. You just need a suspicion. 20% will do.

It’s the same with the attachment styles. You may have an idea of what your ‘preferred’ attachment style is or maybe you have no idea. And it may well help you to understand your own behaviour if you know which attachment style you tend to drop into.

But in the moment, when you’re about to launch into your habitual behaviour which you know is so difficult for your partner, you don’t need to know whether this behaviour stems from an anxious, avoidant or disorganised attachment style. You just need to know that it isn’t relational.

Listen to the feeling

The couples therapist, George Pransky, points to the importance of not communicating when you are in a bad feeling. When we communicate from a bad feeling, we simply communicate the bad feeling itself.

This is one of the first things I learned when I started my journey towards working with couples. My partner, Mark and I applied it to our relationship right from the start. In fact I owe it to Mark that I saw this so clearly. Because it was Mark who took himself off to his own place when he found himself in a low mood.

We both have our default low moods, which we attribute to the trauma we both suffered earlier in our lives. My default is overwhelming sadness and occasional bouts of depression. Mark’s is irritability.

As George Pransky recommends, the only thing we talk about when either of us is in a low mood, is what we’re feeling, what might lie behind it (too much alcohol, too little sleep, worries about our children, for instance) and what, if anything, we can do about it.

We do not discuss anything life-changing (like whether we should move to the seaside) or even make minor decisions (like whether I should buy a hedgehog house). And we aim to avoid talking about things which might deepen the low mood (like trauma, male depression, patriarchy and international conflict).

And we never attribute a low mood to one another. I don’t blame Mark when I’m depressed and he doesn’t blame me when he’s irritable. This was one of the most important insights I had when we first got together: that it wasn’t my fault if he was feeling low. I think this may have been the first time that I saw this so clearly, and I also saw that I had been wondering whether it was my fault. So there was no need to start asking myself what I’d done wrong.

The ABCs of Behaviour Change

Having said all that, it’s still likely that there will be times when you haven’t noticed that you’re not in a very good mood and you are preparing to launch yourself into something which isn’t relational.

Let’s start with prevention and then move onto cure. If you catch yourself in time you can make a choice. This is the ABC method.

A stands for acknowledge. You just noticed you were about to say something critical and prove that (as always) you are right. Congratulations! You noticed. So you’ve acknowledged that you were about to say something non-relational.

B is for breathe. Simply take a breath, which gives you a few seconds to pause.

C is for choose. What do you choose to do now? Continue with what you were about to say? Or find different, more loving words? Or maybe say nothing? You have choice, so use it!

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done this with Mark. My default losing strategy is needing to be right. It’s like an addiction and I have had to recognise that my addiction to being right is worse than non-relational; it’s positively destructive. Frankly I prefer to be in a loving relationship than to be right all the time. It’s not been easy breaking that habit, but it’s been worth it!

After months and months of practice, it’s now become relatively easy. I may ‘know’ I’m right, but I no longer feel the need to prove it to Mark. And there’s an unexpected benefit – I’ve learned a lot that I would have missed had I always insisted on making my point.

The cure for non-relational behaviour

There has to be a cure doesn’t there? Because we won’t catch it every time we begin to launch into non-relational behaviour.

One of my clients said recently that she’s getting better at noticing when she’s fallen into the trap of her main losing strategy, unbridled self-expression. She may not notice it in time to practise the ABC method. But she can stop herself mid-stream and then apologise.

It's simple, isn’t it? That little five-letter word, ‘sorry’. It’s a way of changing the dance between you and your partner. When a couple seeks out a couples therapist or coach, it’s usually because things are not going well, and they are engaged in a dance which plays out over and over again.

For my client and her partner, the dance is that she pursues him anxiously for reassurance and engaging in unbridled self-expression and he withdraws because he finds her neediness overwhelming. Actually it’s one of the commonest dances which plays out in couples and is characteristic of couples where one person is love avoidant and the other is love addicted (in other words having avoidant and anxious attachment styles).

So when the anxious partner stops herself mid-stream and apologises, she changes the dance.

This is part of the process of repair. Unfortunately there isn’t much information out there about relationship repair. In the culture it seems as if the assumption is that we fall in love, we enjoy a honeymoon period, we start to feel some disappointment, it goes a bit pear-shaped, then it goes badly wrong and we get divorced. As if there is nothing we can do to work through the disappointment and the pear-shaped periods.

There’s more to repair than saying sorry. And I’ll be writing about that in my next blog post.

In the meantime, there are some things you can do right now if you’d like to start a journey towards a more connected relationship:

Download my e-book, Three Steps to a Magical Relationship

Sign up for my online course, Unlocking Intimacy: Navigate Conflict & Nurture Lasting Connection with 50% off with the voucher code SIMPLE50 – only until midnight on Saturday. In five modules the course takes you through the 5 Losing Strategies, the value of presence and owning your shit, the ABC method of behaviour change, and an introduction to inner child work to help you work through the childhood adaptive patterns which lie behind the losing strategies.