The Five Losing Strategies in Relationships

Oct 6

The Five Losing Strategies in Relationships

(See the next post for the Winning Strategies!)

You've had this argument before. Maybe it started with the dishes, or a late reply, or a tone of voice. Within minutes, it has stopped being about any of those things. One of you is defending, the other is pulling away, and you both walk off feeling more alone than when you started.

So what separates the couples who can move through moments like this from the ones who keep replaying them?

It isn't that they love each other more. In Relational Life Therapy, developed by Terry Real, healthy relationships need love and relational skill: the ability to speak honestly, listen openly, and care for the connection between you, especially when you're hurt or afraid. Real describes five losing strategies that cost us connection, and five winning strategies that rebuild it. Each winning strategy is the direct answer to a losing one. Once you can spot the pattern you fall into, you'll know what to practise instead.

Why We Keep Having the Same Argument

We all walk into our relationships carrying a blueprint shaped by childhood experiences, early attachments, past hurts, and cultural conditioning. What we experience in a conflict isn't objective reality. It's reality filtered through that blueprint.

This is why one partner's habitual reaction so often sets off the other's, and why each reaction then fuels the next. Before long, you're in a cycle neither of you chose.

When a conversation turns reactive, defensive, or emotionally charged, it's usually a younger, protective part of us that has taken the wheel. This is the part that learned to adapt and survive. Real calls it the adaptive child, and the losing strategies are the tools it reaches for.

The Five Losing Strategies

1. Needing to be right.

When you argue over whose version of the "truth" wins, your partner stops being your teammate and becomes your opponent. This might sound like: "That's not what happened. I remember exactly what I said."

Of course, facts matter. There are times when something genuinely needs to be clarified.

But relationships rarely become safer because one person successfully proves the other wrong.

You may win the battle and walk away feeling vindicated, but the hard truth is, whenever there's a winner, the relationship loses.

As Real says, the relational answer to "Who's right?" is: who cares?

2. Controlling your partner.

Control can look like using direct or indirect manipulation, pressure, and power-over domination to manage your own discomfort. It can be obvious: demanding, pressuring, threatening, or insisting that your partner behave a certain way. it can also be subtle.

It can sound like: “If you would just do this differently, then I wouldn't feel this way.”

Control is often an attempt to create safety by managing another person and while it can create short-term results, in the long run it breeds resentment and withdrawal and creates an imbalance of power. Control at best creates compliance, not collaboration.

And in adult relationships, no one likes to be controlled, and no one has a right to power over their partner.

3. Unbridled self-expression.

We're often taught that honesty is the best policy. But honesty isn't the same as saying everything we feel, exactly when we feel it, in whatever way it comes out.

Unbridled self-expression can look like yelling, name-calling, throwing things, or acting aggressively. It can also look like emotional dumping: unloading every raw feeling onto your partner without considering whether they're able to receive it.

Marshall Rosenberg described acting out as a “tragic expression of a need.”

The need underneath the behaviour may be completely legitimate. You might need reassurance. You might need rest. You might need help. You might need to feel important to your partner. But the way the need is expressed can make it almost impossible for your partner to hear it.

While unburdening ourselves or giving way to our urges and reactions can feel relieving and freeing, it can leave the recipient of our offloading feeling overwhelmed, defensive, confused, and burdened.

Having a partner (or anyone else we are in a relationship with) does not entitle us to act without regulation or consideration. The challenge is learning to distinguish authentic expression from unregulated expression.

4. Retaliation.

Retaliation holds the energy of grandiosity and righteous indignation where we feel justified to offend from the victim position. Where defense is to ensure your safety, security, and mind your boundaries - retaliation is to punish.Sometimes retaliation is obvious aggression. Sometimes it is passive aggression, withholding affection, deliberately provoking jealousy, or finding a way to “get even” that says: "I'll make you feel what I feel" or "You started it, so now I get to finish it."

It is a crude way of trying to communicate what hurt us by acting it out. And the hard truth is this method will never lead to us being seen better, understood deeper, or loved how we need to be.

5. Withdrawal.

Withdrawal is not the same as taking healthy space. Sometimes we genuinely become too overwhelmed to continue a conversation productively. Taking a pause can be wise.

The difference is whether the pause protects the relationship or abandons it. Withdrawal is a unilateral shutdown, or stonewalling, that leaves your partner alone on the other side of the wall. withdrawal can be physical (leaving the room, walking away), emotional (shutting down), or relational (checking out, turning cold).It might look like: leaving mid-sentence without saying you'll return, or going quiet for days.

A pause says "I need ten minutes, and then I want to continue." Withdrawal says nothing. The Gottman Institute refers to withdrawal as one of the four horsemen - a surefire way to corrode connection.

Taking Your Adaptive Child's Hands Off the Wheel

These strategies aren't evidence that something is wrong with you. They are adaptations. At some point, they may have helped you feel safer, more in control, less vulnerable, or safer in your attachments.

The problem is that a strategy that protected you earlier in life is not equipped to help you navigate an adult relationship.

The adaptive child’s strategies are designed to keep you safe, not to keep you relational. When you feel the adaptive child take over and yourself moving into one of these strategies, try:

Building Awareness

How do you know who is at the wheel?
What thoughts, sensations, emotions, and urges show up when your adaptive child is calling the shots?
What strategies do they reach for?
Do you argue your case?
Try to control?
Unload?
Punish?
Disappear?

Acknowledge

Get curious rather than critical.

“This reaction feels familiar. Where have I learned this?”

You don't need to solve your entire childhood in the middle of an argument. Simply recognising the pattern can create enough space to choose differently. “Oh yes, this urge to withdraw is a familiar pattern that once kept me safe”.

Action

What once kept you safe and was adaptive can now be maladaptive to creating healthy relationships. So with the information we have gathered, we now need to understand what we need to compassionately take your adaptive child’s “sticky hands off the wheel” (as Terry Real words it) and step in as the wise, functional adult.

A pause.

A breath.

A mantra.

Putting your feet on the floor.

Changing the temperature.

Taking agreed-upon space.

Reminding yourself: “I want to stay connected”

A Reminder

Noticing your losing strategies isn't a reason for shame. They're evidence of how well you learned to protect yourself. The invitation is simply to update the system, so the wise adult you are now can lead your relationships.

5 Key Takeaways

Arguments are driven by past blueprints, not present facts: Recurring fights over small things like chores or tones of voice are actually triggered by your childhood conditioning and past hurts, which distort how you view the conflict.
Defensiveness comes from your inner "adaptive child": When a conversation becomes emotionally charged, your mature adult self checks out, and a younger, protective part of your personality takes over using old survival habits.
Winning an argument means losing the relationship: Defaulting to "losing strategies"—such as needing to be right, controlling your partner, venting without filters, retaliating, or shutting down—actively destroys your connection.
Control and retaliation never bring you closer: Trying to manage your partner's behaviour only breeds resentment, and punishing them out of righteous anger will never make you feel truly seen, understood, or loved.
Breaking the cycle requires a conscious pause: To save the connection, you must catch your triggers early, acknowledge the pattern without judgment, and use grounding tools (like a breath or a mantra) to hand control back to your "wise adult."