Feedback loops

I’ve been doing some thinking lately about feedback loops.

If you are able to tap into a positive feedback loop in your thinking and behavior, it can be a wonderful thing. As an example, consider a novice guitarist. She’s more likely to practice if she feels like she’s making progress and getting better at her instrument. And the more she practices, the more progress she’ll make, the more at ease she feels. Which makes her want to practice more, which makes her better, which …

Sadly, the difference between a positive feedback loop and a negative one is often just a subtle difference in perspective. If feeling awkward playing the guitar makes you want to play and practice less, which means your skills atrophy, so you feel even more awkward, so you practice even less …

Which is just a long-winded way of saying feedback loops can be driven in either direction.

I’ve had experiences with those sorts of loops in relationships as well. I tend to warm up to a relationship fairly slowly. It takes a while for me to feel at ease and really comfortable with a person. But as I get more at ease and more relaxed with someone, the relationship starts going better, which makes me even more comfortable, which …

(Editorial aside: Apparently I don’t know how to talk about feedback loops without using a lot of ellipses.)

But I’ve also seen negative feedback loops in relationships. In my first serious relationship (hello there, you there was a time where my girlfriend felt insecure and threatened. Which made her very clingy and possessive and needy. Which pushed my buttons and made me look for more space. Which left her feeling even more insecure, so she became even more clingy and …

I find those negative cycles to be enormously difficult to break. With that girlfriend, it took a concerted effort from both of us. She worked hard at trusting more in the relationship and accepting a certain amount of ebb and flow over time, and I made an effort to not pull away when she was feeling clingy. It was really hard work. Feedback loops are self-perpetuating and I found it very easy to slip back into the negative patterns that I was trying so hard to break.

I wish I knew a reliable (and easy) way to break those negative patterns, or even how to reverse direction and drive the loop in the positive direction instead. It’s deceptively easy to spot them and offer solutions when you see the patterns in someone else’s life, but I know from painful experience that it’s a very different challenge when you’re on the inside looking out.