Many of the relational patterns that create distress in adult relationships began as intelligent survival adaptations in childhood. What once helped us stay safe, connected, and emotionally protected, can later show up in intimate relationships as reactivity, withdrawal, anxious pursuit, control, self-erasure, compliance, or conflict.
Relational Life Therapy understands couple conflict through the lens of survival adaptations and losing strategies, with Terry Real identifying three core survival responses: fight, flight, and fix. This workshop offers a trauma-informed, parts-based deepening of that framework, exploring how survival responses organise the Adaptive Child and shape many of the reactive patterns couples become trapped within.
Drawing on RLT, subpersonality theory, attachment theory, mindfulness, and contemporary trauma-informed practice, we will explore how survival responses such as fight, flight, fix (also known as submit, fawn, appease, or please), and attach, can be understood as distinct parts within the Adaptive Child. Rather than viewing these responses as pathology, resistance, or character flaws, this workshop reframes them as adaptive strategies developed in response to relational environments where safety, voice, connection, authenticity, or emotional expression may once have felt threatened.
Particular attention will be given to taking a deeper dive into fix/submit and attach, both of which frequently appear in couples work through patterns such as self-erasure, over-accommodation, anxious pursuit, loss of voice, over-attunement to the other, and difficulty “rocking the boat.”
By mapping survival responses onto RLT’s Five Losing Strategies, participants will learn to recognise reactive relational patterns not simply as willful behaviours, but as survival-based adaptations rooted in attachment history, trauma, and relational learning. This trauma-informed lens supports clinicians in working with greater attunement, precision, compassion, and accountability — particularly when trauma keeps one or both partners locked in first consciousness.
Ultimately, the workshop explores how mindfulness, awareness, and relational attunement can help clients move from automatic survival responses toward second consciousness, Wise Adult functioning, and healthier relational choice. Oftentimes, our triggers are the clearest indicators of where our wounds live — and therefore where healing becomes possible. Understanding relational patterns begins with awareness: noticing how we react under threat, and learning that new responses, greater choice, and more relational ways of being are possible.
Dolma’s workshop was a masterful synthesis of complex material, delivered with clarity, rigour, and deep passion… Her commitment to reclaiming the contributions of Psychosynthesis, and of Assagioli himself, felt both timely and necessary. A rare and inspiring offering.
