Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one's conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.
                                                         J. G. Ballard

The dynamics of abusive relationships show up in less intense forms in many relationships which are not frankly abusive. We can take what therapists have learned in working to heal abuse and use that knowledge to help with less extreme situations.
Short of abuse, we often relate to one another in ways which are coercive, detached or passive, inadvertently misusing one another, and often repeating dysfunctional patterns implicitly learned in childhood and early adulthood. By looking at patterns in abusive relationships, we can recognize their less extreme cousins in our own personal and professional relationships. By increasing our awareness of how these patterns play out as "enactments" in current relationships, we have more choices to pick from, and can enjoy better outcomes when troubles come up.

In Treating the Adult Survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Psychoanalytic Perspective, Frawley and Davies (1994) spell out four different types of traumatic interactions people get into without meaning to do. In their model of therapeutic process, they discuss in painstaking detail how these patterns crop up in the therapeutic relationship. If they run their course without reflection and working through, they can spell the end of the therapy, or worse, lead to destructive repetitions for both patient and therapist. If the therapeutic couple can go through these enactments and reflect on and learn from them, there is a chance for recovery and growth to take place. The four basic patterns are:

1. The uninvolved nonabusing parent and the neglected child
2. The sadistic abuser and the helpless, impotently enraged victim
3. The idealized, omnipotent rescuer and the entitled child who demands to be rescued
4. The seducer and the seduced

They make the point that these may not be the only patterns, but they are the ones which come up and up again over thousands of cumulative hours of working with people.
Each of these “relational matrices," as Frawley and Davies call them, has two variations, leading to eight "positions"—for example, one person might be become the seducer and the other the seduced at one time, and at another time they may trade places. These roles inevitably get expressed in as the relationship grows, particularly during periods of stress, offering opportunities for the relationship to break-up and fail, or alternatively to recognize and learn from these challenging and often painful experiences. Learning from them isn't easy, and takes practice and dedication, as well as the ability to tolerate distress. A lot of times, it is easier to end the relationship as a way to relieve distress, than stick through the difficult times—let alone learn from the difficult times.

Stressful periods include, for instance, obvious threats to the relationship from becoming distant or growing apart, considering separating, infidelity, a change in life goals for one individual or the other, and importantly, as intimacy and commitment increase. Getting closer can trigger deep fears and paradoxically drive people apart by pushing them into familiar and often problematic roles (see also work with co-authors on "irrelationship") which are associated with early life problems with intimacy, especially getting used to mistreatment within intimate relationships with people we depended on growing up.
In the trauma literature, it’s common to talk about 3 major roles—victim, abuser, and bystander. Here’s where they map onto those four matrices:

1. The uninvolved nonabusing parent (bystander) and the neglected child (victim)
2. The sadistic abuser (abuser) and the helpless, impotently enraged victim (victim)
3. The idealized, omnipotent rescuer (bystander/abuser [anti-activist—see below]) and the entitled child who demands to be rescued (victim)
4. The seducer (abuser) and the seduced (victim)

In psychoanalytic therapy, the therapist—and hopefully later on when the capacity for recognition and reflection has developed, the patient—use the understanding that difficult patterns are inevitable to stay with the difficult work, seeing therapy as a kind of theater in which learning can take place. This also involves learning that abusive dynamics are absorbed early on in life and repeat unconsciously later in life, keeping one foot in the difficulty of the dynamics and another foot outside, reflecting on what is taking place and making emotional connections.

The basic conceptual tools of psychoanalytic therapy include the idea of transference—that the patient tends to see the therapist as being similar to past figures (both "good" and "bad") and that this may sometimes lead to a distorted view of the the therapist (again in both positive and negative ways). When one person sees the other person in a exaggerated negative way, analytic therapists call this "projection"—and when one person gets pulled into acting like the projected role, this is called "projective identification". For example, a patient may temporarily feel like the therapist "doesn't really care" if he or she goes away for vacation and can't be easily reached.
Transference, projection and projective identification are just like when we go home for the holidays and we find ourselves regressing, often to our dismay acting the way other people expect us to and the way we fear we will, the way we did when we were younger. It's especially powerful when the whole family is wrapped up in the process, creating a web of distortion without anyone stepping back and wondering what is really going on.

The therapist, in parallel with transference, has "countertransference"—at times experiencing the patient in distorted ways based on the powerful influence of the transference, as well as the therapist's own developmental experiences. However, the therapist, through training and their own therapy, has presumably learned to an extent how to separate the "fantasy" components of countertransference from the "reality" of the situation. If caught up in repeating dynamics, the therapist especially early on in treatment takes the lead in recognizing enactments while they are happening or afterward, and has permission to comment about what happened, how it felt, what it meant, and make connections with past and current experiences. This capacity to "make use of the countertransference", represents a fourth position which I like to call the “activist” position. As therapy progresses, both the patient and the therapist share the job of reflecting on what has happened, a capacity which grows with time and practice.

The activist position is a place from which thinking and reflection can take place, a vantage point of relative sanity in which emotions and thoughts can connect. Rather than being all-encompassing, emotional reactions are held in a reflective space where they can be useful. Rather than either overwhelming and destroying the relationship, or being completely numbed or pushed out of awareness (dissociated), emotions are married with thinking to make sense of otherwise confusing and disturbing interactions which if unchecked would lead to rupture and isolation, rather than repair and mutuality.

It is indeed a very active position, as it requires more mental and emotional work than taking the other person's behavior at face value does. Seeing the other person in a simplistic way, as being controlling or too passive, for example, provides the relief of a quick answer, but is often overly simplistic and leads to no positive change. The activist position is therefore very different from trying to be a cardboard cutout "rescuer" or "fixer", and is a position which can be shared. The goal is for both people involved (or all people in the case of a family or other group) to reach the point where they are able to reflect together on what is happening, make connections with their own experiences without accusing the other(s) of being to blame, and engage in the collaborative effort required to make use of challenging experiences, rather than taking the more familiar path of maintaining the status quo.