The Five Losing Strategies, and Why Nobody Gets a Pass
I want to start by saying this is not a finished piece of thinking. It is a working hypothesis, a place where two frameworks I love are meeting in ways I find genuinely exciting, and I’m anlps looking ant neuronormative culture and my own wiring .. I don't yet have all the answers. What I do have feels important enough to share. Bear with me 🤗
Terry Real and the Five Losing Strategies
Relational Life Therapy, developed by Terry Real, identifies five ways we protect ourselves in relationship that end up costing us the very connection we were trying to hold onto. He calls them the Five Losing Strategies.
They are not character flaws. They are not evidence that you are bad at love. They are protective responses, intelligent adaptations that your system developed at some point because they made sense, and that have been running ever since, often long after they stopped being useful.
The five strategies are:
• Being Right — the part that cannot afford to be wrong. That builds a case, marshals evidence, needs the other person to acknowledge their version of events before anything can move forward. It may not feel like winning. It may feel like survival.
• Controlling — the part that manages everything to feel safe. That reorganises, anticipates, directs. That pursues — needing to know where things stand, circling back, checking in until there is resolution. That fixes — reaching for the solution before the other person has finished speaking, because sitting with an unsolved problem feels unbearable. From the outside it can look like competence, or even care. From the inside it can feel like the only thing standing between order and collapse.
• Unbridled Self-Expression — the part that has to get it all out. All of it, right now, until the other person receives it completely. What looks like honesty often is honesty. What it can miss is timing, proportion, and the impact on the person receiving it.
• Retaliation — the part that needs you to feel what it felt. That strikes back with words, with coldness, with a carefully placed observation. It may not feel like cruelty. It may feel like justice.
• Withdrawal — the part that goes somewhere you cannot follow. That goes quite not as a decision but as an involuntary closing down. The words do not come. The feelings may not come either.
so I’ll go through each now ( and underneath a bit around neuronormativity) Theres a lot of writing below for info! And videos…
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You Can Be Right, Or You Can Be in Relationship
There’s a part of me that is very good at being right: I imagine that’s not a surprise to many of you! She remembers the exact wording of a conversation from eleven days (or eleven months) ago. 🫣. She will, if necessary, reconstruct the entire sequence of events in chronological order to prove that yes, actually, this is what happened. She’s trying to keep me from shame, from feeling like the bad one or that I don’t matter.
IFS therapist Mike Elkin ascertains what couples mainly fight about is “Who is the better person?” The more seriously they take that fight, the more miserable they are.
Stan Tatkin famously wrote: you can be right, or you can be in relationship. Terry Real says the same thing differently: you can be right, or you can be married. Ow.
Maybe one of the most unbearable things for us is the belief that we are bad. So when someone contradicts our version of events, protective parts come out fast and we return to the same point from a different angle. A small child in me jumps up and down .. I need you to see me!
Marshall Rosenberg called arguing a “tragic expression of an unmet need” because the need never gets met that way.
You can win every point and still leave the conversation more alone than when you started. I know I have.. You?
For those of us with neurodivergent wiring there is extra nuance to this. Detail-oriented, pattern-seeking brains genuinely notice things others miss.. my brain is so quick to clock inconsistency and my accuracy is pretty sharp. Add Rejection Sensitivity where being contradicted can feel like threat rather than disagreement and delayed emotional processing so the feeling arrives too late after the argument is already over.
Understanding the wiring doesn’t dissolve the responsibility. For me it’s so helpful to go: ah, this is a mixture of my hard working parts and my wiring (Quite a mixture!) Allowing me a pause, a smile of understanding and a breath.
Neuronormative partners have their own version of their own wiring too in my view . Societal communication runs on implied meaning so if the subtext was clear to one person, it’s assumed clear to both. For an ND partner that assumption can then be pointed out accusingly. “You should have known”. Which collides well onto the part already protecting the one who feels they’re the bad one. So instead of protecting their connection, the Being Right fight descends into more arguing and then no one wins. That’s big and familiar to me (ow), I wonder about you?
Underneath the certainty of the Being Right part there is almost always a tender vulnerable one where being wrong meant something more than just being wrong.
So the invitation (with real curiosity and no agenda!) is to turn inward. To notice the wiring. To listen to the defensive and wounded parts. What are their hopes and fears? To speak for them from Self, instead of as them.
That’s the wonderful shift offered by IFS and RLT. From a muddy battleground to maintaining a healthy “biosphere”. From needing to win to wanting to understand.
You can be right. Or you can be in relationship. I’m guessing you already know which one you actually want?
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How Do I Control Thee? Let Me Count The Ways
Controlling is named in Relational Life Therapy as one of the Five Losing Strategies in relationships. It doesn’t get you what you want, it doesn’t work long term even if it does in the moment. It fosters disconnection. So why do we do it? It’s my belief that controlling isn’t about the other person but instead it tends to be about managing anxiety and other feelings.
At its most extreme, Controlling becomes coercive so .. checking phones, dictating clothes, isolating partners from friends and family .. which is a different and extremely important conversation.
What I’m instead exploring here are the parts of us that run things often without our knowing .. So let me count the ways:
Organising and directing: making sure things go to schedule, everyone does what they said they would. Anyone else?
Fixing: solving a problem before anyone has to feel uncomfortable, pre-emptively managing other people’s emotions. Such a good way of controlling the outcome even if it looks like care.
Pursuing: needing the silence stopped, the conversation resolved and the rupture repaired, right now! Uncertainty in relationship is genuinely intolerable for some parts and I notice parts that will work very hard to close that circle.
People-pleasing: I spent a long time thinking of this as generous, accommodating, selflessness. Great partner, fabulous mum, dear friend. This part anticipates what you need before you ask and smooths things over and makes everything comfortable. We women are very socialised into this one in our patriarchal culture. Some men do it too!
However I realise these parts are micromanaging the other person’s response. This one needs to know you’re okay, not angry, that things are safe so the accommodation is a very understandable strategy.. selflessness is agenda’d.
In IFS, Dick Schwartz calls these Manager parts : they are proactive, planners and preventers. Martha Sweezy writes about Anticipatory Scouts which are parts that scan constantly, outward for potential criticism or rejection from others, and inward for the inner critic that will pile on if something goes wrong.
For those of us with neurodivergent wiring this has extra texture. I need systems and routines or the cognitive load of daily life becomes too much. Sensory sensitivity means unpredictability has a real physical cost. Anticipatory anxiety and pattern recognition means the mind has already clocked multiple outcomes in lightening speed. Many neurodivergent folk have also spent a lifetime being misread, corrected, found too much or not enough in our neuronormative world.
Controlling behaviour is wiring, relational wiring, and protective parts all at once, nuanced and rarely neatly separable.
Underneath it, often the same message: if I can manage this well enough, I won’t feel shame.
The relational cost runs in both directions. Cece Sykes, IFS senior trainer, is clear that the more a manager tries to control, the more the other’s parts feel desperate to break free and the harder the manager grips. The strategy creates the very tension it’s trying to resolve and it’s often exhausting for everyone inside it and out.
A partner who is being managed doesn’t feel trusted instead they feel like a problem being solved.
Disconnection follows which is the last thing these parts are hoping for.
Understanding the wiring doesn’t dissolve the responsibility. The invitation is to pause and notice and in that pause, there is a choice. Yay for Cece’s 9th C of Self!
Relational recovery for me lives in coming back to myself rather than managing others. Noticing what I’m feeling, what I want and need, and speaking for that from Self.
Which flavour do you recognise in yourself? The organising? The fixing? The pursuing? The accommodating? I’d so love to know 🧡
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Saying All The Things (And Why It Doesn’t Work )
There’s a part of me that will let you have everything she’s been holding. The thing from last week, the way you said or did that thing, and on a really bad day throwing in a few insults and character assassinations like “you always” or “you never”. She is thorough and loud, she is powerful and wow it feels sooo good to unload. For about four minutes.
Terry Real calls this Unbridled Self-Expression : sometimes known as “kitchen-sinking”. He has a wonderfully unflattering image for it (the “barf bag” approach to intimacy). The strategy is exactly what it sounds like: saying all of it, at full volume, with full feeling, without much thought for where it lands. Though volume isn’t always the giveaway.. “I’ve always thought you looked like an elephant in those trousers ” is also unbridled self-expression. It can come from pent-up feelings that have nowhere else to go, or from a sense of entitlement to say whatever is true regardless of impact. Often both. Familiar?
We can dress it up as honesty. Authenticity. Courage. Some of it of course IS the real thing, which is what makes this strategy so seductive and so hard to argue with.
Esther Perel draws a distinction I find really useful here. She asks not just what is true but what is this truth in service of? It’s self-expression in the name of intimacy, which isn’t the same thing. Honesty without regard for impact isn’t intimacy. Connection, or relief?
Here’s what I understand from the inside, as an IFS therapist and someone who has done this: the part doing the unbridling isn’t being honest. She’s reactive and has no interest in connection. In IFS we’d call this part a Firefighter, arriving after there’s been some vulnerability, after the exile’s pain has broken through. Her one job is to put the flames out right now, to stop the pain. Underneath her, in my experience is a part that just wants to know she’s loved and considered.
The impact on the other person? Unless they can pause and with Self energy take relational leadership, most likely their own protectors come up lightning fast, defensive, retreating, shutting down. Connection is now even further away than before the firefighter arrived. The firefighter clocks that familiar felt sense of being alone. Off it goes again.
For those of us with neurodivergent wiring this one has particular texture. There are three layers often happening at once: the wiring and relational wiring itself (emotional hyperreactivity, a thinner braking system between feeling and expressing, verbal processing so the speaking IS the thinking, directness as a default, justice sensitivity, rejection sensitivity), and then the relational wound - the defense mechanisms we then take on - underneath it all. For me that relational wound is childhood trauma, i have part that learnt that feelings had to fill the room to be heard. Wiring, relational wiring, and relational wound, the “parts”, rarely neatly separable.
I learned this one from the inside out. I know the pain of being on the receiving end of it. My mother was a spectacular unbridler (I say this with love and full recognition of where I learned it). The feelings came out fast and hot and filled the room. I could see her hurt, the fire unleashed, her hope that the truth would finally get through The devastation it caused. I had it modelled and a part of me learnt to do this in reaction.
Saying all the things rarely gets you what you want. This I’ve learnt the hard way.
Do you recognise this part in you? Does it arrive fast and hot, or does it build slowly and then go?
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To Stay (and Make You Pay), or Not to Stay .. that is the question.
That’ll be Retaliation and Withdrawal, the last two of the RLT losing strategies I’ve been musing about through an IFS and neurodivergent lens.
The one I go to most is withdrawal. I grew up steeped in British culture so don’t talk about feelings, don’t make a fuss, appear fine and get on with things. Charming on the surface, emotionally unreachable underneath. The mature ones don’t lose their sh*t. We live in a culture that can make disconnection a virtue.. from our bodies, our feelings, each other, and the world we’re actually embedded in. Suppression is self-mastery. Tolerance of chronic overwhelm is resilience. The stiff upper lip gets rewarded, the ability to stay pleasant gets read as emotional intelligence, while simultaneously we’re asked to compete endlessly for worth and submit to structures never built around human flourishing.
Modelled by culture and many of our families. I see it as generational legacy energy alongside - in my experience - hard working manager parts that learned early to fit in, mask and keep me safe.
Withdrawal in my experience is also a response to impingement. Self preservation as a life strategy in reaction to encroachment when boundaries are crossed, pace overridden, needs and wants consistently treated as inconvenient or wrong. Love avoidance isn’t always about fear of intimacy but it’s a very reasonable response to what intimacy has actually felt like.
Withdrawal can also be more immediately reactive, more Firefightery. Anyone else said or been on the receiving end of this? “I’ll go away, and when you’ve calmed down, I’ll come back.” Ow, so painful. On the surface it sounds almost reasonable, almost like responsible distance-taking. The withdrawer gets to be the composed one, while the other person’s expression has been quietly positioned as the thing that caused the problem.
This is also where withdrawal and retaliation start to overlap passive-aggressive retaliation wearing withdrawal’s clothes. The covert, carefully composed version tends to be more available to people with good social scripts.
For some ND systems withdrawal may also be involuntary shutdown when emotional or sensory input reaches capacity the nervous system can genuinely go offline. No words, mute or blank, or monotropic flow pulls us elsewhere. Not socially sanctioned.
Retaliation on the other hand is offending from the victim position. You hurt me, I’ll make sure you feel it. Now two people who both need to defend themselves. It can be overt so the comment aimed exactly where you know it will land or covert: withheld warmth, carefully placed coldness. The covert version requires social skill, reading the room well enough to know where to aim and delivering it in a way that’s deniable. More available to people with good social scripts.
The person who retaliates loudly, impulsively, visibly often gets read as the aggressor.
I see retaliation as a bid for repair dressed in armour. The tragic expression of an unmet need. There may be underneath a younger part who was hurt and received no repair, so a protector takes matters into their own hands because being passive felt worse.
For some ND systems the retaliatory impulse can arrive neurologically fast, before reflection is possible. Justice sensitivity means perceived unfairness lands with physical force. RSD means a perceived slight can carry the full weight of every previous unrepaired rupture. The response isn’t proportionate to today because the nervous system isn’t only responding to today.
Something I find inside me is that retaliation and withdrawal are sometimes a polarised pair — the part that burns back and the part that disappears, taking turns or coming in to manage the mess the other made. Both protecting something more vulnerable underneath. Worth asking: what did that part actually need instead? What would it have meant to get that?
In my side questy way I keep circling back to who gets to use which strategy visibly, and how it gets read when they do and I see it’s a power question. Sylvia Duckworth’s Wheel of Power and Privilege maps how gender, race, ability, class, and sexuality shape who holds power and who doesn’t. Whose retaliation gets read as aggression and whose as reasonable provocation? Whose withdrawal reads as dignity and whose as coldness or dysfunction. The map of who gets to use these strategies follows the contours of power pretty faithfully, I’m spotting. You?
So an invitation to pause and notice. Parts met with curiosity rather than shame gradually loosen their grip.
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Through an IFS lens, each of these is a part doing its absolute best. Each has a hope, for safety, for acknowledgment, for things to go right. Each has a fear underneath it. And underneath the fear, almost always, is something more tender.
But here's where it gets interesting.
For a long time, conversations about these strategies have implicitly assumed a kind of baseline. A default. A neurotypical relational template against which everything else is measured. I want to gently, respectfully, challenge that.
Neuronormative communication has its own relational strategies. Its own confusions. Its own costs.
Hint culture, saying the thing sideways and hoping it lands, is not neutral. It is a particular relational dialect. One that many people find genuinely baffling, not because they lack empathy, but because they take words at their meaning. White lies as social lubricant. Consensus as truth. Performing fine. Withdrawing through busyness rather than shutdown. Retaliation through social exclusion, the cold shoulder, the group chat, the quiet withdrawal of approval, rather than direct confrontation.
These are also losing strategies. They just got to call themselves normal.
I am not saying neuronormative wiring is worse. I am saying it is wiring. With its own costs, its own blind spots, and its own exiles under the table. Everyone has work to do. Nobody gets a pass.
which brings me to neurodivergent wiring For those of us whose nervous systems are wired differently, ADHD, autism, AuDHD and more, the five losing strategies show up shaped by the wiring underneath them.
This is the intersection I have been focusing on and in this month. I find it genuinely new territory it’s not been written about I don’t believe in this particular way
when a neurodivergent person needs to be right, it may not only be a wound running. It may be a nervous system that experiences being contradicted as genuine threat, Rejection Sensitivity arriving before any reflection is possible. It may be a mind that genuinely notices inconsistencies and injustices others miss, and cannot rest until they are named.
What others may experience as control, it may be executive function scaffolding rather than manipulation, or anticipatory anxiety that rehearses disaster in such detail that managing the environment feels like the only rational response. When they flood, it may be verbal processing, thoughts forming in the speaking, not before it. When they retaliate, sensory overload may have already taken the system to its limit before the conversation began. When they withdraw, it may be neurological shutdown rather than stonewalling.
The wiring does not cause the strategy but it may change how the strategy arrives, how intense it feels, and how hard it is to interrupt.
Understanding the wiring does not remove responsibility for impact but it changes the pathway to accountability. It gives a more accurate map of what is actually happening, so that genuine change becomes possible.
Three layers worth knowing (and thanks to friends in helping me put this together):
When any of these strategies shows up, it is rarely just one thing. I have come to think of it as three layers, all running at once.
The first is wiring, how the nervous system processes the world. This is not a wound. It needs accommodation, not healing.
The second is how we are wired to connect, the relational differences that are structural, independent of trauma. These need understanding and language, not repair.
The third is the adaptation, the defensive part or parts - the relational wound, what developed when wiring met a world that did not understand it. The shame, the masking, the protective parts. This layer is where the work is most alive
Most of the time, all three are present. The invitation is not to sort them neatly but to hold them with curiosity and ask, what does this particular thing actually need from me right now?
This therefore is a prototype.
I don't have all the answers. This intersection, neurodivergent nervous systems, relational strategies, the question of who gets called difficult and why, is something I am working with in real time. In my own system. In the circles I run. In the writing I am doing.
What I know is that it feels important. That bringing IFS, RLT and neurodivergence into the same conversation opens something that none of them opens alone.
I have put together a small companion leaflet, Your Wiring, Your Parts, Your Strategies, that goes deeper into each strategy and the neurodivergent layer within it. If you would like a copy, get in touch at drtashwilson@gmail.com with Losing Strategies in the subject line, my intention is to ping the file back asap