Hello Reader,

At 15 years into my second marriage, I suddenly realized we were on the brink of divorce.

We still loved each other deeply, so this surprised me.

My first marriage was at the tender age of 25. Signed up for the traditional gender roles, monogamy package, factory-installed.

That marriage ended in a blaze of glory: hot, painful, violent. So much shame, blame, yelling, and aggression.

I thought that was how all marriages end.

So imagine my surprise that there had been none of those nasty ingredients in my current marriage.

Instead, it had been a quiet drift, a walled-off silence, a slow misattunement that lasted years.

Let me be clear: my current partner and I love and respect each other. A lot.

But our adaptive children were getting in the way of us actually connecting.

Once I started seeing it, I couldn't unsee it.

If you've ever been in a relationship for long enough, you probably know the moment your kid self starts to drive.

Your adaptive child is both wise AND destructive.

My teacher, Terry Real, says, "Adaptive then, maladaptive now."

Our adaptive children used strategies then that worked to help us survive, but now harm our love.

I know you know what I'm talking about!

That moment you stop being a wise, present, and skillful adult, and start being, well, an asshole who is really just hurting and needing love, but acting out at the same time.

In my current marriage, we were both lonely, quiet, and hurting.

But because there is so much love, it was hard to notice that we were at the doorway threshold of ending.

I’m writing this today for those of you living lives of quiet desperation, where the rift is not loud and ugly, but you feel the deadening, the lifeforce draining out of your love.

In my first marriage, I have many clear moments of memory: standing in the kitchen and realizing that the misattunement I just experienced from my partner was a “little death.”

Even in that loud, explosive relationship, the ending did not come from one final blow. It came from a thousand tiny deaths.

And I can see now that the same thing was happening in my second marriage, just more quietly. Misattunements. Small withdrawals.

Losing strategies block connection.

A thousand tiny deaths.

In retrospect, I suppose that most relationships get to the verge at least once.

Being a couple's therapist didn't stop mine from going there.

“The true work begins now,” our current couples therapist tells us, "Now is when you can become adults in love."

Can we work to rein in our adaptive children, to prevent them and their losing strategies from running the show?

Can we learn to let our wise adults guide us, hold those wounded and acting-out little kids, and find our way into a boundaried, adult love?

I'm deep in the work of learning to be a Relational Rife Therapist, the work of Terry Real.

Terry teaches that there are five losing strategies our adaptive children use.

These can be mapped onto the fight, flight, and fix responses.

They all have a child’s logic to make them make sense.

Five Losing Strategies:

1. Being Right​
   a) Arguing about whose view is more accurate
   b) Fuels self-righteous indignation
   ​
2. Controlling Your Partner​
   a) Can be direct or indirect manipulation
   b) No one likes being controlled. It leads to retaliation and payback
   ​
3. Unbridled Self-expression​
   a) Saying whatever is on your mind with no kindness or respect
   ​
4. Retaliation​
   a) Offending from the victim position
   b) "I’ll make you feel what I feel!"​
   c) Can be overt or covert (passive-aggressive)
   ​
5. Withdrawal (AKA Stonewalling)​
   a) This is different from taking a responsible time-out or responsible distance taking
   b) Comes from resignation or retaliation.

When you read these, which is yours? We all have at least one.

My top pick is being right.

There is no shame in having a losing strategy, and it's good to know what you do when you get activated.

My RLT therapist says, “When you find yourself about to use one of your losing strategies, the best thing to do is the absolute opposite.”

So for me, the opposite of being right, justified as it may be to my adaptive child, is to allow myself to be wrong.

To not have certainty, to not believe the story I've made up in my head about my partner.

Sometimes you are not with the right person, and the relationship clearly needs to end so you are both free to become more fully who you are.

Sometimes, though, you are with the right person, but your adaptive children remain hypervigiliant and unconvinced. You question the relationship endlessly.

You whip out the losing strategies.

I'm so grateful that my partner and I are in RLT therapy and are learning to wrangle our adaptive children.

The flow that is present between us, Eros and love and excitement and curiosity, which had nearly dried up, is gushing again. It feels wonderful to fall back in love with a long-term partner and realize you never really stopped.

This isn't a sales pitch.

It's just me, in the trenches with you, reaching out from my very real relationship.

If you still love them, fight for it. There's a way back.

Pavini Moray, Ph.D.