At a glance
In a couple the drama triangle is not one person’s habit, it is a circuit that needs both of you to keep it turning. One reaches, one withdraws, one accuses, and every move is a fair answer to the one before it. This is how the circuit runs between you, and where it can be interrupted.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- The truce that lasts until Thursday. Clients tell me they agreed on Sunday to handle it differently, and by midweek both of them are back in position without either one having decided to be.
- Each one answering the move before. What I see most often is 2 people responding reasonably to the last thing that happened, which is exactly what keeps the circuit turning.
- The quiet one is not the calm one. Clients who go silent in these exchanges usually describe far more going on inside them at that moment than their partner imagines.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
Why does it start again when we both know better?
Because understanding a pattern and being inside it are 2 different states, and the second one arrives faster. You can describe the whole circuit to a friend on Tuesday and be standing in it on Wednesday evening with the washing machine still going.
The roles themselves are the familiar 3: the one who steps in and fixes, the one who cannot see a way through and waits to be understood, and the one who names what is wrong and whose fault it is. I have written about what each of those positions feels like from the inside. What changes in a couple is that you are not taking a position on your own. You are taking one in answer to the position your partner has just taken, and they took theirs in answer to yours.
That is why insight on its own does not stop it. Knowing the shape helps you recognise it afterwards. It does not slow down the half second in which your body has already decided what kind of person your partner is being right now.
What is my move actually doing to my partner?
More than you can see, because the thing you do to lower the temperature is often the thing that raises theirs.
Going quiet is the clearest example. If you withdraw to stop yourself saying something you will regret, that is a considered act and it comes from care. To the person opposite you, the room has just emptied. What they do next is press harder, because pressing is what has occasionally produced a response before. And the pressing confirms to you that going quiet was the right call. Both of you are now doing more of the thing that is causing the problem, for good reasons, and neither of you can see the other’s reasons from where you stand.
One study of 175 couples found that where one partner tended to withdraw, the other tended to press and criticise, and that both partners reported lower satisfaction where that pairing was strongest.1 It asked people to describe themselves at a single point in time, in one community sample, so it shows the 2 moves travelling together rather than one of them causing the other.
Why does asking who started it never settle anything?
Because a circuit has no beginning, and the search for one is itself a move in the circuit.
Each of you can trace the evening back to a moment where the other did something first, and each of you is telling the truth about what you saw. You start at the sentence that landed on you. Your partner starts at the thing that made them say it. Go back far enough and you are in a different year.
I want to be careful here, because this can be heard as a claim that everything is always equally shared, and it is not. One of you may be doing more of the damage. One of you may be carrying more of the load, or holding more of the power in the relationship. What is true is narrower: for this particular circuit, finding the first cause has never once been the thing that stopped it turning.
Why does talking about it become another round of it?
Because the conversation about the pattern is usually opened from inside one of the positions.
The partner who opens it is often the one who reads about these things, which means the opening sentence arrives with a diagnosis attached. “I think you do this because of how you grew up” is said with real warmth and lands as a verdict. The other one defends, the first one feels unheard after all that effort, and within a few minutes you are doing the circuit about the circuit.
The useful difference is small and awkward. Talk about your own corner out loud, not about theirs. What you felt pulling at you, what you were about to do, what you wanted and did not say. A sentence about yourself is hard to argue with, and it is the only part of the evening you can report on with any authority.
How do we work on this together, and when is this not the right room?
In couples work the circuit stops being a story one of you tells about the other and becomes something you can both watch happening in front of you. That is most of the value. It is slow, it is specific, and it tends to work on one real exchange rather than on the relationship in general.
- Take one evening, not the pattern. A single exchange that you both remember gives you something to look at. The pattern in general gives you something to argue about.
- Agree a word for the moment it starts. Something plain and unglamorous that either of you can say without it being an accusation, used to pause rather than to win.
- Say what you wanted, not what they did. Underneath most of these moves is a want that has never been said out loud, usually because saying it feels like handing someone a weapon.
- Let repair be unimpressive. Coming back 20 minutes later and saying the plainer version does more for a relationship than any conversation that ends with both of you agreeing about the past.
In my own work with couples I draw mainly on emotion-focused therapy for couples, which stays with what each of you is feeling as the other speaks rather than deciding what is true about the argument.
There are situations where seeing the 2 of you together is not the right move, and it matters to say which. Where one of you is frightened of the other, or is being controlled, what looks like a circuit is not one, and sitting you both in a room treats a one-sided situation as a shared pattern. That is not a small error. It is also not the right starting room when an affair has just come to light and neither of you can yet speak without it becoming the only subject, or when one of you is depressed enough that the work is first about that. In each of those cases there is still work to do, and some of it is done one person at a time to begin with.
If this is the circuit the 2 of you keep ending up in, you can book a session together, or a free 30-minute call first to see whether it is the right fit.
Questions people ask
Do we both have to come?
For this particular pattern it helps a great deal, because the circuit is only visible when both halves of it are in the room. Where that is not possible, one of you working on your own corner still changes what the other has to answer.
Will you treat us as equally responsible?
No, and I would not be doing my job if I did that automatically. Some patterns are evenly shared and some are not, and saying so plainly when it is not is part of the work.
What happens in a first couples session?
Most of it goes on one recent argument, slowed down until each of you can see what the other was doing with their part of it. It is less about settling what happened and more about watching how it moved.
Can we come if we are already talking about separating?
Yes, and plenty of couples arrive at exactly that point. The work then is partly about understanding what has been happening between you, whichever way the decision goes.
Do we need to agree on what happened before we start?
No, and waiting until you agree would mean never starting. Two accounts that do not match are usable material, not an obstacle.
If you and your partner keep swapping roles in the triangle, couples therapy is where I help you both find a way out together.
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Sources
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
