Love-Centered Therapy and the First Story Cycle: A Dyadic Process Model of Implicit Relational Activation, Autonomic...

Couples often recognize the patterns that keep them stuck long before they become capable of interrupting them. Love-Centered Therapy (LCT) is a clinically derived process model that synthesizes attachment theory, somatic psychology, interpersonal neurobiology, and decolonial scholarship. LCT organizes intervention through three interconnected constructs: learned templates for intimate relationships (the First Story), the repetitive unsatisfying interactions those templates produce (the First Story Cycle), and the emotions generated by that ongoing interaction (the Relational Field). Intervention focuses on helping partners approach their learned responses with curiosity rather than judgment, take responsibility for their own activation, and return to relational contact from a more regulated state.