Relational patterns repeat because each partner moves through their own experiential loop. The loop is a descriptive way of capturing how perception, experience, and behaviour braid together within an individual. It is not a literal structure in the brain; it is the pattern through which a person organises their moment-to-moment reality. Each partner has their own loop, shaped by their blueprint, and the interaction between these loops produces the familiar choreography of the relationship.

Perception sits at the entry point. What each partner notices, ignores, or interprets is filtered through their experiential history. That perceptual frame shapes the internal experience that follows—states of safety, threat, irritation, rejection, or contact. Experience then drives behaviour. And behaviour is comprehensive: emotional expression, tone, posture, gestures, silence, pacing—and crucially, the language used to describe what is happening. How a moment is spoken about is part of the behaviour that shapes the loop.

Because behaviour becomes the other partner’s perceptual input, and their perception shapes their experience, the process becomes circular. A glance interpreted as criticism shifts the partner’s internal state; that shift alters their tone; the altered tone reinforces the initial perception. The loop recreates itself. Each partner’s loop feeds the other’s, creating a self-stabilising pattern that repeats regardless of intention or insight.

Therapeutic work therefore focuses on disrupting the loop in real time. Explanation cannot interrupt a pattern that is formed through lived interaction. Insight does not alter a braid already in motion. The intervention must occur inside the moment—shifting tone, pacing, posture, or language in ways the existing loop cannot easily assimilate. These live disruptions introduce new experiential conditions that require the loop to reorganise. When repeated, they form the beginnings of a new loop: different perceptual anchors, different emotional states, and different behavioural repertoires.

Change takes hold when experience shifts, not when understanding increases. The loop must be interrupted as it unfolds.