The Five Losing Strategies: What We Do When We Feel Threatened in Relationships
This post is part of 52 Weeks of Relational Mindfulness and the opener for Phase 2: What Gets in the Way. Phase 1 was about knowing yourself: the adaptive child, the wise adult, the patterns and where they come from. If you’re new here, that’s a good place to start. [Begin with What Is Relational Mindfulness? (And Why It’s the Only Place to Start)] Phase 2 is where we get into what those patterns actually do in your relationship. Starting with the five default strategies most of us reach for when things get hard and why none of them work.
Here’s something I’ve noticed after years of working with high-achieving couples:
the same skills that built the business are often quietly dismantling the relationship.
Not because successful people don’t care about their relationships. Most of them care deeply. But the strategies that work in a competitive, results-oriented environment, where winning matters, where being right has real consequences, where control is a feature not a bug, don’t translate. In relationships, they backfire. Every time.
In Relational Life Therapy, Terry Real identifies five default strategies we reach for when we feel threatened, dismissed, or out of control in our closest relationships. He calls them the five losing strategies. Not because the people using them are losers, but because the strategies themselves cannot win. They’re not designed for the context they’re being used in. They solve for the wrong problem.
Why These Strategies Exist
Before we name them, it’s worth saying this: the five losing strategies aren’t character flaws. They’re adaptive responses. They emerged from somewhere: from early environments where they served a purpose, from cultures that rewarded them, from nervous systems trying to manage the threat of relational pain.
The adaptive child reaches for these strategies automatically when something feels threatening in a relationship. A criticism. A withdrawal. A conflict that feels like it’s about to go somewhere familiar and bad. The whoosh hits, and one of these strategies shows up almost before you’ve made a conscious decision.
The problem isn’t that you use them. The problem is that they don’t work. But most of us keep using them anyway, because we don’t have a better option available in the moment.
That’s what this phase of the series is about. Not shame. Visibility. You can’t change what you can’t see.
Strategy 1: Needing to Be Right
This one is endemic among high performers. In most professional contexts, being right matters. Being wrong has consequences. The person who’s consistently right gets credibility, authority, advancement. So you develop a very efficient relationship with being right. You get there fast, you defend your position well, and you don’t concede easily.
In a relationship, this exact skill set becomes a wrecking ball.
Because your partner doesn’t need you to be right. They need to feel heard. Those are not the same thing, and when you prioritize one, you almost always sacrifice the other.
Needing to be right in a relationship looks like: correcting your partner’s account of events, building a case instead of having a conversation, listening to respond rather than to understand, treating disagreement as a problem to be solved rather than a perspective to be curious about.
The losing part: you might win the argument. You will lose the connection. And over time, your partner stops bringing things to you because the cost of being wrong in front of you is too high.
Strategy 2: Controlling
Control is another high performer specialty. You didn’t build something significant by leaving things to chance. You manage variables, anticipate problems, and create systems that produce reliable outcomes. That’s not a flaw. In the right context, it’s exceptional.
In a relationship, controlling looks like managing your partner rather than being with them.
It can be overt: telling them what to do, how to handle situations, what the right answer is.
It can also be subtle: structuring the environment so your preferences consistently prevail, making decisions that affect both of you without genuine consultation, or being so decisive that your partner’s input gradually stops feeling worth offering.
Strategy 3: Unbridled Self-Expression
This one surprises people. Isn’t emotional expression supposed to be healthy?
Yes, when it’s in service of connection. Unbridled self-expression is something different. It’s the belief that because you feel it, you’re entitled to say it. That your emotional experience takes priority over its impact. That full disclosure is the same thing as honesty.
It sounds like: “I’m just being real with you.” Or: “You need to know how I feel.” Or the feedback delivered with a precision and candor that would be appropriate in a performance review and is devastating in a marriage.
High performers often have a particular flavor of this: the direct communicator who conflates bluntness with integrity, who believes that softening delivery is the same as softening the truth, who values their own discomfort-tolerance over their partner’s actual experience of being on the receiving end.
The losing part: your partner isn’t your employee, your audience, or your therapist. They’re a person trying to feel safe with you. Unbridled self-expression prioritizes your release over their wellbeing and does real damage over time, even when every word is technically true.
Strategy 4: Retaliation
This one is the most viscerally satisfying in the moment and the most corrosive over time.
Retaliation is the strategy of evening the score. You hurt me, so I hurt you back through words, through withdrawal, through a well-timed comment that you know exactly where it will land. It can be explosive and obvious. It can also be cool and surgical: the quiet contempt, the perfectly timed silence, the passive move that communicates everything while maintaining plausible deniability.
The adaptive child reaches for this when it’s in pain and doesn’t have another option available. It’s the strategy of someone who feels powerless and is trying to restore some sense of equilibrium by making the other person feel what they feel.
The losing part: retaliation doesn’t restore equilibrium. It escalates. Every act of retaliation gives your partner something to retaliate for, and the cycle runs until one of you shuts down entirely or the relationship ends. There is no version of this strategy that ends with more closeness.
Strategy 5: Withdrawal
Withdrawal is the strategy that looks the most like peace. You stop engaging. You go quiet. You leave the room, physically or emotionally. You stonewall. You let the silence do the work.
For high performers, withdrawal often masquerades as self-regulation.
“I’m removing myself before I say something I’ll regret.”
Sometimes that’s true and it’s genuinely the wise adult making a good call. More often, withdrawal is the adaptive child punishing through absence. Making the other person feel the cost of having pushed too hard, asked too much, not been manageable enough.
It can also be chronic rather than situational. The high performer who is perpetually unavailable, always working, always optimizing, always on to the next thing, is withdrawing from their relationship in a way that doesn’t look like conflict but functions as abandonment. Their partner doesn’t get the version of them that’s present. They get the remainder.
The losing part: what withdrawal communicates, regardless of intent, is: you are not worth staying for. And partners who repeatedly receive that message stop asking you to stay.
The Common Thread
All five strategies share something. They prioritize self-protection over connection. They solve for the adaptive child’s need to feel safe, in control, or vindicated at the expense of the actual relationship.
And they all feel justified in the moment. That’s the trap. The whoosh hits, the adaptive child takes the wheel, and the strategy feels not just reasonable but necessary. Like the only available option.
It isn’t. But you can’t access the other options until you can see what you’re doing.
The first step is recognition. Which of these is your default? Most people have a primary strategy and a backup. Some people cycle through several in a single argument. Knowing which one you reach for, and what triggers the reach, is the beginning of having a choice about it.
This is exactly the kind of pattern work I do with individuals and couples in my practice. Not just identifying the strategy, but understanding what it’s protecting, where it came from, and what it would take to build access to something different. If you’re recognizing yourself here and you’re ready to do more than just understand it, reach out to learn more about working together.
The Question Worth Sitting With
There’s a question I ask a lot in this work, and it applies here:
This strategy you’re using, what is it actually moving you toward?
Needing to be right. Controlling. Unbridled expression. Retaliation. Withdrawal. Each of these is moving the relationship somewhere. The question is whether it’s somewhere you actually want to go.
The wise adult can ask that question in real time. The adaptive child never thinks to.
That’s the whole game.
Audrey Schoen is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Roseville, CA, specializing in couples, individuals, and entrepreneurs. She practices Relational Life Therapy, Brainspotting, and Accelerated Resolution Therapy, and offers in-person sessions in the Sacramento area and online throughout California and Texas.
Primary source: Terry Real, The New Rules of Marriage (2007).
SIGN UP TO MY NEWSLETTER AND GET THE
Plus, you'll get relationship tips, book & podcast recommendations, occasional updates, and more.
You can expect to receive about 1-4 emails per month.❤️