For the purposes of therapy, it is essential to hold onto the understanding that the negative cycle is not the relationship. The negative cycle is the “bad dance” the two of you get trapped in.
The enemy is not your partner. The enemy is the bad dance the two of you keep getting pulled into.
Over time, most couples have lived inside this painful cycle for so long that it begins to feel like “this is the relationship.” The cycle starts to define how each partner experiences the other, themselves, and the relationship itself. This distinction is very important to keep in mind because couples can end up making tragic mistakes when they reduce their vision of their relationship to the negative cycle. Poor decisions can be made, lives can be disrupted and families ended, resulting in so much unnecessary trauma and pain.
A central goals in EFT therapy is helping the couple separate the relationship from the cycle — so they can begin to see that the relationship is larger than the painful pattern that has come to dominate it.
