Gottman Quotes

If you think your boss is stupid, remember: you wouldn’t have a job if he was any smarter.

People are in one of two states in a relationship,” Gottman went on. “The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s just in a crummy mood.’ Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative.

Thus, the critical dimension in understanding whether a marriage will work or not, becomes the extent to which the male can accept the influence of the woman he loves and become socialized in emotional communication.

Friendship fuels the flames of romance because it offers the best protection against feeling adversarial toward your spouse.

Successful long-term relationships are created through small words, small gestures, and small acts.

The point is that neuroses don’t have to ruin a marriage. If you can accommodate each other’s “crazy” side and handle it with caring, affection, and respect, your marriage can thrive.

Human nature dictates that it is virtually impossible to accept advice from someone unless you feel that that person understands you.

taking responsibility—even for a small part of the problem in communication—presents the opportunity for great repair.

We move in response to our conversation partner’s face, and our brain also fires as we move those muscles and stirs the passions. Paralyzing the face is idiotic.

Women find a man’s willingness to do housework extremely erotic.

When parents offer their children empathy and help them to cope with negative feelings like anger, sadness, and fear, parents build bridges of loyalty and affection.

Some people leave a marriage literally, by divorcing. Others do so by leading parallel lives together.

Once you understand this, you will be ready to accept one of the most surprising truths about marriage: Most marital arguments cannot be resolved. Couples spend year after year trying to change each other’s mind—but it can’t be done. This is because most of their disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences of lifestyle, personality, or values. By fighting over these differences, all they succeed in doing is wasting their time and harming their marriage.

You can spend a lifetime being curious about the inner world of your partner, and being brave enough to share your own inner world, and never be done discovering all there is to know about each other. It’s exciting.

The problem in today’s economy is that people are typically starting a family at the very time they are also supposed to be doing their best work. They are trying to be productive at some of the most stressful times of their lives. What if companies took this unhappy collision of life events seriously? They could offer Gottman’s intervention as a benefit for every newly married, or newly pregnant, employee.

But in their day-to-day lives, they have hit upon a dynamic that keeps their negative thoughts and feelings about each other (which all couples have) from overwhelming their positive ones. They have what I call an emotionally intelligent marriage.

Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.

They don’t object to their children’s displays of anger, sadness, or fear. Nor do they ignore them. Instead, they accept negative emotions as a fact of life and they use emotional moments as opportunities for teaching their kids important life lessons and building closer relationships with them.

When a child has that strong emotional connection with a parent, the parent’s upset, disappointment, or anger creates enough pain in the child to become a disciplinary event in itself.

Trust is built in very small moments, which I call 'sliding door' moments. In any interaction, there is a possibility of connecting with your partner or turning away from your partner. One such moment is not important, but if you're always choosing to turn away, then trust erodes in a relationship- very gradually, very slowly.

even in stable, happy relationships: When conflict begins with hostility, defensive sequences result

And when your family shares a deeper intimacy and respect, problems between family members will seem lighter to bear.

Our partners don’t always have to think like we think. That’s what makes life interesting—it would be boring to be married to yourself. In fact, that’s called being single.

Make dedicated, nonnegotiable time for each other a priority, and never stop being curious about your partner. Don’t assume you know who they are today, just because you went to bed with them the night before. In short, never stop asking questions. But ask the right kind of questions.

Happily ever after simply means that both partners are known, valued, accepted for who they are and who they are becoming. The goal is to be able to love your partner more deeply each and every year you’re together.

Admit when you're wrong. Shut up when you're right.

The early part of a relationship, besides the fun and infatuation, is about establishing trust and a shared future.

The greatest gift a couple can give their baby is a loving relationship, because that relationship nourishes Baby’s development.

You live longer if you are married or have a long-term partner. She lives longer if she has female friends. You live longer if she lives longer. Encourage her female friendships.

There is no such thing as constructive criticism,” says John Gottman. “All criticism is painful.” He is correct. We never like to hear that there is something “wrong” with us, or that something needs changing, especially if this message is coming from the loved one we most depend on. Psychologist Jill Hooley’s work at Harvard measures the impact of critical, hostile comments made by loved ones and shows just how venomous disparagement by those we rely on can be. This censure may even trigger relapse of mental illness, such as depression.

Converting a complaint into a positive need requires a mental transformation from what is wrong with one’s partner to what one’s partner can do that would work. It may be helpful here to review my belief that within every negative feeling there is a longing, a wish, and, because of that, there is a recipe for success. It is the speaker’s job to discover that recipe. The speaker is really saying “Here’s what I feel, and here’s what I need from you.” Or, in processing a negative event that has already happened, the speaker is saying, “Here’s what I felt, and here’s what I needed from you.

Couples with a strong friendship have a lot more access to their humor, affection, and the positive energy that make it possible to have disagreements or to live with them in a much more constructive and creative way. It’s about earning and building up points.

Like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that in closed energy systems things tend to run down and get less orderly, the same seems to be true of closed relationships like marriages. My guess is that if you do nothing to make things get better in your marriage but do not do anything wrong, the marriage will still tend to get worse over time. To maintain a balanced emotional ecology you need to make an effort—think about your spouse during the day, think about how to make a good thing even better, and act.

great relationships—the masters—are built on respect, empathy, and a profound understanding of each other. Relationships don’t last without talk, even for the strong and silent type.

Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.

The underlying mechanism that maintains closeness in marriage is symmetry,” one prominent researcher, John Gottman, wrote in the Journal of Communication. Happy couples “communicate agreement not with the speaker’s point of view or content, but with the speaker’s affect.” Happy couples ask each other more questions, repeat what the other person said, make tension-easing jokes, get serious together. The next time you feel yourself edging toward an argument, try asking your partner: “Do you want to talk about our emotions? Or do we need to make a decision together? Or is this about something else?

In the midst of a bitter dispute, the husband or wife picks up a ringing telephone and is suddenly all smiles: “Oh, hi. Yes, it would be great to have lunch. No problem, Tuesday would be fine. Oh, I am so sorry to hear that you didn’t get the job. You must feel so disappointed,” and so on.

most couples don’t get any training in relationships, and often they don’t learn how to communicate with each other until they go to therapy, and that’s often too late.

Approximately 40 percent of the time, when a woman brings up an issue, men have no clue what she is talking about. We

Active listening asks couples to perform Olympic-level emotional gymnastics even if their relationship can barely walk.

Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.

Perfection is not the price of love. Practice is. We practice how to express our love and how to receive our partner’s love. Love is an action even more than a feeling. It requires intention and attention, a practice we call attunement.

Psychologist Sydney Jourard studied how many times people touched one another when they were out to dinner in several cities.18 In Paris the average number of times people touched one another in an hour was 115 times. In Mexico City the number was 185 times in an hour. In London the average was zero. In Gainesville, Florida, the average was 2.

If my wife is in pain, my world stops so I can listen to her.” In a committed relationship, you will both stop the world to try to understand and ease each other’s pain. This is partly why we get married, and this is partly why we love. We need each other and we need to be needed by each other. True commitment is choosing each other over and over again,

Working briefly on your marriage every day will do more for your health and longevity than working out at a health club

I have a commitment to myself to grow from my failures.

Alice doesn’t look back and doesn’t question the adventure she’s chosen. That’s commitment

Create a plan together to minimize hurt feelings and avoid an incident in the future.

Emotionally mature people have a secure sense of self. They don’t feel threatened when other people see things differently, nor are they afraid of seeming weak if they don’t know something. So when you have an insight to share with them, they listen and consider what you tell them. They may not agree, but thanks to their natural curiosity they’ll try to understand your point of view. John Gottman, well-known for his research into relationships and marital stability, describes this trait as a willingness to be influenced by others, and counts it among his seven principles for a sustainable, happy relationship (1999).

Tiny little doses, every day, is what it takes to make a healthy relationship. Why? Because that’s exactly what a relationship is—not one big thing, but a million tiny things, every day, for a lifetime.

Our gridlocked conflicts contain the potential for great intimacy between us. But we have to feel safe enough to pull our dreams out of the closet. When we wear them, our partner may glimpse how beautiful we are—fragile but shimmering. Then, with understanding, our partners may join us in being dream catchers, rather than dream shredders.

When we fall in love we are often on our very best behavior. We lead with the healthiest side of ourselves. But as relationships progress, each person gets more real, more transparent, and therefore more vulnerable.

I’ve found 94 percent of the time that couples who put a positive spin on their marriage’s history are likely to have a happy future as well. When happy memories are distorted, it’s a sign that the marriage needs help.

There is no question that committing to a person can be a terrifying prospect. It means putting all our eggs in one basket.

have the conversations that lead to intimacy, to awareness, and to a deep and meaningful understanding of one another—the ways you’re the same and the ways you’re different.

father is someone who works hard, who isn’t around much, who criticizes more than he compliments, who doesn’t show affection or any other emotion except anger—no longer applies,

news flash: Men, you have the power to make or break a relationship.

Intimacy inevitably creates conflict.

First, a couple needs to stay curious about each other.

It's only human to have conflicts. It's even humane to have conflicts - often, it's exactly the right thing to do. But we need to bring our best humanity to our conflicts.

Your job here is to make your partner feel safe enough to tell you what’s behind their position on the issue: their belief, dream, or story.

§  The Five Love Languages by Gary D. Chapman §  The SoulMate Experience by Jo Dunn §  The Seven Principles For Making a Marriage Work by John M. Gottman and Nan Silver Whether

We soothe newborns, but parents soon start teaching their children to tolerate higher levels of arousal, a job that is often assigned to fathers. (I once heard the psychologist John Gottman say, “Mothers stroke, and fathers poke.”) Learning how to manage arousal is a key life skill, and parents must do it for babies before babies can do it for themselves. If that gnawing sensation in his belly makes a baby cry, the breast or bottle arrives. If he’s scared, someone holds and rocks him until he calms down. If his bowels erupt, someone comes to make him clean and dry. Associating intense sensations with safety, comfort, and mastery is the foundation of self-regulation, self-soothing, and self-nurture, a theme to which I return throughout this book.

Every couple, in their daily life together, messes up communication, and every relationship has a potential “dark side.” It is a misconception that communication ought to be the norm in relationships. What may matter most is the ability of couples to repair things when they go wrong.

Couples who have learned to dialogue about their perpetual issues ask just such questions. They ask, “Is there a story behind this for you, maybe some childhood history that makes this so crucial for you?” They want to uncover not just the topmost feelings, but the deeper layers as well.

the long-term success of a relationship depends far more on avoiding the negative than on seeking the positive. Gottman estimated that a stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1. Other asymmetries in the social domain are even more striking. We all know that a friendship that may take years to develop can be ruined by a single action.

Of all the people in the world, what led you to decide that this was the person you wanted to marry (or commit to)? Was it an easy decision or a difficult decision? What was it like to fall in love?

Carnegie was right when he wrote, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming genuinely interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

As I mentioned, the most common research finding across labs is that the first negative attribution people start making when the relationship becomes less happy is “my partner is selfish,” a direct reflection of a decrease in the trust metric. They then start to see their partner’s momentary emotional distance and irritability as a sign of a lasting negative trait. On the other hand, in happier relationships people make lasting positive trait attributions, like “my partner is sweet,” and tend to write off their partner’s momentary emotional distance and irritability as a temporary attribution, like “my partner is stressed.

Once the negative event is fully processed, it isn’t remembered very well. Dan Wile said that a lot of conflict is about the conversation the couple never had but needed to have.21 Instead of having the conversation they needed to have, they had the fight. The conversation they still need to have becomes evident when they attune.

The problem is that therapy that focuses solely on active listening and conflict resolution doesn’t work. A Munich-based marital therapy study conducted by Kurt Hahlweg and associates found that even after employing active-listening techniques the typical couple was still distressed. Those few couples who did benefit relapsed within a year.

We’re not suggesting you be overly contrived about this and don’t want you to be flipping your hair back if she’s flipping hers. Just pay attention to her words and her body language, and you’ll start getting the social bonding going.

It’s not your job to improve your partner. That’s solely your partner’s job. Your job is to be the best version of yourself that you can be. And if you are kinder even during conflicts, your partner will likely cooperate more too. It’s a win/win.

En su aclamado libro Inteligencia intuitiva, Malcolm Gladwell expone la teoría de Gottman de que hay cuatro reacciones emocionales principales que destruyen una pareja: ponerse a la defensiva, o la reacción a un estímulo como si se estuviera siendo atacado; hermetismo, o la negativa a comunicarse o cooperar con el otro; criticar, o la costumbre de juzgar los méritos y defectos de alguien, y la peor de todas, el desprecio, una actitud general que expresa una mezcla de las emociones primarias de repulsión e ira.

In the Broadway play In Defense of the Cave Man, a man says that when he was first married, he saw his wife cleaning the bathroom and asked her, “Are we moving?” In his bachelor days that was the only time he and his roommates bothered to clean the bathroom.

differences attract us at first, and yet we can find ourselves in relationship trouble when we try to change these differences later. Learning to understand and accept the ways in which you’re different is key to creating lasting connection and enduring love.

How people reacted to their partner’s bids for connection was in fact the biggest predictor of happiness and relationship stability. These fleeting little moments, it turned out, spelled the difference between happiness and unhappiness, between lasting love and divorce.

Conflict is connection. It’s how we figure out who we are, what we want, who our partners are and who they are becoming, and what they want. It’s how we bridge our differences and find our similarities, our points of connection. The problem is, we haven’t been taught how to do it right.

To sum up, the attunement-during-conflict blueprint for the speaker is: No blaming, no “you” statements Talk about how you feel in a specific situation, use “I” statements Express a positive need The attunement-during-conflict blueprint for the listener is: Awareness of partner’s enduring vulnerabilities Turning toward partner by postponing own agenda Tolerance by believing there are always two valid realities Making understanding the partner the goal of listening Nondefensive listening, not responding right away, getting in touch with the partner’s pain Empathy—summarizing the partner’s view and validating by completing a sentence like “I can totally understand why you have these feelings and needs, because….

What is the skill of attunement during conflict? The answer is given, in part, in Anatol Rapoport’s book Games, Fights, and Debates. In that book Rapoport talks about increasing the likelihood that people will choose cooperation over self-interest in a debate. His suggestion is that we need to reduce threat—that people need to feel safe to cooperate and give up their self-interest. Another very important principle in Rapoport’s theory is that to make conflict safe, we first need to postpone persuasion until each person can state the partner’s position to the partner’s satisfaction.

I call the parents who get involved with their children’s feelings “Emotion Coaches.” Much like athletic coaches, they teach their children strategies to deal with life’s ups and downs. They don’t object to their children’s displays of anger, sadness, or fear. Nor do they ignore them. Instead, they accept negative emotions as a fact of life and

most marital arguments cannot be resolved. Couples spend year after year trying to change each other’s mind—but it can’t be done. This is because most of their disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences of lifestyle, personality, or values. By fighting over these differences, all they succeed in doing is wasting their time and harming their marriage. Instead, they need to understand the bottom-line difference that is causing the conflict—and to learn how to live with it by honoring and respecting each other.

The opposite of play is not work—it’s depression.” When our lives are infused with play, we’re able to see the absurd in the serious and find excitement in the mundane. A relationship without play is a relationship without humor, without flirting, without games, and without fantasy. We all need humor, laughter, and play. Romance is play. Banter is play.

There are many marital therapists who have high expectations for what is possible in a marriage...I am not opposed to such views, but I personally take a different one. I am a "plumber"... I have often described my goal as fostering the "good enough marriage". I am likely to think a marriage is good enough if the two spouses choose to have coffee and pastries on a Saturday afternoon and really enjoy the conversation, even if they don't heal each other's childhood wounds, or don't always have wall-socket, mind-blowing, skyrocket sex.

Four horsemen of the (relationship) apocalypse - criticism, contempt, stonewalling, and defensiveness.

if you enter into any long-term relationship thinking that the hallmark of its success is a lack of conflict, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment and failure.

commitment is a choice we make every single day, over and over again. We choose it even when we are tired and overworked and stressed out.

To navigate your way out of gridlock, you have to first understand that no matter how seemingly insignificant the issue, gridlock is a sign that you each have dreams for your life that the other isn’t aware of, hasn’t acknowledged, or doesn’t respect. By dreams I mean the hopes, aspirations, and wishes that are part of your identity and give purpose and meaning to your life.

What can make a marriage work is surprisingly simple. Happily married couple aren't smarter, richer or more psychologically astute than others. But in their day-to-day lives, they have hit upon a dynamic that keeps their negative thoughts and feelings about each other (which all couple have) from overwhelming their positive ones. They have what i call an emotionally intelligent marriage.

Muchas parejas pierden el rumbo al tener un hijo si no cuentan con un detallado mapa de amor. Cualquier cambio drástico (un traslado en el trabajo, una enfermedad, la jubilación, etc.) puede obrar el mismo efecto. De hecho, el simple paso del tiempo puede afectar a la pareja de un modo similar. Cuanto más comprendas y conozcas a tu pareja, más fácil os resultará seguir conectados mientras la vida gira a vuestro alrededor.

Nash’s equilibrium, when it exists, is that point where neither player can do any better, or have no regrets, given what the opponent has done. Neither can have regrets because of how the other person played the game. It may not be the best option for either player, but it’s the best under the circumstances. There isn’t always an equilibrium in a game, or a Nash equilibrium in a game theory matrix. However, if it exists, in many cases the Nash equilibrium is a far better outcome for both players than the von Neumann saddle point. In the Kelley apartment cleaning game-theory matrices above, the Nash equilibrium is for them both to clean. Consider his payoffs. He does much better if he cleans no matter what she decides to do (because 5.7 is much greater than -2.2). Now consider her payoffs. She also does better if she cleans no matter what he does (because 8.5 is much greater than -6.6). So they have a stable Nash equilibrium at the joint strategy = (Male Cleans, Female Cleans). Then neither of them can have regrets about that choice because with that choice neither of them can do any better, regardless of what the partner does. With the Nash equilibrium their strategy is to maximize one’s own gains even if it means maximizing the partner’s gains (as well as one’s own).

When you negotiate with each other, it’s always from a point of self-interest, not mutual benefit. You haven’t built trust, or commitment, or a foundation of loyalty to each other because you’re not really in this relationship.

People who have been wronged by an emotionally immature person may start to think they’re at fault if they continue to feel hurt by what the person did. Emotionally immature people expect you to take them off the hook immediately. If it feels better to blame you for not forgiving them fast enough, that’s what they’ll do. After a rift, many people will make what relationship expert John Gottman calls a repair attempt (1999), apologizing, asking for forgiveness, or making amends in a way that shows a desire to patch things up. But emotionally immature people have a completely unrealistic idea of what forgiveness means. To them, forgiveness should make it like the rift never happened, as though a completely fresh start is possible. They have no awareness of the need for emotional processing or the amount of time it may take to rebuild trust after a major betrayal. They just want things to be normal again. Others’ pain is the only fly in the ointment. Everything would be fine if others would just get past their feelings about the situation.

We now realize that behind each person’s gridlocked position lies something deep and meaningful—something core to that person’s belief system, needs, history, or personality. It might be a strongly held value or perhaps a dream not yet lived. These people can no more yield and compromise on this issue than they can give up “the bones” of who they are and what they value about themselves. Compromise seems like selling themselves out, which is unthinkable.       But when a relationship achieves a certain level of safety and one partner clearly communicates that he or she wants to know about the underlying meaning of the other partner’s position, the other partner can finally open up and talk about his or her feelings, dreams, and needs. Persuasion and problem solving are postposed. The goal is for each partner to understand the other’s dreams behind the position on the issue.

triggers." They are old, enduring vulnerabilities that occurred before this relationship began and have left emotional scars that can get activated. When you feel triggered, search your memory for a point in your history or childhood when you had a similar set of feelings. Triggers never go away, they endure.

Couples who regularly practice empathy see stunning results. It is the independent variable that predicts a successful marriage, according to behaviorist John Gottman, who, post hoc criticisms notwithstanding, forecasts divorce probabilities with accuracy rates approaching 90 percent. In Gottman’s studies, if the wife felt she was being heard by her husband—to the point that he accepted her good influence on his behavior—the marriage was essentially divorce-proof. (Interestingly, whether the husband felt heard was not a factor in divorce rates.) If that empathy trafficking was absent, the marriage foundered. Research

Most couples are willing to spend an hour a week talking about their relationship. I suggest that emotional attunement can take place (at a minimum) in that weekly “state of the union” meeting. That means that at least an hour a week is devoted to the relationship and the processing of negative emotions. Couples can count on this as a time to attune. Later, after the skill of attunement is mastered, they can process negative emotions more quickly and efficiently as they occur. If the couple is willing, they take turns as speaker and listener. They get two clipboards, yellow pads, and pens for jotting down their ideas when they become a speaker, and for taking notes when they become a listener. It’s not a very high-tech solution, but the process of taking notes also helps people stay out of the flooded state. I suggest that at the start of the state of the union meeting, before beginning processing a negative event, each person talks about what is going right in the relationship, followed by giving at least five appreciations for positive things their partner has done that week. The meeting then continues by each partner talking about an issue in the relationship. If there is an issue they can use attunement to fully process the issue.

Prerequisites for sex: Men in general like to have sex to feel emotionally connected, and women need to feel emotionally connected to have sex. Almost 90 percent of the couples we interviewed agreed with that last sentence. We refer to this as women having more prerequisites for sex than men do. Women’s prerequisites aren’t always limited to emotional closeness; sometimes they are about feeling exhausted, distracted, not rested, or not good about herself or her body. Interestingly, the data shows that gay men have the most sex of any type of couple—two people with the fewest prerequisites—and lesbians have the least sex of any type of couple—two people with the most prerequisites. Sexual desire for women is a barometer for how the rest of her world is going. If she’s not rested, or happy, or healthy, or feeling supported or loved, she’s not going to feel like having sex.

(...) I also believe that most crabby people can change by making a conscious choice to react to the world in a different way. The key is to scan your environment regularly for things and people to appreciate rather than to criticize. In so doing, you create a new climate of praise and gratitude in your life. Instead of getting bogged down in people’s faults and mistakes, you get swept up in a fruitful search for reasons to say “thank you.

So the rules for attunement were that while the listener has responsibilities, so does the speaker. In turning toward, the speaker cannot begin with blaming or criticism. Instead, it is the responsibility of the speaker to state his or her feelings as neutrally as possible, and then convert any complaint about the partner into a positive need (i.e., something one does need, not what one does not need). This requires a mental transformation from what is wrong with one’s partner to what one’s partner can do that would work. It is the speaker’s job to discover that recipe. The speaker is really saying, “Here’s what I feel, and here’s what I need from you.” Or, in processing a negative event that has already happened, the speaker is saying, “Here’s what I felt, and here’s what I needed from you.” How do couples find that positive need? How do they convert “Here’s what’s wrong with you, and here’s what I want you to stop doing” into, “Here’s what I feel (or felt) and here’s the positive thing I need (or needed) from you”? I think that the answer is that there is a longing or a wish, and therefore a recipe, within every negative emotion. In general, in sadness something is missing. In anger there is a frustrated goal. In disappointment there is a hope, and expectation. In loneliness there is a desire for connection. In a similar way, each negative emotion is a GPS for guiding us toward a longing, a wish, and a hope. The expression of the positive need eliminates the blame and the reproach.