Many couples I see go in circles as they argue, blame, and attack one another which invariably ends in escalating the emotional distress.  Disappointment and hurt feelings become ladened with fear and shame as it reaches crisis levels.  We are in a crisis when we perceive the situation as catastrophic and engage in attacking or withdrawing behaviours and that prevent us from repairing a situation or communicate effectively about a difficult subject.

When we are in a crisis there are certain things that happen. 

Firstly, our fight or flight part of our nervous system is activated.  We are actually physically and emotionally ready for a fight or to flee.  So it is no wonder that our behaviour reflects this.  Some typical attacking behaviours are:

venting,
bullying,
demanding,
guilt tripping,
name calling,
blaming,
criticizing,
lecturing,
debating. 

Some typical withdrawing behaviours are:
avoiding conflict,
leaving or threatening to leave,
shutting down emotionally and verbally,
isolating and making unilateral decisions,
indirect expression of feelings. 

Often each partner will tend towards a preferred way of dealing with crisis but both can engage in fighting or fleeing at different times.

The way we talk about what happens when we have disagreements or breaches in the relationship also reflects a crisis. We tend to express things in catastrophic ways: ‘I can not believe you would treat me this way’, ‘I can’t deal with/stand this anymore’, ‘How am I ever going to trust you’.  These kinds of expressions overwhelm each partner and increase feelings of powerlessness.  The person receiving the message hears that they have done something so awful that the relationship has been destroyed.  The person expressing these sentiments reinforces that they are a victim with no power to recover.  One of the results of being in a crisis is a feeling of loss of control.  Partners spiral into behaving badly towards each other out of this sense of powerlessness.  Attacking others or withdrawing can often be a way both partners are trying to gain some control and deal shame. These behaviours and expressions only increase this cycle and the hurt that both partners are feeling.

Crisis occurs when our emotions of anger, hurt, shame, and fear overwhelm us.  It is very hard to stop the fight or flight behaviours when we are in this crisis state even though we want to because we are so ‘revved up’.  The reasons we feel in crisis are because there is something our partner has done, sometimes as little as a gesture, that activates a sense of danger we feel under and that our life is going to be destroyed.  Of course we know rationally that our life is not being destroyed, but when in a crisis state partners often feel that the relationship will end. 

As the hurt and resentment builds up it becomes easier to go into this crisis state rather than maintain a calm state because there has been little repair in the relationship.  The more betrayal a person has experienced in their life makes this crisis state easier to reach.

How can you change this cycle?

• First of all it takes time and effort.  Given how this cycle can become so entrenched,  it is easy to see how hard it is to change these behaviours.  Having a long term view on changing and dealing with your relationship struggles can help to weather the storms.  Looking for the small steps and changes will help to inspire you to keep going and begin to change the powerlessness you feel.  The first step is to keep resisting getting into the cycle and limit talking about difficult subjects until there is safety established.
  
• Our thoughts and behaviours are hard to stop once you have got involved in them.  Learning to notice the signs of a crisis state arising in your body before you get involved in thoughts and behaviours is an important step.  It is easier to calm down and comfort sensations than stop yourself venting once you have started.  For example, noticing tension and learning ways to relax and release the tension will help to keep your emotion in a tolerable range.  When our emotions are in a tolerable range we have more control over the ways we express ourselves and listen to our partner.
  
• Learning to communicate from a calm and regulated state is the most important step. You do not have to be in a crisis state to express your feelings.  Becoming calm is not an act of diminishing your feelings but one of getting them into perspective and creating an environment that is more likely to have your feelings responded to. Limiting your discussions to when you are in counselling creates safety and practice of these skills. Getting a different experience in therapy helps to show you that you can do it differently and train yourself to manage and change this crisis state.
• It is important to realize that we are not always in crisis or overwhelm when the fight or flight part of our system is activated.  Learning to notice our emotions and activation is important information when assessing and processing our experience.  Then we can use this information in our communication with one another. This is referred to as the window of tolerance, where we can experience and express our emotions with relative ease.
• One of the most common mistakes that feeds a crisis state is the belief that someone is right or wrong, good or bad. This means that your partner’s experience reflects on your experience, if one of you is good the other must be bad, and leads to defending yourself and making your partner wrong.  Learning to accept and understand one anothers' experience without making it wrong, is one of the most important things that need to change, in order to create a loving connection.
  
• Notice how your thinking encourages this crisis state. Do you think in catastrophic and absolute ways.  Change always to right now.  You can only solve this moment with each other.  Notice ways you blame and shame your partner.
• The crisis state is often triggered at the beginning of a discussion before fully understanding and exploring what your partner is saying to you and then prevents you from hearing the rest. When we are calm we can be curious and really explore our partners experience.
  

In coming across the above quote recently I was reminded of the pain caused by being caught up in this cycle. Back in my mid twenties I was a walking wound, and to compensate I tried to take care of others and become the tool to their healing. Thankfully I have come a long way over the years even though there are times when I can get drawn into this dynamic. I have found this description a useful way to understand how we are caught up in being dependent on each other’s happiness. Partners will move between these three positions creating relationships based on powerlessness and fusion.

When I began my training I was first acquainted with this system in relationships as having three positions, persecutor, victim and rescuer. It is useful to conceptualize each position as a separate person for description, but more accurately they are aspects within our psyche that are activated in relationships.  We express them in reaction to what we perceive and experience in others.  However, you may recognize that you gravitate towards one characteristic in particular.  Here is a description of each of these positions.

Victim (Wound).

The victim carries beliefs about themselves as being a target for others hostility and rejection. They believe others are against them and responsible for their pain.  They see their life in hopeless and helpless ways with obstacles at every corner preventing them from having what they really want. The victim expresses their helplessness to elicit caretaking. They do this by; guilt tripping, acting helpless, blaming, sabotaging success, afraid to take action, self deprecating statements, emotionality, and looking to others for direction. They are self-absorbed and want others to feel the way they do.  For example, if their partner feels happy and satisfied this can be experienced as a slight to their feelings, after all ‘can’t you see I am hurting over here?’ (says the wound).

They find it difficult to tolerate rejection or criticism. The victim feels afraid to take responsibility for themselves, and often mistakes responsibility for blame or rejection.  They are indirect about their needs believing the only way to be cared about is by manipulating it through being helpless and hurt.  Being self-sufficient means being alone and disconnected, and so resent others for not responding immediately when they need them.  Taking care of themselves is seen as a burden.  The victim has developed this view from either being a target as a child or learning through wounded adults to manipulate others. They view relationships as providing them with the safe haven that they crave. The consequence is to put pressure on others to do the impossible and make up for everyone who has let them down.

Rescuer (Tool).

The rescuer connects their self worth to being needed and taking care of others. They over function taking on things they perceive as helpful to their partner or that they think their partner ‘needs’ to be happy.  They have come to believe that their own desires are injurious to others and quickly deny them.  They want to avoid conflict at all costs and are governed by guilt whenever there is any possibility that they could be responsible for hurting anyone.  Some rescuers charge into situations where they perceive they are needed, taking on people as projects. They are also motivated by the fear that others will think badly of them. They carry shame about their own suffering or needs, striving to maintain a picture of themselves as in control and capable.  The rescuer is very focused on others and becomes very adept at anticipating disaster.  They rescue by managing and organizing others, catering to other’s emotional needs and attempting to provide whatever is requested, denying their own experience to protect others, saying what they think other’s want to hear, explaining their partners behaviour to others and apologizing for them, taking responsibility for others in an  attempt to take away someone’s suffering.  Through these actions the rescuer communicates a sense of them-self as capable and the other as incapable.

The rescuer tends to be self-sacrificing in the hopes of a return of love from their partner they have tirelessly taken care of.  At their core they do not believe they are lovable and attempt to elicit love by doing for others. In this way they are driven by perfectionism believing that the only way to receive love is by being perfect.  The rescuer will periodically fall into a pit of despair when everything falls apart and all their efforts have been to no avail.  They end up feeling helpless and try to compensate by controlling more which often takes them into the persecutor position.  From here they will become superior and contemptuous towards the victim when their efforts are not appreciated. They can also move into the victim position feeling used and abused.

Persecutor (Knife)

The persecutor is a position that develops out of the victim and rescuer. For someone who maintains this position in relation to others has likely been the victim of extreme control or chaos and has learnt to protect themselves by attempting to control others.  So feelings of worthlessness and vulnerability are buried deeply beneath a fear of loosing control.  Their self worth is tied to being right and being superior.  They attack to protect themselves from being attacked.  They maintain their sense of self worth by perceiving others in an inferior position.  The persecutor uses various methods to maintain control including, contempt, dismissing, attacking (verbally and physically), humiliating, blaming, raging, self-righteousness, bullying, sarcasm, stonewalling and withholding.  In extreme situations violence and rage are used to control others.  They deal with their own pain by inflicting it on others, feeling justified because of being victimized by others. Persecutors keep their vulnerability well hidden and see things in terms of weakness and strength, having contempt for what they perceive as weak in others.  They will often move into the victim position in response to being challenged and held responsible for their behaviour.

The victim and the rescuer will move into the persecutor position as an escalation of their attempts to control.  The victim will persecute with blame and guilt by torturing others with responsibility for their pain and not being good enough to make them feel better.  The rescuer will persecute others with their self-sacrifice and resentment that they are not appreciated for what they have done for them.  The rescuer will often express their hostility in a passive aggressive way, because their need to be thought well of predominates. The rescuer and victim will react to each other in a never-ending spiral that escalates into increasing resentment and hatred.  This cycle becomes increasingly abusive with both moving back and forth into the persecutor position. 

When you are caught in this cycle it is not possible to develop deep intimacy and both partners feel powerless.  Both the rescuer and persecutor project ‘weakness’ outward and the victim projects their aggression and responsibility outward.  In this way they maintain an incomplete sense of self through disowning these parts of themselves. There is a focus on others as responsible for your happiness and a belief that you can have control over others feelings and actions.  You may at your core carry the belief that you are responsible for others feelings and therefore can control them.  The victim does this by being helpless, the rescuer by being accommodating, and the persecutor by intimidating.   As you operate from these positions in relationships you maintain a lack of connection to an authentic self by living your life through others.  In this dynamic partners are viewed as unequal.

How to live outside this cycle.
Learning to take responsibility for ones own life and keep working towards the goal of wholeness is of course the way out.  Whatever it takes for you to focus on yourself and develop awareness will increase your sense of self.  Identification is the first step in changing.  Here are some pointers;

Counselling. When we get stuck in dynamics we have a certain way of seeing things that has developed from our life experiences and can be very difficult to change.  We tend to continue to see things from this perspective partly because we are so good at fooling ourselves and not looking at things we don’t want to deal with.  Each of these positions has an investment in staying caught up in it.  We change in part because we are frustrated and because we are challenged usually by others to see things differently.  Having a therapist to help explore these dynamics and providing a safe place to express the fear and shame that fuels these positions.  

Self reflection. There are many ways to do this, meditation, reading, spending time by yourself doing the things you like to do.  Doing more separate activities from your partner will help to develop more of a sense of self.

Identifying your Fears. These interactions are driven by fear. Identify when you feel fear or guilt. Create some space before acting on it to calm yourself and reflect on what you really feel or desire in the situation.  By slowing yourself down you can often identify what is triggering the guilt or fear and what decision you are making in response. Do something different to break the habit.

Deal with Conflict.  As you learn to identify your reactions that cause you to avoid conflict you will become more aware of the truth of your experience in relationships.  Being honest risks others not being happy with you (you can't make them happy anyway), and having to deal with your differences. The more honesty that comes into relationships the more you will develop a foundation based on responsibility for your own happiness.

So what does this mean you may ask?

It is fascinating to me how important the first years of life are in creating these styles and patterns within us – that is where it all starts truly:) We may very much want to leave it all behind and believe that we can do just that.  Perhaps it gives us a sense of power to feel we can rise above our parents influence – however, understanding attachment can be useful – if not interesting.

The relationship as an infant with our [mothers] is instrumental in creating what is referred to as secure or insecure attachment.  This comes down to developing an ability to both approach other people and separate from other people. The ease to which we can do this is determined by how in tune our mothers were with us in those first few years of life. Of course we don’t remember those years but we can often get a sense of it from how our relationships with those  people (mother)  or from information regarding events such as hospital admissions.  So what are our[mothers] doing that so affects us?

Being in tune with an infant is the ability to focus on the infants needs and respond to help the baby regulate their distress.  A baby cries and the mother responds with soothing and the baby’s nervous system learns to ‘calm down’. If the mother is not soothing the baby does not learn to calm down. If this happens over and over again, the babies nervous system starts to take on ways of dealing with this and develops what is referred to as insecure attachment styles. The mother can ‘misattune’ in a number of ways; by just not paying attention and being self absorbed, only responds in a cold and practical manner, gets frustrated or feels a lot of anxiety herself, avoiding mutual gaze, resisting physical contact, wanting attention from the infant when the child does not. These things happen on occasions with all mothers, but your parents have their own attachment styles that gets reflected in their ability to respond to you as a baby on an ongoing basis.

Of course if you throw into the mix more extreme forms of abuse and neglect then the baby may develop a much more extreme insecure attachment. Adults who have had these experiences find relationships very challenging and people around them often don’t know if they are coming or going.

So often in relationships as adults we can find ourselves in relationships with partners that challenge our attachment styles – just like my husband and I do. His style developed in response to an unattuned mother who would resist being emotionally connected. So he learned to avoid emotional connection. He is on the end of what is called insecure avoidant. As adults these people tend to avoid emotional intimacy, keep their internal world to themselves, appear as if they don’t need anyone, and find dependency frightening.  In other words they tend to get anxious the closer they become to others.

And people like me who have what is called an insecure ambivalent style tend to feel more anxious when separated from people close to them. This comes from a mother’s inconsistant and unpredictable response. So these mothers will tend to encourage connection and then withdraw from it depending on their own emotional moods. So a baby may sometimes feel soothed by the mother and than abandoned.  As adults we know that being close can feel good but what we don’t feel secure about is being separated from others. So we can perhaps see how my anxiety would get activated by my husbands avoidance of emotional connection and his anxiety gets triggered if I come in too close. The good news is that we can change these patterns to create more secure attachments.