There's a scene that repeats itself a lot in session. A couple arrives and tells me about the week's fight: he went to another room, she felt like he was abandoning her, the volume escalated, he shut down further. When they finish telling me, almost always someone says: "it's always the same." And they're right. Not in the sense that they're hopelessly stuck, but in the sense that what they're describing isn't an isolated conflict — it's a pattern. A dance they both know by heart, even though neither consciously chose it.
Recognizing that — seeing the cycle as a cycle — is, in my experience, the first move that makes change possible.
Why we repeat: two nervous systems activating each other
The reason we always fight about the same thing has little to do with stubbornness or bad will, and a lot to do with biology and history. Each person arrives in a relationship with a nervous system shaped by years of experience — early bonds, moments of connection and rupture, learning about what's safe to show and what's better to hide.
Stephen Porges, with his Polyvagal Theory, helps us understand something fundamental: when two people are in conflict, their nervous systems are affecting each other in real time. What you feel in the middle of an argument isn't only about what your partner said — it's about what that comment activated in your body, in your history, in the parts of you that learned to survive a certain way. Co-regulation, the process by which two nervous systems synchronize and calm each other, can work in the opposite direction too: two systems in alarm feeding off and escalating each other.
From the Internal Family Systems perspective, Richard Schwartz would say that in every couple conflict there aren't two people fighting — there are several sets of internal parts activating each other. The part in you that feels rejected activates the protective part in your partner, which in turn activates the scared part in you, and so on. Neither person chooses the cycle — the parts run it, responding to perceived threats that often have roots much older than the relationship itself.
The pursue-withdraw dance, and other familiar choreographies
One of the most common patterns I see in session — and one that couples therapy research has documented extensively — is the dance between the one who pursues connection and the one who withdraws to regulate. It goes roughly like this: one person feels distance and seeks connection more intensely — more questions, more volume, more urgency. The other, overwhelmed by that intensity, withdraws to avoid escalating, to calm down, to avoid saying something they'll regret. That withdrawal, which for the one withdrawing is regulation, feels like abandonment to the one pursuing. So they pursue harder. So the other withdraws further.
Neither is the villain. Both are responding to what feels like a real threat. And both are, without knowing it, feeding exactly what the other fears.
Brené Brown puts it in a way I find very accurate: the vulnerability we can't show turns into reactivity. Underneath pursuit there's almost always a fear of not mattering, of being invisible, of losing the bond. Underneath withdrawal there's almost always a fear of conflict, of disappointing, of being too much. When those vulnerabilities can't be named, they get expressed as reactive behavior — and the cycle continues.
There are other dances too: criticism and defensiveness, mutual distance that both interpret as rejection, sarcasm masking pain. The forms vary, but the underlying structure is similar: two nervous systems that perceive threat and respond the only way they know how.
What therapy can do with the patterns
When a couple comes into my office, I'm not there to arbitrate who's right about Tuesday's fight. I'm there to help them see the whole cycle — to name it, to observe it from the outside, to understand how each reaction summons the other's. That alone, the simple ability to say "ah, we're in the dance again," already changes something in the temperature of the moment.
From there we work on several levels at once. With the body — because these patterns don't live only in thoughts but in the tightness in the chest, the stomach that clenches, the voice that rises without anyone deciding it should. Body-based therapy and Somatic Experiencing offer tools for working directly with the nervous system, not just the narrative. With the internal parts — identifying which part activates at each moment in the cycle, what it protects, what it fears, what it needs to be able to lower its guard. And with co-regulation — learning, sometimes for the first time, how to calm each other instead of escalating each other.
The access point I'm most interested in finding with each couple is the one that goes from reactivity to vulnerability. Not so everything becomes tender and friction-free — conflict is inevitable, and in many ways healthy — but so that behind the reaction, the real person can appear, with their real fears, and be heard.
There's something Gabor Maté repeats in different forms that I find very true in couples work: the behaviors that irritate us most in the other almost always point toward something we haven't yet resolved in ourselves. A partner is, in that sense, one of the most honest — and most demanding — mirrors we have. What gets activated in conflict isn't just information about the relationship. It's information about yourself.
That doesn't make it easy. But it does make it worth looking at.
If you're stuck in a cycle that feels frozen and you're wondering whether this can change, you can read about what to expect from therapy or write to me directly to book a first session.