The Push-Pull That Feels Like Love (But Isn't)

Written By Jessica Luiz

September 8, 2026

Why the tension–outburst–repair cycle teaches people that safety has to be earned

🎯 The Shape, Not the Incident

Almost nobody comes into my office describing a single incident. What they describe, when I ask them to really look, is a shape: tension quietly building, an outburst, and then a pull back into apology, reassurance, and closeness — followed, eventually, by the tension starting again.

“It’s not even that bad most of the time. It’s that I never know when it’s coming, so I’m always managing it.”

That phrase — always managing it — is the part I listen for. Because the shape of this cycle isn't incidental. It teaches something. It teaches a child, or a partner, that love and safety are conditional: available when the other person's emotions are being carefully tended, withdrawn or endangered when they aren't.

And the reconciliation phase is the part almost everyone misreads. It feels like love returning. Frequently, what it's actually doing is resetting the cycle and reinforcing the lesson that peace is something you earn back.

What matters clinically is never the worst single moment. It's the same shape, recurring, over months or years.

🧠 What the Science Shows

  • The pattern was named nearly fifty years ago. Psychologist Lenore Walker (1979) described a three-phase cycle — tension-building, an acute incident, and a "honeymoon" phase of remorse and repair — after which tension begins accumulating again.

  • But the tidy arc has real limits. Later researchers pushed back on the idea that every coercive relationship follows this sequence. Michael Johnson's (2008) work distinguishes intimate terrorism — violence embedded in a broader pattern of control — from situational couple violence, which arises from specific escalating conflicts without an underlying control structure. The distinction matters, because the interventions differ and misapplying one can make things worse.

  • The control, not the violence, is the organizing feature. Evan Stark's (2007) concept of coercive control reframed abuse as a liberty crime rather than an assault crime: surveillance, isolation, micro-regulation of daily life, and intimidation can entrap someone thoroughly without a single act that would register as violence in court. England and Wales criminalized it in 2015; California added coercive control to the definition of domestic abuse for restraining order purposes in 2020, and Connecticut and Hawaii followed.

  • Psychological aggression is the most common form, by a wide margin. In CDC's national survey, roughly 49% of women and 45% of men reported lifetime psychological aggression by an intimate partner (Leemis et al., 2022) — substantially more prevalent than physical or sexual violence.

  • Children absorb the pattern, not the peace. Cummings and Davies's emotional security theory holds that what predicts children's adjustment is not whether parents conflict but whether conflict resolves in ways that leave the child's sense of the family's security intact. Unresolved, hostile, or cyclically re-erupting conflict predicts internalizing and externalizing problems even when children are never the target.

  • Chronic vigilance has a physiological cost. Sustained anticipation of threat keeps stress systems engaged in ways that carry measurable wear over time — what McEwen (1998) described as allostatic load. The exhaustion people report isn't imagined and isn't weakness. It's the bill for staying braced.

🧭 Being Bigger Doesn't Put You Outside This

I want to name something directly, because I see it minimized constantly.

Being a man — and being physically larger than your partner — does not place you outside this pattern. Intimate partner violence is not primarily a question of who could overpower whom. A very large share of the harm is psychological, and psychology doesn't check size or gender at the door.

Feeling responsible for managing someone else's escalations. Walking on eggshells. Watching a stated boundary met with more intensity rather than more respect. Editing what you say in your own home. That wears on a nervous system regardless of who is doing the bracing.

The data bear this out: CDC estimates roughly one in ten men in the U.S. has experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner with IPV-related impact, and the impacts men most commonly report are fear, concern for safety, and PTSD symptoms. Hines and Douglas (2011) documented significant PTSD symptomatology in men sustaining partner violence — alongside real barriers to being believed when they sought help.

Both things are true at once: women are far more likely to be seriously injured or killed by a partner, and men experiencing coercive control are routinely disbelieved, told they can't be victims, or asked what they did to provoke it. Naming the second does not diminish the first.

If you're the person in the story nobody expects to be at risk, you are allowed to take the cost seriously.

A safety note: if you're considering changes to a relationship where escalation has been a feature, the separation period carries elevated risk. Plan it with someone who knows this terrain — an advocate, a therapist, or the

National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788), which can help you think through options.

🧭 The ACT Lens

ACT has an uncomfortable, useful question at its center: is what you're doing working?

Not is it understandable. Not are you trying hard. Is it working — in the direction of the life you actually want?

Most people in this cycle have been running the same strategy for years: manage the tension better. Anticipate more accurately. Get better at de-escalating. The strategy makes complete sense, and it has usually produced a version of the same shape, over and over.

ACT calls the honest reckoning with that creative hopelessness — not despair about your life, but a clear-eyed acknowledgment that this particular approach has been thoroughly tested. That acknowledgment is often where something can finally move.

What comes next is not a decision you have to make today. It's a smaller thing: willingness to stop pretending the cycle is a series of unrelated bad days.

🔧 Skills You Can Use Today

1. Track the shape, not the incidents. For four weeks, note dates and one line about what happened — kept somewhere private and secure. People consistently underestimate frequency, because the reconciliation phase overwrites the memory of the last one.

2. Ask the workability question out loud."Has managing this better made it happen less often?" Answer honestly. That's information, not a verdict on you.

3. Rename the state accurately. "I'm anxious and oversensitive" versus "I'm hypervigilant because the environment is unpredictable" are different diagnoses with different implications. The second one is usually the accurate one.

4. Tell one person the whole shape. Not the worst incident — the pattern. Isolation is what allows the cycle to keep looking like an unlucky run of individual events.

🧷 Untrendy but True

If peace in your home is something you have to keep earning, it was never peace. It was a truce you were maintaining alone.

Resources for the Curious

📚 Books

  • Why Does He Do That? — Lundy Bancroft. Still the most practical book on the internal logic of controlling behavior, written for people living with it.

  • Coercive Control — Evan Stark. The academic text that reshaped how the field understands abuse as control rather than assault.

  • No Visible Bruises — Rachel Louise Snyder. Reporting on how thoroughly the systems meant to intervene miss what's actually happening.

🎧 Podcasts

  • Something Was Wrong — First-person accounts of coercive relationships; the recognition factor is often what gets people to name their own pattern.

  • Navigating Narcissism with Dr. Ramani — Clinically grounded on manipulation dynamics without pathologizing everyone difficult.

  • Betrayal — On the slow discovery that a relationship was not what it appeared to be.

▶️ Videos

References

Cummings, E. M., & Davies, P. T. (2010). Marital conflict and children: An emotional security perspective. Guilford Press.

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and commitment therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Hines, D. A., & Douglas, E. M. (2011). Symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder in men who sustain intimate partner violence: A study of helpseeking and community samples. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 12(2), 112–127. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022983

Johnson, M. P. (2008). A typology of domestic violence: Intimate terrorism, violent resistance, and situational couple violence. Northeastern University Press.

Leemis, R. W., Friar, N., Khatiwada, S., Chen, M. S., Kresnow, M., Smith, S. G., Caslin, S., & Basile, K. C. (2022). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2016/2017 report on intimate partner violence. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), 171–179. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM199801153380307

Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press.

Walker, L. E. (1979). The battered woman. Harper & Row.

Jessica Luiz https://jessicaluizpsyd.com
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