The More The More: Patterns that play out in relationships

'The more the more' is a bit of a catchphrase in Relational Life Therapy. It’s a way of describing the dance a couple performs when things go wrong in their relationship.

So we have patterns like:

• The more Anne pursues John for emotional support, the more John withdraws behind a wall
• The more Richard pursues Jamie for sex, the more reasons Jamie finds to avoid intimacy
• The more Gloria complains about Julie’s absences from home (working late/going out drinking), the more Julie stays out late in the evenings

The same dance can play out over and over again

Some of these patterns occur over short periods. For instance:

1. John leaves the lid off the toothpaste
2. Anne complains that he never puts the lid on the toothpaste
3. John accuses Anne of constantly nagging him
4. Anne defends her nagging because John never listens
5. John calls Anne a hypocrite because she also sometimes forgets to put the lid back on the toothpaste
6. Anne capitulates and goes to the bathroom to cap the toothpaste

John and Anne are engaged in a common enough dance: the more she accuses him, the more he accuses her, until ultimately Anne withdraws. This may only occur sporadically. It’s not pleasant and it’s not relational, but it probably won’t be grounds for divorce.

Gloria and Julie are engaged in a longer-term dance, one which may play out over years, and it’s another common pattern.

One partner complains about the other’s constant absences. The endless complaints just serve to drive their partner away, to the pub or the golf course, or to staying late at work. And the more one person complains that their partner is never there, the more their partner stays away.

The more time Julie spends at work, in conferences and out at clubs with her girlfriends, the more Gloria complains that Julie is never there, doesn’t listen to her, doesn’t love her.

Julie finds Gloria’s endless pleading clingy and stifling. Gloria feels abandoned and unloved.

In the end the couple find themselves in a stalemate. Neither one feels like they can change, and if their version of the more the more has persisted over many years, it can become enormously destructive. Sometimes those absences morph into affairs. Eventually the discovery of the affair may lead to divorce. Or it might produce enough of a disruption that the couple seeks the help of a professional.

A traditional patriarchal dance

Take my clients Roan and Christie (not their real names). Their marriage conformed to the traditional patriarchal model. Roan worked hard, travelled a lot for work and expected Christie to manage the house and children single-handedly. At first Christie just got on with it – her expectations were no different from her husband's because her parents had also followed that traditional model.

Christie also put up with a lot of what she regarded as typical man talk – demeaning women in general and her in particular. She didn’t challenge it even when she had gone back to work and was juggling her job with the care of their children and running the house.

Over the years Christie’s response to Roan’s insults had been to withdraw into herself and write his behaviour off as the product of a cultural norm that neither of them could challenge.

So the more the more for Christie and Roan was: the more Roan insulted Christie, the more she withdrew into sullen silence, and the more she withdrew, the more he attacked her. Because he interpreted her silence as an indication that she wasn’t listening.

This was their dance – the sequence of responses which followed one another predictably, time after time.

There was a definite flavour of Dr Jekyll and My Hyde here. Over the decades that this pattern had played out, Roan had become more and more verbally abusive. And while there were periods of peace when they got along fine, those periods became shorter and shorter.

Eventually the dance became unsustainable for Christie. With the support of her therapist she started to defend herself. This changed the dance into one of endless conflict. Bitter arguments would be followed by weeks of silence, and both Roan and Christie knew that they needed to seek help or they would end up divorced.

Changing the dance with immediate effect

With Christie and Roan, there was work to do as they had been practising this dance for such a long time, they had become very good at it! When we engage in any activity over and over again, we develop well-formed neural pathways which make it feel easy and natural (like learning to drive).

The great thing about the more the more is that once the couple have identified the dance, they can set about changing it.

Once Christie and Roan had decided that they wanted to change their dance and replace it with something more loving, they knew that the work would be worth it. There was one thing they were sure of – they didn’t want a divorce.

The first step is to simply stop the neural pathway in its tracks. That means using the ABC method to interrupt our behaviour as soon as we become aware of it.

A = awareness (that I’m about to insult my wife/that I’m about to tear into my husband in retaliation)

B = breathe – take a breath or three to create a pause

C = choose – what can I do differently this time?

You have no idea what the outcome of your choice will be. If your partner also wants to change their role in the dance, you can expect good results. But even if your partner is unaware that you’re attempting to change things, you can still expect some change.

Because when one person changes their behaviour, they disrupt the dance and their partner has to respond to something new!

Removing the urge to engage in the dance

The ABC method enables all of us to stop ourselves engaging in destructive behaviour. But it doesn’t remove the urge to engage in those behaviours. To make a difference at a deeper level, we need to work on the origins of our behaviour.

In the language of Relational Life Therapy, the dance that a couple engages in is composed of their two stances. For instance one partner may be an angry pursuer and the other might be a resentful withdrawer.

Or we have the two stances of anxious pursuer and fearful withdrawer.

The origins of those two separate stances lie in our experiences as children. The stances we adopt when we get triggered in adulthood are rooted in the adaptive responses we created in response to frightening or threatening circumstances we encountered as children.

This is the nature of trauma, whether it be small T or big T trauma. As Gabor Maté has said, the trauma is not in the event(s), but in our response to the event. And this shows up in our stance.

The adult relationship is the perfect context to heal from trauma precisely because the dance and the couples two stances mirror the relational traumas they experienced as children. We all marry the unfinished business of our children trauma, and this gives us all the perfect opportunity to heal those traumas.

I’ll be writing more about this in next week’s newsletter, so remember to check back in!