Gottman Couple Therapy

1 Build love maps

This gets couples to know each other through open-ended questions. Knowledge of each other’s history, values, likes and dislikes are the foundation of any relationships.

2 Share fondness and admiration

This is the antidote to contempt (one of the four horsemen). Human beings tend to scan the environment for what others have done wrong. This helps cultivate a culture of compliments and appreciation instead.

3 Turn towards instead of away

Couples keep sending emotional bids to connect with each other. This part offers exercises to get couple to do gestures to save up in the emotional bank account and to support each other emotionally.

4 The positive perspective:

Assess whether couples’ positive affect outweighs the negative. We emphasize using the first 3 modules to build the couple’s friendship. This is the foundation for further therapy success.

5 Manage conflict:

Before tackling any conflicts, we need to understand the repeating negative cycles during conflicts. We need to identify the behaviours each does during a conflict, including defensiveness, criticism, blaming, contempt, aggressiveness, stonewalling, withdrawal, and so on. Then we need to understand what are the internal dynamics that make each person behave in certain ways.

There are two types of conflicts: one is resolvable conflict. This type takes effective problem-solving skills including: softened startup, accepting influence, repair and de-escalation, and compromise. The other type is perpetual problems that are hard to resolve. This type of conflict takes high level of positive affect during the discussion.

The next two steps help overcome these kinds of gridlocks.

6 Making life dreams come true

All of us have hopes, dreams, and fears that stem from childhood experiences and our core values. When each partner’s dreams and values clash, it creates the perpetual problems. It’s important for couples to understand and support each other’s deep fears and dreams. We will explore which part of these are comprisable and which are not; how can the couple support each other’s dreams.

7 Create shared meaning:

How people distribute their time and resources shows their beliefs, culture, and things they find meaningful. Everyone also has a narrative of their life and their relationship. Here we discuss the meaning of family rituals, roles, goals, missions, and what feelings they bring up. Every relationship is cross-cultural, so it’s important to co-create shared meaning system.

Another central intervention of the Gottman approach is to down-regulate negative affect during conflicts. Gottman identified four highly toxic behaviours: criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling.

Stonewalling

Criticism

Defensiveness

Contempt

Couples who do a lot of these things are more likely to have unstable and dissatisfying relationships. Gottman calls these four behaviours the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Gottman therapists will behaviourally intervene to reduce the occurrence of the “Four Horsemen.” The antidotes to these behaviours are: gentle start-up, appreciation, taking responsibility, and self-soothing. Part of the intervention is the famous speaker-listener exercise.

There are a lot of helpful resources in Gottman’s famous book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (2015). There are theories as foundational knowledge to understand about relationships and exercises to work together on your own time.

Another useful tool is this Gottman card deck application available on both iOS and Android. There are many question cards that can pick from to ask each other. This way, you will never run of conversation topics during quality time with each other. Again, this helps to build positive affect with each other.