Free take-home handout
When You're in the Cycle
A printable EFT guide for the hardest part of a negative cycle: the moment it is happening. Once you have mapped your cycle, this is what to do when one of you gets sharp and the other goes quiet, in real time.
Free to download and share with your therapist. Educational, not a substitute for therapy.
What's inside
- The one shift that changes the moment: de-escalate first, handle the content later
- Each partner's counter-move, plus what the sharpness and the shutdown really mean underneath
- A worked example showing a couple catch the cycle and turn it around, line by line
- The Gottman flooding time-out: how to take a real break without it reading as abandonment
- Fill-in prompts for your signal phrase, your break plan, and each partner's move, with example staying-signal lines
Who it's for
Couples who can name their cycle but freeze when it is actually happening, and want concrete in-the-moment moves to step out of it together.
Adapted from Sue Johnson's Emotionally Focused Therapy and the Gottman research on flooding.
My Mental Climb adapts established therapy frameworks for educational use and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or certified by their originators, including The Gottman Institute.
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A worksheet gets you started. If this is a pattern that keeps coming back, a free 15-minute consult with our intake coordinator is a low-pressure way to talk through it and get matched with the right clinician on our team.
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FAQ
What do we actually do the moment we are in the cycle?
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Name it out loud first, with a phrase you both agree on, like “we're in it.” Then do your counter-move: the sharper partner slows down and leads with the softer feeling and one clear need, and the quieter partner sends a staying signal instead of shutting down. The goal in the moment is to de-escalate, not to solve the problem.
Why not just work it out while we are upset?
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Once one of you is flooded, with a racing heart and no room to hear the other, no repair happens. Trying to solve the content mid-cycle is usually what keeps it going. The move is to step out, let your bodies settle, and come back to the content calm.
Do we need therapy, or can we use this on our own?
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Many couples can practice these in-the-moment moves on their own once they have mapped their cycle. The deeper work, where the cycle loses its charge instead of only getting managed, is learning to reach for each other from the vulnerable feelings underneath, and that usually goes faster with an EFT-informed couples therapist.