The Five Losing Strategies in Relational Life Therapy

I have recently started undertaking training in Relational Life Therapy, or RLT. While I am certified in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, one of my goals as a couples therapist is to have a broad, integrative, and fairly deep understanding of the major models in the field rather than becoming too rigidly attached to one way of working. Typically when I begin training in a new modality, I try to approach it with an open mind and without assuming that I am necessarily going to find something I want to bring into my existing work. 

The reality is that I already believe deeply in the work I am doing with couples, and much of what I do through EFT, attachment-focused work, experiential interventions, parts work, and trauma therapy already feels quite effective. But I am also always asking myself whether there is something else that might help my couples move more quickly, understand themselves more clearly, or interrupt a pattern that has felt impossible to shift.

I want to be direct: couples therapy is expensive. It takes an incredible amount of time, energy, vulnerability, and resources to show up week after week and work on a relationship that may already feel exhausting. I am very aware of what people are pouring into this process when they come into my office, and so I am always interested in anything that can make the work more precise or more usable. When I learned about RLT’s “five losing strategies,” I immediately thought it would be a useful list and inventory for some of my higher-conflict couples, giving us a simple way of identifying the behaviors many couples reach for when they are hurt, activated, defensive, or desperate to be understood, but in the end, behaviors that make it much harder for our partner to hear us.

The five losing strategies are: being right, controlling, unbridled self-expression, retaliation, and withdrawal. Most couples can recognize themselves in at least one of these pretty quickly. The harder part is usually not understanding that the strategy is ineffective but understanding why it feels so necessary and automatic in certain moments.

The first losing strategy is “being right.” This is the tendency to argue about whose version of the relationship, or whose memory of a particular conflict, is more accurate. I see this one all the time in couples therapy. I might ask a couple where they tripped up during the week, and within thirty seconds I can see the negative cycle begin to unfold in real time. One person starts telling me what happened, the other interrupts to say that is not actually what happened, then we are correcting the timeline, debating the tone, clarifying who said what first, or trying to establish which interpretation is more reasonable.

And before long, we are not actually talking about the emotional experience anymore: we are litigating the case.

I often tell couples that there is really no such thing as purely objective truth inside a relationship. There are facts, certainly, and facts do matter. But there are also two people experiencing one another through two different nervous systems, two different developmental histories, two different attachment templates, and two different sets of expectations, fears, sensitivities, and biases. Two people can live through the same interaction and come away with genuinely different emotional realities.

Being right becomes a problem when the goal shifts from understanding one another to winning the argument about what happened. I see couples debate semantics, interrupt, correct details, defend intent, or refuse to validate anything their partner says because it feels as though acknowledging even one piece of the other person’s experience will somehow undermine their own. And this is one of those places where the strategy defeats the goal. Most of the time, what people really want is to feel heard, understood, and taken seriously, but the insistence on being right can make that much less likely.

Part of intimacy requires tolerating individuation. Your partner is going to have an experience of you that is not always the experience you intended them to have. Their experience may be shaped by old wounds, just as yours is. Their interpretation may sometimes be distorted, just as yours can be. The goal is not necessarily to arrive at one perfectly agreed-upon version of reality. Sometimes the work is learning how to tolerate that two things can be true at once: this was not what I intended or how I experienced the moment, and this is how it landed for you.

The second strategy is controlling. Controlling is what happens when we try to manage our partner rather than make a request and tolerate the fact that they are an autonomous person who may or may not respond the way we want. This can look very obvious, like demanding, threatening, pressuring, criticizing, micromanaging, or intimidating someone into doing what we want. But it can also be much more subtle. We can guilt a partner into agreeing with us, keep explaining why their emotional response is wrong, repeatedly ask for reassurance until we get the exact version of it we need, or try to shape someone’s behavior so that we do not have to sit with our own anxiety, jealousy, rejection, shame, or fear.

At its core, controlling often carries the message: I need you to think, feel, or behave differently so that I can feel okay.

And the reality is that most people do not like to feel controlled. Sometimes control does create short-term compliance, but it often creates resentment, resistance, defensiveness, withdrawal, or retaliation underneath. Even when it appears to “work,” it can slowly erode a sense of safety and mutuality in the relationship.

This is where differentiation becomes important. You are allowed to have needs and limits. You are allowed to ask for something, to say that a behavior is not working for you, or to decide what you are and are not willing to participate in. But there is a meaningful difference between expressing a need and attempting to engineer another adult into becoming the person you need them to be.

The third losing strategy is unbridled self-expression. This is the idea that because something is emotionally true for me, I should be able to say it exactly as it comes out. One of my mentors once reflected during an EFT training that “tone trumps message”, and I think about that all the time. We can say something completely reasonable, even emotionally important, but if it is delivered with contempt, accusation, sarcasm, or a sharpness that signals danger, our partner is much more likely to brace than to hear us.

We have to learn how to package our emotional world in a way that the other person can actually receive, and this can be frustrating because it varies person to person and relationship to relationship. It is a tall order to show up emotionally with the edge of a butter knife and then expect our partner not to protect themselves.

One of the things I appreciate in RLT is the idea that emotional honesty without containment is not relational. That distinction matters because authenticity and emotional impulsivity are not the same thing. Sometimes people hear the language of vulnerability and assume that being vulnerable means saying everything they are feeling, in whatever form it emerges, as long as it feels true. But intimacy requires more than honesty; it requires some capacity to think about the impact of how we deliver what is true.

Unbridled self-expression can look like yelling, contempt, character attacks, dumping anger, saying deliberately hurtful things and then defending them with “I’m just being honest,” or insisting that because a feeling is real, it must be expressed immediately. But it can also look like sending ten or fifteen texts in a row when someone has stopped responding, calling repeatedly after a partner has asked for space, waking someone up late at night because the conflict feels intolerable to leave unresolved, or starting a major fight when both people are already exhausted and dysregulated.

Part of relational maturity is learning how to tolerate temporary conflict without immediately discharging all of our distress onto the other person. That does not mean suppressing emotion or pretending everything is fine. It means developing enough containment that what we are trying to communicate has a chance of actually being heard.

The fourth strategy is retaliation. RLT sometimes describes this as offending from the victim position, which I think is a helpful way of understanding it. I am hurt, so I need you to understand how hurt I am by making you feel some version of what I am feeling.

Sometimes retaliation is very direct. It can look like insults, revenge, punishment, or cruelty. But often it is quieter. It can look like withholding affection because you are angry, using sexual withdrawal as punishment, becoming passive-aggressive, bringing up something you know your partner is vulnerable about, or going cold in a way that is meant to communicate, You hurt me, and now I am going to make sure you feel it.

What makes retaliation complicated is that the person doing it often experiences themselves as simply reacting. “You hurt me first.” “What did you expect me to do?” “I would not have said that if you had not done this.” And emotionally, that logic can make perfect sense in the moment. When we are hurt, there is often a very powerful wish for the other person to understand the magnitude of what has happened inside of us.

The problem is that pain delivered as punishment rarely creates understanding. More often, it creates another injury.

Then the partner who was retaliated against becomes hurt, and they retaliate in return. Eventually both people genuinely experience themselves as the victim of the other person’s behavior, and neither can quite see where the cycle begins anymore. In many high-conflict relationships, both people are hurting, both people are protecting themselves, and both people are participating in something that neither of them actually wants.

The work becomes figuring out how to bring hurt forward without turning it into a weapon.

The fifth losing strategy is withdrawal. Withdrawal is what happens when we disengage rather than remain emotionally present. And I want to be clear that this is not the same thing as taking a responsible, structured timeout, which can be very important when one or both partners are too activated to continue a conversation productively. I will write more about that separately.

Withdrawal is different because it often comes from resignation, overwhelm, avoidance, or retaliation. It can look like shutting down, stonewalling, refusing to discuss something, chronically avoiding certain topics, becoming emotionally absent, or disappearing into work, screens, substances, hobbies, or silence whenever the relationship becomes uncomfortable.

And whether or not the intention is to communicate this, withdrawal often lands as: when things get difficult between us, I disappear.

For people with attachment trauma, that can be an incredibly painful message to receive from the person who says they love you. At the same time, I also think this is one of the strategies that gets oversimplified most often. Not everyone who withdraws is trying to punish or manipulate their partner. Some people are genuinely flooded. Their nervous system is overloaded. Their access to language becomes reduced. They may not be able to identify what they are feeling quickly enough to put it into words. Continued engagement can begin to feel physiologically impossible.

This is one of the reasons trauma-informed couples therapy can be so important. We need to understand not only what someone is doing, but what is happening underneath it. One partner may pursue harder because distance feels dangerous, while the other withdraws because intensity feels dangerous. The more one pursues, the more overwhelmed the other becomes. The more the other disappears, the more panicked the first becomes. Eventually both nervous systems are pinging off one another, creating a co-created cycle that neither person consciously chose and that neither person actually wants.

Many of my couples reflect something very similar to me after we have spent time naming these patterns. They will say, “Danielle, I understand all of this cognitively. I agree with you. But when I am actually in the moment, it is very hard to do anything differently.”

And this is where relationship education reaches its limit.

Insight is important. Understanding your cycle is important. Recognizing that you are controlling, retaliating, withdrawing, or becoming uncontained is important.

But insight alone is usually not enough to create lasting change, especially when these strategies are rooted in attachment trauma, developmental trauma, shame, dissociation, or deeply rehearsed protective responses.

This is where trauma-focused couples therapy can be useful, and sometimes individual therapy alongside the couples work can be important too. I have found parts work to be incredibly valuable here because it helps people understand the protective states that take over during conflict and how quickly those parts can become blended with our sense of self. EMDR can also be useful in helping process earlier experiences that continue to organize present-day reactions, while somatic and other bottom-up forms of therapy may help build more flexibility when the nervous system becomes activated.

The goal is not simply to know what you should do instead. Most people already know, at least conceptually, that they should not yell, stonewall, punish, control, or prosecute the case. The harder task is having enough access to yourself in the moment that another option becomes available.

And that is really the point of identifying these strategies in the first place. Naming them gives us a map. It helps us see where we go when we feel hurt, unseen, frightened, disrespected, or disconnected. From there, the deeper work is understanding why we go there, what happens between two people when we do, and how we begin to turn toward each other differently.

In a future article, I will be writing about RLT’s five winning strategies and what we would want couples to begin practicing instead.