The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships Read online

  Also by John Gottman

  Meta-Emotion:

  How Families Communicate Emotionally with Lynn Katz and Carole Hooven

  The Heart of Parenting:

  How to Raise an Emotionally Intelligent Child with Joan DeClaire

  The Analysis of Change

  Why Marriages Succeed or Fail with Nan Silver

  What Predicts Divorce?

  The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work with Nan Silver

  Copyright © 2001 by John M. Gottman, Ph.D., and Joan DeClaire

  Illustrations copyright © 2001 by Julie Schwartz Gottman, Ph.D.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Harmony Books is a registered trademark, and the Circle colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Crown Publishers in 2001, and subsequently published in paperback by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, in 2002.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gottman, John Mordechai.

  The relationship cure: a five-step guide to strengthening your marriage, family, and friendships / John M. Gottman and Joan DeClaire

  1. Interpersonal relations. 2. Interpersonal communication. 3. Social interaction.

  I. DeClaire, Joan. II. Title

  HM1106.G68   2001

  158.2—dc21    2001023115

  ISBN 9780609809532

  Ebook ISBN 9781524761776

  v4.1

  a

  To my wife, Julie; my daughter, Moriah; my sister, Batia; and my friend and colleague Bob.

  Turning toward them continues to be rewarding.

  —J.G.

  To my parents, Orville and Frances DeClaire, for caring so deeply.

  —J.D.

  This book has emerged primarily from three wonderful collaborations. The first is with my coauthor, Joan DeClaire, who has put a great deal of herself into this book and put up with many frustrations as we puzzled through the ideas in this work. It has been a huge creative effort, the scope of which we didn’t understand when we began. Second is the collaboration I have had with my very dedicated and very talented student Jani Driver. She did the hard work of building the bids and turning system from our apartment-lab data. It has been great fun working with her and seeing her talents develop. An amazing scholar and an intuitive observer, she has the potential to become a fine scientist and clinician. The third is the collaboration with my wife, Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, who put aside all her many obligations to do the powerful drawings for this book. I greatly appreciate all of her energy and talent in completing these drawings. She also brings to my work a great intuition and sensitivity for people, and every year I keep being more amazed at her depth of understanding and compassion. Without Julie’s vision, hope, optimism, and encouragement, my laboratory and my work would not be thriving today.

  The research that has resulted in this book was made possible by the continuous support I have received from my core laboratory staff, Dr. Sybil Carrere, Catherine Swanson, and Sharon Fentiman. We have been together and friends for more than a decade, and somehow it all works smoothly and keeps getting better all the time. Whether we are doing a television show or running a major study, we continue to be a great team. I also need to thank Virginia Rutter, whose energy, creativity, and imagination have been great at helping me bring this work to the public’s attention.

  I want to thank the staff of the Gottman Institute, particularly Etana Dykan, Peter Langsam, Kelly Scandone, Shai Steinberg, and Linda Wright, for all their support in planning and running workshops.

  Thanks also to the many students and staff who have taught me so much about relationships, particularly Julian Cook, Joann Wu Shortt, Angie Mittman, Jim Coan, Melissa Hawkins, Carole Hooven, Vanessa Kahen Johnson, Lynn Katz, Regina Rushe, Kimberly Ryan, Kristin Swanson, Amber Tabares, Rebecca Tyson, Beverly Wilson, and Dan Yoshimoto.

  I would like to acknowledge the amazingly insightful integrative work of Jaak Panksepp, whose great vision about affective neuroscience formed the basis for our work on the emotional command systems. I’ve read Jaak’s book three times and still have not tapped its great potential.

  The National Institute of Mental Health, particularly Drs. Molly Oliveri and Carolyn Morff, have generously supported my work on relationships. Recently, Ron Rabin, executive director of the Kirlin Foundation, and Craig Stewart, executive director of the Apex Foundation, have provided enormous support and encouragement of my work. They have emerged from the darkness and shown me the light ahead.

  And thanks to Mark Malone for his help with the manuscript.

  J.G.

  Cover

  Also by John Gottman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  1. How We Connect Emotionally

  2. Step One: Look at Your Bids for Connection

  3. Six Bid Busters and How to Avoid Them

  4. Step Two: Discover Your Brain’s Emotional Command Systems

  5. Step Three: Examine Your Emotional Heritage

  6. Step Four: Sharpen Your Emotional Communication Skills

  7. Step Five: Find Shared Meaning

  8. Apply What You’ve Learned In Marriage

  In Parenthood

  In Friendship

  In Sibling Relationships

  In Coworker Relationships

  9. In Conclusion

  A very fundamental and simple idea has emerged from our research: We have discovered the elementary constituents of closeness between people, and we have learned the basic principle that regulates how relationships work and also determines a great deal about how conflict between people can be regulated. That basic idea has to do with the way people, in mundane moments in everyday life, make attempts at emotional communication, and how others around them respond, or fail to respond, to these attempts.

  Those everyday moments are not very dramatic. They are easily overlooked, and unfortunately that is their usual fate. Nonetheless, they are very powerful. By becoming aware and mindful of such moments, we can give and receive the intimacy and support we all need from our closest relationships.

  We can now integrate this basic idea about moments of emotional connection with the seven basic emotional command systems of the brain. These command systems make it possible for us to see directions and purposes for our emotions. Awareness of the emotions these command systems generate allows us to examine what may be missing in our lives, and also to examine mismatches between our needs and the needs of those who are most important to us. Awareness of our emotions within ourselves and the emotions generated within our closest relationships can provide a natural guide for our search for meaning, and can give us the direction in our lives that we are continually seeking.

  This book is designed to provide the guidelines and skills for building that awareness.

  A work team at one of Seattle’s floundering Internet companies has a problem that’s common in many workplaces: They can’t communicate with their boss. If you catch a few team members at a local tavern after hours, you’re likely to hear an exchange something like this:

  “Joseph is the coldest
fish I’ve ever worked for.”

  “I know what you mean. The other day I saw this picture of a little boy on his bulletin board and I said, ‘Cute kid. Is that your son?’ And he goes, ‘No.’”

  “And that was it?”

  “Yeah. So I’m standing there wondering, ‘Well, who is it then? Your nephew? Your stepson? Your love child?’”

  “He’s just so out of it. And to think we were so jazzed when we heard he was going to head the team, with that vaunted success record of his.”

  “He’s smart, all right. But what good has it done us? We still haven’t launched the site.”

  “That’s because he has zero people skills. Have you noticed how all the other managers try to avoid him?”

  “Yeah, that’s what’s screwing us up. We have no real standing in the company. I was hoping he could take our ideas up the ladder and we’d finally get the resources we need. But he never asks for our input. He never even asks if you’ve had a nice weekend.”

  “Remember when we moved to the new building and he decided to do away with private offices? He said we’d have an open floor plan to ‘enhance communication.’ What a crock!”

  “Stop it, you guys. I feel sorry for him.”

  “Sorry for him? Why? He’s the one with all the stock options!”

  “Well, I think he wants to be a better boss—he just doesn’t know how.”

  “Oh yeah? How can you tell?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a guess. Maybe he knows how disappointed we all feel in him. And that makes it even harder for him. I can’t read his mind, but I bet that’s what’s going on.”

  Next meet Kristine, age fifty-four, an advertising executive whose mother was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Kristine would like to help with her mother’s care, but Mom lives several states away, near Kristine’s sister, Alice. Here’s a typical phone call between the sisters:

  “How’s Mom?” Kristine asks tentatively.

  “She’ll be better once the insurance pays her hospital bill,” Alice responds. “That’s all she talks about.”

  “But that was last December. The insurance still hasn’t paid?”

  “No, not that hospital stay. I’m talking about this last time, when she had that seizure.”

  “What seizure?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “She was in the hospital last month after a seizure. They ran some tests.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about this. Why didn’t you call?”

  “It was just so hectic. And it’s impossible to get hold of you with your voice mail or whatever. Besides, there’s nothing you can do from the East Coast.”

  “But, Alice! I’ve asked you to call me when these things happen!”

  “Well, it really doesn’t matter now. They put her on some new medicine and she’s doing much better. We got through it fine. There’s no need to worry.”

  But Kristine does worry. And she’s angry as well. She tells herself that Alice isn’t cutting her out of the loop on purpose; she’s just caught up in her own concerns. But now that Mom’s health is going downhill, Kristine and her sister have got to cooperate better than this. Otherwise, Kristine might miss her only chance to be there when Mom needs help most. And if that happens, she and Alice could hold grievances against each other for the rest of their lives.

  Now meet Phil and Tina, a couple in their thirties who seem to have it all. Solid jobs, two beautiful kids, lots of good friends—and they love each other. Trouble is, they haven’t had sex in six months.

  Seated together on a small sofa in a therapist’s office, the couple describes how the problem started.

  “Tina’s company was going through this big reorganization,” Phil explains. “And every day she’d come home exhausted.”

  “It was a real drag,” Tina remembers. “I was spending all day in these long, tense meetings, trying to defend people’s jobs. When I got home, I couldn’t shake the stress. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I felt so anxious. Phil tried to be nice, but…”

  “I wanted to help her, to tell her it was going to be okay, but I couldn’t do anything right. It wasn’t like we had this huge, catastrophic breakdown or anything. It was more about the little stuff. I’d kiss her on the back of her neck or start to rub her stomach when we were in bed—things that used to get her attention. But now I was getting nothing in return. Zip. It definitely threw me off balance.”

  “And I felt that if I didn’t get all hot and bothered the minute he touched me, he was going to be wounded or something,” Tina explained. “It just made me so tense.”

  Phil got the point. “She has all these people leaning on her at work. And then she comes home to this guy who’s feeling insecure, who’s whining about his needs. It was such a turnoff for her.”

  So, to preserve his pride, Phil quit trying. “I got tired of the rejection,” he explains to the therapist. “I don’t know how long we can go on like this. It’s tough to keep putting yourself out there only to be shut down all the time. Sure, I love her, but sometimes I’m afraid we’re not going to make it.”

  “It’s not working for me, either,” Tina says through tears. Then, after a long silence, she adds, “I miss making love, too. I miss the way it used to be.”

  “Well, maybe that’s a place to start,” Phil says quietly. “Because you never told me that before. You never gave me that information.”

  Phil couldn’t have said it better. Whether people are struggling to save a marriage, to cooperate in a family crisis, or to build rapport with a difficult boss, they usually have one thing in common: They need to share emotional information that can help them feel connected.

  The disgruntled workers at the Seattle Internet company need to know that their boss shares their dream of launching a successful site. They need to know that he appreciates their work and ideas. But when they turn to him for this emotional information, he fails to respond. In fact, he can’t even react sociably to their attempts at friendly conversation. He doesn’t inspire confidence that they’ll be able to achieve their goal. As a result, the team members feel demoralized and they doubt whether they can make the launch.

  A similar dynamic is happening between the sisters whose mother is sick. Kristine has asked Alice to keep her informed about their mother’s condition. But she’s after more than medical information. She wants to feel as though she is part of the family, especially in this time of crisis. By failing to call when their mother is hospitalized, Alice shows that she doesn’t really consider Kristine a part of the world she inhabits with Mom. Alice may blame the miles between their homes, but the emotional distance Kristine experiences seems even wider.

  Phil and Tina are like many couples I see in marital therapy. Whatever conflicts the couples may have—sex, money, housework, kids—all of them long for evidence that their spouses understand and care about what they’re feeling.

  Sharing such information through words and behavior is essential for improving any significant relationship. This includes bonds with our kids, our siblings, our friends, our coworkers. But even our best efforts to connect can be jeopardized as a result of one basic problem: failure to master what I call the “bid”—the fundamental unit of emotional communication.

  This book will show you five steps you can take to achieve this mastery and make your relationships work:

  1. Analyze the way you bid and the way you respond to others’ bids.

  2. Discover how your brain’s emotional command systems affect your bidding process.

  3. Examine how your emotional heritage impacts your ability to connect with others and your style of bidding.

  4. Develop your emotional communication skills.

  5. Find shared meaning with others.

  But first let’s make sure you understand what I mean when I talk about bids. A bid can be a question, a gesture, a look, a touch—any single expression that says, “I want to feel connected to y
ou.” A response to a bid is just that—a positive or negative answer to somebody’s request for emotional connection.

  At the University of Washington, my research colleagues and I recently discovered how profoundly this bidding process affects relationships. We learned, for example, that husbands headed for divorce disregard their wives’ bids for connection 82 percent of the time, while husbands in stable relationships disregard their wives’ bids just 19 percent of the time. Wives headed for divorce act preoccupied with other activities when their husbands bid for their attention 50 percent of the time, while happily married wives act preoccupied in response to their husbands’ bids just 14 percent of the time.

  When we compared how often couples in the two groups extended bids and responded to them, we found another significant difference. During a typical dinner-hour conversation, the happily married people engaged one another as many as one hundred times in ten minutes. Those headed for divorce engaged only sixty-five times in that same period. On the surface the contrast may seem inconsequential, but taken together over a year, the additional moments of connection among the happy couples would be enough to fill a Russian novel.

  We also found that this high rate of positive engagement paid off in tremendous ways. For example, we now know that people who react positively to one another’s bids have greater access to expressions of humor, affection, and interest during arguments. It’s almost as if all the good feelings they’ve accumulated by responding respectfully and lovingly to one another’s bids form a pot of emotional “money in the bank.” Then, when a conflict arises, they can draw on this reservoir of good feeling. It’s as if something inside unconsciously says, “I may be mad as hell at him right now, but he’s the guy who listens so attentively when I complain about my job. He deserves a break.” Or, “I’m as angry as I’ve ever been with her, but she’s the one who always laughs at my jokes. I think I’ll cut her some slack.”