Vicious Circles

Most people who notice a pattern in themselves ask where it came from. The question is natural, and sometimes the answer is interesting, but it rarely changes anything. A pattern you have had since childhood is not held in place by childhood. It is held in place by what you do this week and by how the people around you answer it. That is the claim at the center of Paul Wachtel’s cyclical psychodynamics, and it is one of the more hopeful ideas in the psychodynamic tradition, because loops can be interrupted and the past cannot.

A vicious circle, in this sense, is a loop in which a fear leads to a way of behaving, the behavior draws a response from other people that seems to confirm the fear, and the confirmed fear leads to more of the same behavior. Each turn of the loop looks, from the inside, like fresh evidence that the fear was right. Nothing in it requires anything to be buried or hidden. The whole mechanism runs in plain sight, which is why it is so hard to see.

Core Ideas

The cause is in the present. Whatever started a pattern, it continues because of how the person is living now. Understanding the origin is not the same as changing the loop, any more than knowing what caused an injury heals it.
Fear drives it. The behavior that keeps the loop going is almost always an attempt to avoid a feeling the person learned to be afraid of: anger, need, wanting, pride. The avoidance has consequences, and the consequences feed the fear.
The outcome is ironic. People in a vicious circle usually end up with the very thing they were trying to avoid, and they get it because of their efforts to avoid it, not despite them. Someone terrified of being a burden becomes so self-effacing that they are overlooked, and feels the sting they were guarding against.
Other people are part of the machinery. The loop needs responses from others to keep running, and it is good at getting them. See accomplices.
There are virtuous circles too. The same structure runs the other way: a small step draws a better response, which makes the next step easier. The work is less about dismantling the bad loop than about getting a good one started.

Two Loops

The person who cannot be angry

Someone who learned early that anger was dangerous works hard to keep it out of sight, including out of their own sight. They are accommodating, easy, never any trouble. The cost of this is that their wants are rarely stated and so rarely met. They are passed over, taken for granted, volunteered for things. That is irritating, as it would be for anyone, and so there is more anger to keep down, and so more accommodation, and so more being passed over. The anger they are managing today is not old anger. It was generated this week, by the very strategy meant to prevent it.

The person who has to be impressive

Someone whose sense of worth feels shaky presents a little more than they are: a touch more success, a touch more certainty. Some people are impressed, which helps for a while. But praise for an inflated version lands as praise for someone else, and the feeling of being a bit of a fraud grows. The remedy that comes to hand is to present a little more still. Real strengths, and such people usually have them, never get to be the foundation, because the person is always standing on something taller.

Why This Is Good News

If a pattern were a fixed part of you, laid down in early life and sealed off from everything since, there would be little to do about it except understand it and grieve. If it is a loop, then it has joints, and a loop interrupted at any joint slows down. Saying the small wanted thing once, and finding that nothing terrible happens, is a turn of the circle that did not complete. The ironic structure also takes some of the blame out of the picture: you did not set out to produce the outcome; you set out to prevent it. Seeing that makes it possible to take responsibility for the loop without being crushed by it.

It also explains something people often notice and cannot account for: the pattern has exceptions. There are days, or people, with whom it does not run. From the inside those look like flukes. From this point of view they are the most important data there is, because they show where the loop already has a gap.

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Repetition compulsion: Freud’s idea that people are driven to repeat painful experiences, sometimes read as an unconscious wish to re-create them. A vicious circle involves no wish to repeat. The intention is the opposite, and the repetition is the unintended result.
Self-fulfilling prophecy: Close, and sometimes the same thing. The vicious circle adds the engine: the prophecy is fulfilled because the fear behind it shapes behavior, and the behavior shapes responses.
A fixed trait: “I’m just a people-pleaser” describes the loop as if it were a possession. The circle view insists it is an activity, done in particular situations with particular people, and done less in others.

How Geist Uses This

Geist watches the present rather than reconstructing the past. When the same shape turns up with different people, it may name the shape, tentatively, and ask what you would want instead. It does not supply the origin, because the origin is not what keeps the loop going.

Because the loop has exceptions, Geist treats them as the most useful thing you can tell it. If you mention a time the usual thing did not happen, it asks what was different before it asks about what went wrong. And because the loop produces the outcome you were trying to avoid, Geist will not go along with the conclusion that you must have wanted it. It might say something like: “You were trying hard not to be any trouble, and you ended up being the one nobody asked. What would you have wanted them to ask?”

Bring it to Geist

History

The idea that neurotic patterns are kept alive by their own consequences is older than the name. Karen Horney described “vicious circles” in the 1940s, in which a defensive solution creates the conditions that call for more of it (Horney, 1945), and Harry Stack Sullivan’s interpersonal psychiatry located personality in recurring patterns between people rather than inside one of them (Sullivan, 1953). Paul Wachtel brought these threads together with the behavioral tradition’s understanding of anxiety and avoidance, first in Psychoanalysis and Behavior Therapy (1977) and then in the revised and expanded Psychoanalysis, Behavior Therapy, and the Relational World (1997), under the name cyclical psychodynamics, which he had been using since the early 1980s (Wachtel, 1982). His later work applied it to how a therapist speaks (Wachtel, 2011) and to the relational school of psychoanalysis (Wachtel, 2008). Research on exposure as the treatment for fear (Foa & Kozak, 1986; McCullough et al., 2003) supplied the empirical reason the loop can be broken: a feared thing encountered safely becomes less feared.

Sources

Foa, E. B., & Kozak, M. J. (1986). Emotional processing of fear: Exposure to corrective information. Psychological Bulletin, 99(1), 20–35.
Horney, K. (1945). Our inner conflicts: A constructive theory of neurosis. Norton.
McCullough, L., Kuhn, N., Andrews, S., Kaplan, A., Wolf, J., & Hurley, C. L. (2003). Treating affect phobia: A manual for short-term dynamic psychotherapy. Guilford Press.
Sullivan, H. S. (1953). The interpersonal theory of psychiatry. Norton.
Wachtel, P. L. (1977). Psychoanalysis and behavior therapy: Toward an integration. Basic Books.
Wachtel, P. L. (1982). Vicious circles: The self and the rhetoric of emerging and unfolding. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 18(2), 259–273.
Wachtel, P. L. (1997). Psychoanalysis, behavior therapy, and the relational world. American Psychological Association.
Wachtel, P. L. (2008). Relational theory and the practice of psychotherapy. Guilford Press.
Wachtel, P. L. (2011). Therapeutic communication: Knowing what to say when (2nd ed.). Guilford Press. Chapters 4–5.