Stuck In Circles: On Struggling in your Relationships
Relationships can get caught in painful patterns that leave both partners feeling unheard, disconnected, and exhausted. This piece explores how recurring cycles of conflict take shape, why they persist, and how couples therapy helps partners step back from blame to understand the relationship dynamics that keep them stuck. By recognising these patterns together, couples can begin to interrupt old cycles and build new ways of relating rooted in understanding, vulnerability, and connection.
Although we’ve all been through our fair share of disagreements, some relationships experience more frequent and damaging blows to their stability.
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being trapped in a repeated cycle of conflict. We feel frustrated and upset. We yearn to be understood, but our needs don’t get met.
The emotional distance festers. “We keep having the same fight over and over, and no matter what we do, nothing changes”.
Relationships are quite like other systems, bound by rules and processes— although these are often unspoken or unknown.
When we step back from the conflict and observe how the cycle repeats itself, we walk away with a clearer perspective on the relationship itself.
The system finally makes sense.
In therapy, one of the most crucial moments of couples' work is accepting and visualising how each partner plays a part in this dance. Each partner upholds their role in the painful system.
The dance is familiar. His avoidance might lead to her anxiety. Her anxiety might lead to more of his avoidance. The cycle goes on. There is no beginning, middle or end. There is nobody to blame. There is only pain and exhaustion.
We see these rigid roles with caretakers and care seekers, with stoics and sensitives, with critics and defenders, and many other self-repeating cycles.
Relationship therapy asks us to override our self-protective impulses and embrace the emotional needs of our partner. This often raises the question of “Why me first?”
It can feel incredibly vulnerable to be the one to start breaking the cycle, at the cost of “losing” the fight.
In moments where it feels difficult to hold space for conflicting perspectives, the safety and security of therapy allow us to tolerate this duality with more ease.