Re: Pattern to avoid circular reference?

I've been facing this situation often:

class NewFeature
{
  TheClass *theClass;
  NewFeature(TheClass *t) { theClass = t; }
  void act() { // call methods on theClass }

}

class TheClass
{
  NewFeature *feature; // More commonly, a list of NewFeature objects
  AddFeature(NewFeature *f) { feature = f; // or append f to a list of
NewFeature objects }

}

In the above case, TheClass class contains pointers to NewFeature
objects, and each NewFeature object contains a pointer to the same
TheClass instance. This does seem to work most of the time but I'm not
comfortable with the idea of this circular reference.

Is there a standard design pattern to overcome this? The closest I saw
was visitor pattern. If I use that here, I'd do something like

class NewFeature
{
  TheClass *theClass;
  void accept(TheClass *t) { theClass = t; }
  void act() { // call methods on theClass }

}

class TheClass
{
  AddFeature(NewFeature *f) { f->accept(this); f->act(); }

}

But in this case, I'm losing the ability to keep track of the
NewFeature objects I have. Especially, if NewFeature.act() runs some
thread that calls TheClass methods later, I want TheClass to be able
to start / stop the thread when I want; so maintaining a list of those
pointers will be useful. If I do, I end up having my earlier code.

Please help!