Negative marital cycles prompted by powerful negative projections back and forth between both partners.

In these moments each partner is vulnerable to representing the other as the “bad object,” a term derived from “object relations theory.” In the context of marriage this occurs when the other’s negative behavior is viewed as “all bad” rather than as a mix of attributes, some good, some bad. These “all bad projections” set each partner up to feel threatened and insecure in the marriage, commonly resulting in escalating negative cycles. The individual meetings are especially useful in helping each partner moderate their tendency to end up with a bad object view of their partner.