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The myth of less goodness

One of the biggest reasons to see and understand circular causality is that it can mean the difference between a painful relationship and an intimate one.

A close and shared personal history with someone helps us see them more completely, including their strengths, weaknesses, reactive mistakes, and honorable actions.  But even couples in long-term relationships can be vulnerable to a soft version of the myth of pure evil (see the previous video on that) and its accompanying distortions of oversimplification and subtle dehumanization.

With the people who we know and love, rather than “the myth of pure evil”, it’s more like “the myth of less goodness”.  It’s a bias toward seeing less goodness than a partner really has when we’re in the midst of conflict and stress.

And deeper down, there’s a tendency to also see less goodness than exists in ourselves.  In fact, fault finding in a partner is often an unconscious defense against our own shame and fear that the relationship problems are basically our fault.  If we blame the other person, it assuages those insecurities of ours on a subconscious level.

An overarching goal of couples therapy is to increase empathy between and within partners, by encouraging both of them to share their core emotional pain — like fear, sadness, and grief — going beneath the surface of anger, judgment, and reactivity.

When a couple initially comes to therapy, their mutual empathy is usually lacking to some extent.  Both sides have an incomplete understanding of the other’s needs, feelings, perceptions, and reasons for behaving as they have been.  That partial comprehension of each other is almost always skewed in a direction that doesn’t give their partner enough credit and overlooks their own contribution to the “negative cycle” between them.  Both partners generally carry “stories” of asymmetrical fault — stories that could have titles including, “they’re causing the problem”, “I don’t have any power”, “I don’t deserve this”, and other variations on the general theme, “I’m not loved enough”.

Cybernetics and families

Cybernetics theory — including concepts like circular causality, positive and negative feedback, and homeostasis — became influential in the psychotherapy field beginning around the 1950s, because it offered an alternative to individual-focused models of the time.  Instead of viewing problems as residing “inside” a single person, cybernetics theory helped psychology frame behavior as part of a dynamic, “family system” – a system of patterns, interactions, and feedback between individuals.

The fit between cybernetics and family therapy was natural, because marriages and families are complex systems — wholes greater than the sum of their parts.  They operate through reciprocal influence and the multi-directional flow of information (in the form of verbal and nonverbal communication) between spouses, children, and other family members.

Cybernetic terms like circular causality provided the scaffolding for much of our understanding of marriages and families to this day.

Circular causality awareness is empathy

One of the most effective things that couples can do for their relationship is to better see their circular causality.  When they struggle, it’s often because both sides feel unjustly wronged by the other, and both are unable to see how their partner’s behavior is largely a response to their own.  Each person in a troubled relationship or marriage sees themselves as generous but characterologically immutable (“I am who I am”), and their partner as malleable, yet miserly in their dispensing of love (“he just chooses to not give me what I need because he doesn’t care”).  They’re both going to feel largely powerless to change the dynamic of their relationship until they each see how their own words and behaviors affect their partner’s words and behaviors toward them.

Increasing a couple’s mutual empathy goes hand in hand with increasing their awareness of their circular causality.  One way of thinking about empathy is that it’s simply understanding another person.  What it’s like to be in their shoes?  What pain, fear, desire, and other emotions are driving their behavior?  What’s the intended positive function behind their challenging actions and words?  How might my own well-intentioned behavior perpetuate a circular problem by failing to meet her needs?  That awareness itself is often sufficient to break a negative circular cycle.

Once the negative cycle is perceived, both sides realize that they have some control over it.  That neither of them needs to desperately wait for their partner to change before the relationship improves.  They might not know what to do, but they know what to stop doing to interrupt the status quo of dissatisfaction.  From that void, they can become curious and experiment with something different.  Instead of criticism to get my needs met, I can simply ask for specific and manageable requests (like “will you help me with dinner tonight?  or “will you give me a short massage?” or “can I share some feelings with you about my day and will you just listen, I just need to talk?”).  Instead of making a joke or problem solving when my partner opens up about her feelings, I can just be tender and ask curious questions to help her access her feelings and get to the bottom of what’s troubling or frightening her.  Instead of immediately walking away when there’s a heated conflict, I can gently say that I’m worried we might both say things we regret, and so I’d like to slow down and take a few deep breaths, or take a break and come back in a few hours to continue the conversation when we’ve both cooled down and thought about what we need from each other.  Instead of pushing for immediate reconnection, I can turn my attention inward and practice the crucial art of self-soothing and self-regulation.  These creative, empathy-based railway switches lead to a new track of positive circular causality, in which love is given and received reciprocally, repeatedly and increasingly.

The turning point for a couple past which they rediscover their connection and love is often the realization, by one or both partners, that they can improve their relationship and elicit care from their partner by being more loving and caring themselves in a form that meets their partner’s needs, rather than just passively waiting for their partner to act more loving and caring first.  If one partner realizes this truth — that someone has to go first –it’s usually not too long before the other partner also changes, because of the circular nature of their continuous relational dance.  As one partner begins to notice a different and more loving energy coming in his direction, he’ll typically begin to respond with more kindness and generosity himself, in ways that he knows she longs for.  Being cared for increases trust, which helps us take the risk to be caring in return.

The problem is seeing half the problem

The circular causality between two people in a relationship is the portion of their behavior toward each other that I’d call “personal”, as defined in part 1 of this series on what I think the phrase “taking it personally” means to most people.  It’s also important for me to point out that there’s also a big component of how we’re treated in intimate relationships that’s not personal, for example the childhood and prior life conditioning of a partner.  I’ve written about that topic in my video called “Three pillars of a nourishing relationship, part 3, on individual healing”, and I also hope to cover it more later in this series.  For now, I’ll simply observe that distressed partners, in my experience, tend to see how their partners’ prior life experiences contribute to the relationship problems more than they comprehend how their own prior life experiences do.  By extension, they under-appreciate how much their partner is responding to them in the present, which impairs healthy corrective feedback in the relationship.  If we brush off a distressed partner’s difficult behaviors as something stemming basically from their critical mother or absent father or terrible ex, or just some mysterious genetic or personality flaw, then there’s not much incentive for us to change anything.  On the other hand, to the extent that we see our partner’s unloving behaviors as symptoms of their unmet and reasonable needs in their circular dynamic with us, we DO have the incentive to stretch ourselves to become better partners.

Ideally, we’ll take responsibility for what’s our fault in the relationship, and the rest we’ll meet with compassion, patience, and possibly some grief and boundary adjustments when it comes to the deep wounds and defenses that can take a partner many years to dissolve, even when they are “putting in the work”.  Wise partners in distressed relationships will realize that, because of the cognitive biases discussed in part 2.4, it’s likely that we have some circular causality blindness, and our relationship will improve as we endeavor to see the circular causality within it as much as possible.