The Handbook of Conflict Resolution

STAGE 1: THE DISCOVERY OF RELIABLE PATTERNS OF INTERACTION

Research on married couples began in 1938 with the publication of a classic book by Louis Terman (Terman, Buttenweiser, Ferguson, Johnson, and Wilson, 1938). Terman and his colleagues interviewed couples and gave them questionnaires. Fortunately, decades of excellent sociological research on couples later produced reliable and valid questionnaire measures of marital satisfaction and happiness. Sociologists were interested in various social factors that affected happiness and the longitudinal course of marriages, but they were uninterested in behavior.

When John Gottman began his research in 1972 at Indiana University, he was the first to attempt to discover reliable patterns in the data. In this research with couples, he wanted to see if there were patterns of behavior or sequences of interactions that could discriminate happy from unhappy couples. It was not at all clear that these patterns existed.

Gottman later teamed up with Robert Levenson in 1979. Together they used the newly available technology of home videotape to sample natural interactions—couples talking about the history of their relationship and how they thought about relationships and their own and their parents’ relationships. They also observed couples talking about how their day went (after having been apart for at least eight hours), performing tasks like the NASA moon shot consensus decision-making task (a task that tests decision-making abilities), talking about areas of conflict and trying to resolve them, and so on. It became clear that even highly distressed couples could do very well when they worked together on a standard lab task as long as the task was not personal. For example, on the NASA moon shot task, the couple’s score when they worked on the task together exceeded the best individual partner’s score regardless of the couple’s marital satisfaction. This meant that most couples were not deficient in decision-making skills, regardless of the condition of their marriage. Yet, when some couples, the unhappily married ones, tried to talk about their own conflicts, their conflict resolution skills evaporated into thin air.

However, laboratory tasks that induced real marital conflict artificially, like a task in which each partner got a different version of some other couple’s travails and had to decide which partner was more at fault, easily discriminated happy from unhappy couples. But it was not actually a useful task because the task induced conflict in unhappy couples, and positive affects, like laughter, in happy couples. In other words, unhappy couples took the task to heart, but happy couples didn’t take the task seriously. Therefore, the task was not ecologically general or clinically useful because it failed to show how happily married couples dealt with their own very real conflicts. So the Gottman lab decided to study real conflicts in both happily and unhappily married couples.

It was clear in this research that conflict was real and present in all couples, regardless of marital happiness. However, in unhappily married conflict interactions, most conversations began with negative affect, blaming the partner for the problem, while happily married couples were far more likely to begin gently and sometimes, even with positive affects like affection and humor. Also, Gottman and his colleagues quickly discovered that the way the conversation began in the first three minutes, regardless of marital satisfaction, determined how it would continue through the rest of the conversation—in 96 percent of the cases.

Even in happily married couples, Gottman found that there were always some issues that created high levels of negative affect. Happily married couples initiated some discussions the way unhappily married couples did, and when that happened, the same sequences were observed as in unhappily married couples. However, Gottman determined that happily married couples could repair negativity far more easily and could rebound more easily when asked to talk about a positive topic than could unhappily married couples.

For unhappily married couples, conflict often became pervasive in the relationship (transferring to our positive discussion topic), and eventually these couples began avoiding one another, leading parallel lives filled with loneliness. Levenson and Gottman charted this deterioration over time and subsequently it was called the Emotional Distance and Loneliness Cascade.

The Gottman lab discovered stable sequences of interaction in a study of university students (using sequence analysis of Gottman’s observational coding system that scored videotapes and was called the couples’ interaction scoring system, CISS). Later, a graduate student of Gottmans, Mary Ellen Rubin, repeated the same experiment with couples in rural Indiana for her dissertation. Amazingly, the CISS numbers in the two studies discriminated happily from unhappily married couples, differing only in the second decimal place. This was the first hint that replication was possible.

In a series of research studies, Gottman developed new observational coding systems with Cliff Notarius, at the time Gottman’s student, and the lab applied new methods for analyzing sequences of interaction that were developed by Jim Sackett and Roger Bakeman. These sequences (described in Gottman, Notarius, and Markman, 1979) described the skillful conflict management patterns of happily married couples and how very different they were from the patterns of unhappy couples. One of the first discoveries was that during conflict discussions, the ratio of positive to negative interactions was 5/1 on average for happily married and stable couples and 0.8/1 on average for unhappily married and unstable couples. The laboratory then asked whether all negative interactions were equally corrosive. The answer was no. In particular, four behaviors turned out to be excellent predictors of divorce. Gottman called these “the four horsemen of the apocalypse”: criticism (expressing a complaint as a defect in one’s partner), defensiveness (counterattacking or acting like an innocent victim), contempt (insult, mockery, disrespect, acting superior), and stonewalling (listener withdrawal, no usual listener verbal or nonverbal responses).

The Gottman lab also began using social exchange theory, an application of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s (1949) book on game theory, which was followed by Thibaut and Kelley (1986) in their classic book, The Social Psychology of Groups . To operationalize exchange theory within interactions, Gottman built a device called a “talk table” in which people could interact and also rate after every turn at speech how positive or negative their intentions were and how positive or negative the impacts of the messages they received were. This was the first application of game theory to couples’ interaction, a theme the Gottman lab later returned to in studying trust and commitment. The lab used these methods to define reliable patterns of interaction and thought during conflict. Following a series of peer-reviewed journal articles, Gottman published these results in a series of scientific papers and a book (Gottman, 1979).

In a randomized clinical trial attempting to apply these early findings to change unhappy marriages, the Gottman lab found they could get large changes in marital satisfaction, but that these changes mostly relapsed within a year. However, one of Gottman’s students, Howard Markman, applied the same intervention (described in Gottman, Notarius, and Markman, 1979) to newlywed couples and consistently discovered that the same intervention as a preventive measure was effective at preventing marital discord and divorce. This was the first discovery of a general effect: Preventive effects with couples who are not yet unhappy are much larger and more stable than intervention effects with unhappy couples.

STAGE 2: PREDICTION AND THE REPLICATION OF THE PREDICTION

The second stage of the Gottman research program was attempting longitudinal prediction. Prediction in psychology means being able to predict important outcomes from the patterns observed. In repeated studies over time, the patterns and sequences Gottman observed were able to discriminate happy from unhappy couples.

In 1979, another research breakthrough occurred. Robert W. Levenson and John Gottman teamed up to combine the study of emotion with psychophysiological measurement and a video recall method that gave them rating dial measures of how people felt during conflict. This was the new way of getting talk table numbers. The research also became longitudinal. Few predictions were made in the first study. They were interested in a measure of physiological linkage because a prior study showed that the skin conductance of two nurses was correlated only if they disliked one another. They thought this phenomenon might be linked to negative affect in couples as well. Indeed it was.

They were also amazed that in their first study with thirty couples, they were able to predict the change in marital satisfaction (over a three-year period) almost perfectly using just their physiological measures. Time 1 was their first observation of the couples in their new laboratory, and Time 2 occurred three years later. The correlations between Time 1 and Time 2 were very high, with Time 2 marital satisfaction (from the .70s to the .90s) controlling for Time 1 marital satisfaction. They found that the more physiologically aroused couples were in all channels (heart rate, skin conductance, gross motor activity, and blood velocity), the more their marriages deteriorated in happiness over a three-year period, controlling the initial level of marital satisfaction.

As predicted by exchange theory, the rating dial and observational coding of the couples’ interaction also predicted changes in relationship satisfaction. Levenson and Gottman had never seen such large correlations in their data before (correlations ranged from .7 to .9).

In another study, they asked couples to first have an events-of-the-day reunion conversation in which couples talked about the events of their day, then next a conflict discussion, and finally a third conversation about a positive topic. What was surprising was that during the conflict discussion, the use of a harsh start-up (mostly by women) was predictable by the partner’s disinterest or irritability in the events-of-the-day discussion; the responses of men during the events-of-the-day conversation were especially important in this prediction of harsh start-up during conflict. It became clear at that point that to understand conflict, one had to also examine the quality of nonconflict conversations. This finding was the beginning of realizing that the quality of the couple’s friendship, especially as maintained (or not maintained) by men, was critical in understanding conflict. Furthermore, the ability to rebound from conflict to the positive conversation became an important marker of the emotion regulation ability of couples. As conflict persists without resolution, apparently it could come to pervade all of a couple’s life.

Both Levenson and Gottman had discovered Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen’s facial affect coding system (FACS; Ekman and Rosenberg, 2005) and began working with the Ekman laboratory. Gottman subsequently developed the specific affect coding system (SPAFF), which was an integration of FACS and earlier systems in the Gottman lab. The SPAFF directly coded affect using all channels of communication in a cultural informants system. Gottman also began applying time-series analysis to the analysis of interaction data.

Levenson and Gottman began attempting to replicate observations from the first study. The subsequent studies that they conducted in their two labs (some with colleagues Laura Carstensen, Lynn Katz, Sybil Carrere, and Neil Jacobson in the Gottman lab; Jacobson and Gottman, 2007) eventually spanned the entire life course, from a study following newlyweds through the transition to parenthood to a study of two groups of couples (one in their forties and one in their sixties) in the Levenson lab at University of California, Berkeley, on the transition through retirement. The study of couples in later life involved following couples for twenty years in Levenson’s Berkeley lab.

The Gottman lab at the University of Illinois also studied the linkages between marital interaction, parenting, and children’s social development (with Lynn Katz) and later, at the University of Washington, studied these linkages with infants (with Alyson Shapiro). Gottman had begun studying families, at first examining children from age three longitudinally up to age fifteen. He developed the concept of meta-emotion, which is how people feel about emotion in general, specific emotions (like anger), emotional expression, and emotional understanding (Gottman, Katz, and Hooven, 1997). The idea of emotion coaching emerged from that research, a scientific validation of the work of child psychologist Haim Ginott (2003). In a study of newlyweds, Gottman began studying the transition to parenthood and learning how to do research on babies and parents (Gottman, 2004; Gottman and DeClaire, 1998).

Gottman and Levenson discovered that couples interaction had enormous stability over time (about 80 percent stability in conflict discussions separated by three years). They also discovered that most relationship problems (69 percent) never get resolved but are perpetual problems based on personality differences between partners (reported in Gottman, 1999). In seven longitudinal studies, one with violent couples (with Neil Jacobson), the initial findings and predictions replicated. The researchers could predict whether a couple would divorce with an average of over 90 percent accuracy across studies using the ratio of positive to negative SPAFF codes, the four horsemen of the apocalypse (criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling), physiology, the rating dial, and an interview they devised called the oral history interview, as coded by Kim Buehlman’s coding system. They could also predict whether stable couples would be happy or unhappy using measures of positive affect during conflict, which Jim Coan and Gottman discovered was used not randomly but to physiologically soothe the partner. They also discovered that men accepting influence from women was predictive of happy and stable marriages. Levenson discovered that humor was physiologically soothing and (with Anna Ruef) that empathy had a physiological substrate in a study using the rating dial.

The Gottman-Levenson labs’ prediction of divorce was often misunderstood by laypeople who were not very acquainted with the mathematics of probability. Some critics, for example, claimed that a 90 percent divorce rate was not impressive since the national divorce rate was about 50 percent. They said, “If you guess that everyone will divorce, you will be right half the time.” However, the commonly reported 50 percent rate is an estimate of the chance of divorcing over a very long forty-year period. Our divorce predictions were over much shorter time periods, like six years. In six years, for example, seventeen newlywed couples divorced out of 130 newlywed couples, or only 13.1 percent. Guessing that each of these newlywed couples would divorce in 6 years would produce about an 87 percent error rate. A 90 percent correct prediction rate is like blindly picking correctly (by chance alone) 15 out of 17 red balls (the couples who will divorce) in an urn that also contains 113 white balls (the couples who do not divorce). The chance of that correct prediction is about 10^–13 . Hence, the prediction rate in the Gottman lab was probably not a chance event.

Later, Jacobson and Gottman collaborated on a basic study of domestic violence with four groups of couples: (1) happily married, nonviolent, (2) unhappily married, nonviolent, (3) situationally violent, and (4) characterologically violent (all men). They discovered a typology of battering that has mostly been replicated in the literature. Later this finding led to a successful treatment for situational domestic violence.

In 1986 Gottman built an apartment laboratory at the University of Washington, in which his student Janice Driver spent a decade (first as a volunteer and then a doctoral student) discovering the basis of friendship and intimacy and its relation to conflict through a bids and turning coding system. With that work, Gottman and Driver discovered how couples create and maintain friendship and intimacy and how turning toward or away from a bid for emotional connection (during nonconflict interaction) was related to behavior during conflict, especially repair. Newlyweds who divorced six years after the wedding had turned toward bids 33 percent of the time, while newlyweds who stayed married six years after the wedding had turned toward bids 86 percent of the time. The idea of the friendship being an “emotional bank account” was verified. Friendship was related to repair of negativity and, also surprisingly, to the quality of sexual intimacy.

When fourteen-year longitudinal data became available, Gottman and Levenson discovered a second dysfunctional pattern, emotional disengagement. It was marked by the absence of both high levels of negative affect and any level of positive affect during conflict (no interest, affection, humor, or empathy). Now they could predict not only if a couple would divorce, but approximately when. Couples who had the four horsemen divorced an average of 5.6 years after the wedding, while emotionally disengaged couples divorced an average of 16.2 years after the wedding. This was a very new finding.

Levenson, Carstensen, and Gottman began studying marriage in later life with two groups of couples in the Bay Area, one in their forties and one in their sixties. Thanks to Levenson’s tenacity, this work has turned out to be a twenty-year longitudinal study that his lab is now finishing.

Levenson and Gottman also conducted a twelve-year study of gay and lesbian couples, work they published in two papers in the Journal of Homosexuality (2003). Patterns replicated across the life course, and they replicated for gay and lesbian couples as well.

STAGE 3: THEORY BUILDING, UNDERSTANDING, AND PREVENTION AND INTERVENTION

The third phase of the Gottman research was trying to understand the empirical predictions, and thus building and then testing theory. Testing theory requires clinical interventions. The Gottman lab returned to intervention research seventeen years ago. Together Gottman and his wife, Julie S. Gottman, started by building their Sound Relationship House theory (SRH), which became the basis for the design of clinical interventions for couples in two books: The Marriage Clinic (J. M. Gottman, 1999) and The Marriage Clinic Casebook (J. S. Gottman, 2004). The Gottmans next established the Gottman Institute in August 1996 in Seattle, Washington. At the same time, as part of theory building, world-class award-winning mathematical biologist James Murray, his students, and Gottman began working on building a mathematical model of relationships, which led eventually to the publication of The Mathematics of Marriage (Gottman, Murray, Swanson, Tyson, and Swanson, 2002). The mathematical modeling work completed a dream of von Bertalannfy’s (1969) classic work, General System Theory , in which he envisioned equations linking parts of interacting systems. Precise mathematical concepts like emotional inertia, influence functions, and stable steady states replaced imprecise metaphors and vague concepts. The mathematical modeling has now been extended by Paul Peluso to the psychotherapy context. It has generated testable theory.

It is important to note that Gottman Couples Therapy and the Sound Relationship House theory were built on John Gottman et al.’s earlier basic scientific research, and the theory emerged from that basic research. Gottman Couples Therapy therefore should not be considered a school of therapy, but a work in progress that should always be based on solid empiricism. SRH theory is designed to be an initial theory, one that is totally disconfirmable, subject to empirical testing. Its assumptions are clearly spelled out in the Gottmans’ level I training for clinicians. Over time, it will no doubt be modified as the therapy is made more effective by empirical self-examination and the work of other investigators.

The Sound Relationship House Theory

Characteristics of long-term, stable relationships are described in the three components in the SRH theory: the friendship and positive affect system, the conflict management system, and the shared meaning system. The first three levels of the SRH describe the friendship-and-positive-affect system. In the Sound Relationship House theory, there are seven key social processes, represented as “levels” in a drawing of a house (figure 37.1 ). The first three levels are what are called the domain of “friendship and intimacy.” The basis of effective repair during conflict, Weiss’s “positive sentiment override,” is the next level of the house and bridges the first and second domain, effective conflict management. The third domain is the shared meaning system. All three domains are presumed to be mutually causally connected.

Friendship and Intimacy

1. Build love maps . The most basic level of friendship, building love maps, refers to feeling known by your partner. It is the road map one creates of one’s partner’s inner world of thoughts, feelings, hopes, aspirations, dreams, values, and goals. The fundamental processes are asking open-ended questions and remembering the answers. Both superficial knowledge and deeper knowledge (as well as knowledge of one’s partner’s erotic world) are part of building love maps.
Share fondness and admiration . This level describes partners’ ability to notice and express what they appreciate about each other. Building a culture of respect and appreciation, partners catch their partner doing something right and convey appreciation, respect, and affection both verbally and nonverbally. The fundamental processes are a positive habit of mind that ignores or minimizes the partner’s mistakes and instead notices and maximizes what the partner is doing positively for the relationship. It expresses appreciation, fondness, affection, and respect.
Turn toward instead of away . When couples were just hanging out, they actually were often letting their needs be known to one another nonverbally or verbally. They were making bids for emotional connection that might or might not be responded to by their partner. When partners turn toward bids, it is like putting money in their emotional bank account that gets built over time. Conversely, if bids are ignored (turning away) or attacked in response to the bid (turning against), it is like taking money out of the emotional bank account. There is a hierarchy of bidding, from getting one’s partner’s attention to getting shared humor, empathy, and emotional support.

Sentiment Overrides

The positive perspective . If the first three levels of the friendship system are working well, couples will be in positive sentiment override. Conversely when the friendship is ailing, they will be in negative sentiment override. This concept was initially proposed by Weiss (1980).
- Negative sentiment override . Here the negative sentiments people have about the relationship and their partner override anything positive the partner might do to repair. They are hypervigilant for put-downs and tend not to notice positive events. They tend to distort and see even neutral, sometimes even positive things as negative. They are overly sensitive to negativity.
- Positive sentiment override . Here the positive sentiments people have about the relationship and their partner override negative things their partner might do. They do not take negativity personally, merely as evidence that the partner is stressed. They tend to notice negative events but not take them very seriously. They tend to accurately see the positive things the partner is doing and minimize the negative, perhaps even distorting toward the positive, and seeing even negative interactions and gestures as neutral.

Manage Conflict Constructively

Manage conflict . Relationship conflict is natural, and it has functional, positive aspects. The masters of relationships are gentle toward one another; they start conflict discussions without blame (including preemptive repair), accept influence, self-soothe, repair and de-escalate, use positive affect during conflict to de-escalate physiological arousal (especially humor and affection), and offer and then arrive at compromise.
Gottman’s longitudinal research indicated that only 31 percent of couples’ problems are solved over time. Surprisingly, it turned out that 69 percent of the problems were perpetual (they do not get solved), relating to lasting differences in personality, preferences in lifestyle, and differences in needs. The masters of relationships create a dialogue with these perpetual issues, while the disasters are in gridlock about these perpetual issues (i.e., the conflict keeps recurring with hurt and alienation in which each person feels rejected and misunderstood). This finding reveals the existential nature of most conflicts and has led to the “dreams within conflict” intervention, an existentially based intervention. Compromise seems unthinkable to couples gridlocked on perpetual issues because it seems to each partner that for the sake of peace, they have to give up core aspects of themselves they really value. With the dreams-within-conflict intervention, the existential basis of each person’s position is explored, and gridlocked conflict is replaced by self-disclosure and understanding.

Shared Meaning System

Make life dreams come true . A crucial aspect of any relationship is to create an atmosphere that encourages each person to talk honestly about his or her dreams, values, convictions, and aspirations and to feel that the relationship supports those life dreams.
Create shared meaning . A relationship is about building a life together—a life that has a sense of shared purpose and meaning. Couples do that in many ways, including creating formal and informal rituals of connection, creating shared goals and life missions, supporting one another’s basic roles in life, and agreeing on the meaning of values and symbols. So here we return once again to build love maps, but at a deeper level.

Intervention and Prevention Studies

The Gottmans began the interventions with exploring what happened to a couple when the first baby arrived. They discovered that 67 percent experienced a precipitous decline in relationship satisfaction in the first three years of the infant’s life. Gottman’s student Alyson Shapiro compared the 33 percent of couples who did not experience this downturn in satisfaction with the 67 percent who did. This is the same method of comparing the masters to the disasters and designing the therapy empirically. They studied the couples from a few months after their wedding and during pregnancy as well and developed the pregnancy oral history interview.

The predictions by Gottman’s student Eun Young Nahm of the baby’s temperament, made by observing the couple in the last trimester of pregnancy, were impressive. Furthermore, Shapiro’s thesis showed that they could predict how much the baby laughed and cried at three months from the way the couple discussed a conflict in their last trimester. Again, based on the differences between the “masters” of relationships and the “disasters” of relationships, the Gottmans designed a couples’ workshop and couples’ therapy. Based on the comparison of the couples who declined and did not decline in relationship satisfaction after the baby, they designed the Bringing Baby Home (BBH) workshop. The ten-hour BBH workshop had four goals: (1) keeping fathers involved with the baby, (2) teaching constructive conflict management skills, (3) maintaining intimacy and romance between parents, and (4) teaching parents about how babies say “yes” and “no” during play. Then they performed a randomized clinical trial study of the workshop with long-term follow-up. BBH proved to be highly effective. It has now been taught to one thousand birth educators from twenty-four countries, and its successful effects have been replicated in Australia and Iceland.

Next, the Gottmans created an intervention to strengthen parenting called “Emotion-Coaching” (described in Gottman and DeClaire’s, 1998). That intervention has been evaluated and found to be effective in three randomized clinical trials by Australian psychologist Sophie Havighurst and in a study in South Korea led by certified Gottman therapist Christina Choi in two orphanages in Seoul and in Busan. Emotion coaching is now being taught to teachers throughout South Korea, and in several other countries as well.

Third, comparisons of the “masters and disasters of relationships” and analyses across the Gottmans’ studies have led to what has come to be called “Gottman Couples Therapy.” The Gottmans also extended their work to lower-income unmarried couples who had a new baby in a program called Loving Couples Loving Children (LCLC). This intervention uses a facilitated couples’ group format in which couples’ groups meet for twenty-one two-hour sessions. They begin with brief talk show segments. The segments show couples talking with Julie Gottman about a particular issue, like avoiding violent quarrels. They are designed to initiate group self-disclosure by showing couples similar to the ones in the groups talking openly and honestly about the topic at hand. The LCLC intervention was evaluated by the policy group, Mathematica Policy Research in a randomized clinical trial with thirty-five hundred lower-income unmarried couples with a new baby, and effectiveness was demonstrated, especially with African American couples.

Fourth, the Gottmans modified LCLC into the Couples Together Against Violence (CTAV) curriculum to treat situational domestic violence. In that intervention study (also conducted with Mathematica Policy Research) the same couples’ group approach was used with four added modules and the use of the Heart Math “emwave” biofeedback device before every interaction exercise in the group. The emwave is a small, hand-held biofeedback device that teaches people how to self-soothe by guiding them to breathe slowly and focus their attention on a positive thought. Before couples did the exercise of a particular module, they first had to both be in “the green zone” (a calm state) obtained by moving a light on the device from red to blue to green as they self-soothed. The Gottman Relationship Research Institute completed a randomized clinical trial study with an eighteen-month follow-up with a group of situationally violent couples. The CTAV program has been shown to be effective, and these effects last.

Fifth, in collaboration with Julia Babcock (a former Gottman student, now professor at the University of Houston), an initial randomized clinical trial study was performed with characterologically violent married men. Babcock used brief audio training tapes that the Gottmans developed to modify the conflict interaction of these violent men with their wives, obtaining significant changes in interaction and in the satisfaction of wives with the nature of the interaction following treatment. This research is at the beginning phase.

Trust and Betrayal Theory

More recently theory building has been concerned with returning to earlier work applying game theory in a new way toward an understanding of how couples build trust and loyalty versus erode trust and create betrayal. New metrics for trust and betrayal have been created and validated by Gottman and has led to two books, Gottman’s The Science of Trust and Gottman and Silver’s What Makes Love Last? In the near future, with Paul Peluso, a randomized clinical trial study is planned for couples trying to heal after an extramarital affair. This work on trust and betrayal dovetails and combines with Caryl Rusbult’s thirty-year research work on trust and commitment.

Trust and loyalty are systematically built by couples through a process called emotional attunement—turning toward one’s partner’s negative affect and listening with empathy. Loyalty is systematically built by cherishing the partner’s positive qualities and minimizing the partner’s negative qualities. Loyalty nurtures gratitude for what one has. Trust is eroded by turning away from, dismissing, or disapproving of the partner’s negativity. Betrayal is systematically built by minimizing the partner’s positive qualities and maximizing the partner’s negative qualities. Betrayal nurtures resentment for what is missing.

The key variable is one that Caryl Rusbult measured and Thibaut and Kelley (1986) studied systematically, in which the comparison level for alternative relationships is central. When the variable is characteristically negative, a partner is negatively valuing a behavior exchange and thinking that he or she can do better in a real or imagined alternative relationship. When it is characteristically positive, a partner is positively valuing a behavior exchange and thinking that he or she is lucky to be in this relationship and can do no better in any real or imagined alternative relationship.

SUMMARY OF EFFECTIVENESS EVIDENCE FOR INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION

It is reasonable to ask what is the current status of evidence for the effectiveness of Gottman couples’ interventions. Here is the current status.

Proximal Change Experiments

Gottman suggested that a couples’ therapy program could be built empirically by performing a series of proximal change studies. In these studies, the goal is smaller than that of couples’ therapy. The proximal goal is only to change specific aspects of a couple’s relationship, for example, how they begin a conflict discussion, and then examine the effect of that intervention on the second of two conflict discussions. These proximal change studies were examined in a study with Kim Ryan (unpublished) and a dissertation with Amber Tabares (unpublished).

Randomized Clinical Trial of Workshops and Gottman Method Couples’ Therapy

In a randomized clinical trial that became Kim Ryan’s dissertation, a one-day workshop on building friendship, a one-day workshop on conflict regulation, a two-day workshop combining both, called The Art and Science of Love (ASL), and a group that added nine sessions of Gottman Couples Therapy were compared with a one-year follow up. Effectiveness was demonstrated, with the greatest one-year effectiveness and least relapse for the combined two-day workshop with therapy. An unpublished report is available from the Gottman.com website. A paper with Julia Babcock (in press) is under editorial revision with the Journal of Family Therapy .

Bringing Baby Home

A randomized clinical trial with the Bringing Baby Home workshop compared to a control group showed powerful effects in reversing the drop in marital satisfaction, reducing postpartum depression, reducing interparental hostility, improving the parents’ interaction with the baby, and improving the baby’s emotional and language development. The paper is published with Alyson Shapiro (2005). That intervention is being taught to birth educators by the Relationship Research Institute (bbhonline.org ). It has also had large effects in hospitals in Australia.

Loving Couples Loving Children

This program was developed for lower-income couples who probably did not see school as a positive experience. It is based on a twenty-one-session couples’ group curriculum with talk show segments initiating self-disclosure and skill building. It has been evaluated by Mathematica in a randomized clinical trial with thirty-five hundred fragile-family unmarried couples, all expecting a baby. (Information, training, and materials are found at lclconline.org .)

Couples Together Against Violence

In a randomized clinical trial completed at the Relationship Research Institute, a couples’ group intervention for situational domestic violence has demonstrated long-term effectiveness. (Information, materials, and training are found at rrinstitute.com .)

Emotion Coaching with Children.

The work Gottman and Katz have done in the area of meta-emotion (see the book Meta-emotion with Lynn Katz and Carole Hooven, training DVDs available from the Talaris Research Institute and the Gottman.com website, the What Am I Feeling? book, and Raising and Emotionally Intelligent Child with Joan DeClaire) has borne fruit in a highly effective intervention for parents with their children. A randomized clinical trial conducted by Australian psychologist Sophie Havighurst found emotion coaching to be highly effective.

The Gottmans’ Conflict Blueprints

In Gottman method therapy, three blueprints are necessary to help couples cope constructively with conflict. The first blueprint, the Gottman-Rapoport blueprint, replaces the old Guerney “active listening” approach to conflict (Guerney, 2005). A blueprint is a guide for changing the nature of conflict discussions so that they are more constructive and less divorce prone.

Gottman-Rapoport Conflict Blueprint.

In the Gottman-Rapoport blueprint, partners take turns as speaker and listener, and each partner is equipped with a clipboard and pen. There are bullet points (requirements) for both the speaker and the listener. The reason for also regulating the behavior of the speaker is the discovery that even in happy marriages, the same dysfunctional sequences emerge if conflict begins with attack.

There are two steps in this blueprint, understanding and compromise. In the understanding step, Rapoport’s principle is used: postpone persuasion and problem solving until each person can state the partner’s position to the partner’s satisfaction. The speaker needs to speak without attack or blame, use I-statements to talk about feelings about a specific situation, and express only very specific and explicit positive needs, that is, what one needs rather than what one does not need. The listener takes notes, postpones his or her own agenda, summarizes, and validates.

In part 2 the couple uses what we call the two-oval method to reach compromise. In this method each partner specifies what his or her minimal core need is (i.e., what he or she cannot compromise on) and also specifies what he or she is flexible about. Then proposals for compromise that honor both core needs are entertained.

The role of physiological flooding (versus self-soothing) is stressed in this blueprint, and pulse oximeters are used as a measure of peripheral autonomic arousal. The Heart Math emwave biofeedback device is prescribed for people who are physiologically dysregulated by anxiety or anger. The Gottman-Rapoport conflict blueprint differs from active listening in that the behavior of both the speaker and the listener are regulated.

Aftermath of a Fight or a Regrettable Incident.

In this blueprint, a past fight, emotional injury, or unfortunate incident is discussed following a five-step process:

Listing what each person felt without explaining why by reading aloud the feelings one had from a list of fifty-three feelings
Taking turns as listener and speaker describing each subjective reality about what happened and what each person needed during the incident
Describing the triggers that escalated the conflict for each person and the history of these triggers in one’s past
Taking responsibility for one’s role in the incident and apologizing
Constructive plans for dealing with this kind of incident should it arise again

Dreams-within-Conflict Blueprint.

This blueprint is designed to deal with perpetual problems that are not in a quiescent state we call dialogue but instead are gridlocked. In the dreams-within-conflict blueprint, designed for perpetual issues that are gridlocked without compromise, each person takes turns answering a set of six questions designed to provide understanding of the existential meaning of each person’s position. For example, a conflict about money may really be a conflict about what each person dreams about with respect to money. For one partner it may represent security, whereas for the other it may represent freedom or adventure. In our experience, 86 percent of couples move from gridlock to dialogue in this exercise within the ASL workshop.

The Need for Follow Through: Deepening the Gottman Method Workshop

A two-day workshop, The Art and Science of Love (ASL), plus couples’ therapy have been shown to be effective in improving marital satisfaction and reducing destructive conflict, and these effects last at least a year. However, a substantial minority of couples take the ASL and use the material subsequent to the ASL, and yet find they could benefit from additional support and practice. With that in mind, A.G. and M.W., both certified Gottman therapists and trainers, designed an additional two-day program, Deepening the Gottman Method workshop, that took the work of the ASL and expanded it into new approaches to strengthen the skills taught. The purpose is to help couples integrate and absorb the skills learned in the ASL, books, DVDs, audio, and CDs from the Gottman Institute.

One of the major components of Gottman’s research, the ASL and the two-day Deepening the Gottman Method workshop, is to assist couples in resolving their conflicts. The major steps are to help them learn to listen to one another more clearly, help them learn to not move on in the conversation for resolution until they each understand the other’s position, and help them become better friends and establish a more positive regard for one another.

The Deepening the Gottman Method workshop follows the model of the Sound Relationship House theory. The first exercises are designed to practice deeper understanding of each other on various issues and practice the speaker-listener model. Admiration and respect are emphasized. Turning toward rather than away from bids for emotional connection is a necessary ingredient. The workshop leaders present information and tools on speaking clearly about what participants are thinking, feeling, and wanting and how to listen. The leaders then explore the four horsemen of the apocalypse in depth with various exercises, so the partners can recognize how the four horsemen show up in themselves. Demonstrations follow that help couples to recognize when they are flooded. Additional opportunities for self-soothing are provided at several times during each day, so that couples can integrate this rhythm into their patterns with each other.

Workshop leaders also provide a role-play demonstration of the aftermath of a fight or regrettable incident, and then give the couples forty-five minutes to practice this skill. The skill involves a five-step process: (1) listing feelings, (2) presenting perceptions of what happened with the listener summarizing and validating the speaker, (3) identifying triggers that escalated the fight and telling the story of why these are triggers, (4) taking responsibility for one’s part in the fight, and (5) constructive solutions. Couples are also given a chance to practice a shortened version of the aftermath of a fight so that they can use it when their time is limited. A DVD created by the Gottman Institute demonstrates the aftermath of a fight intervention. With multiple opportunities to both observe and practice this intervention during the workshop, it is learned well, since one of the goals of the workshop is to be able to integrate the skills and take them home.

The main focus of several hours of the workshop is the dreams-within-conflict concept, a major tool in conflict resolution. All the main points about handling conflict are reviewed before the conflict conversation: softened start-up emphasizing the importance of expressing feelings, thoughts, and desires without criticism or contempt; the importance of repair early and often; and a quick review of the four horsemen. Couples are then asked to choose an ongoing perpetual problem that both are willing to discuss.

One of the difficulties observed is that couples often have trouble letting go of their own agenda when they are in the listening mode. The example we use that couples have said is effective for them is as follows. To demonstrate how to listen better, a diagrammed circle is presented. On the inside of the circle is a list of words describing the facts, truth, and reality. A stick figure is then drawn on each side of the circle to represent that each person has his or her own view of the truth, the facts, and the reality of the perpetual problem. Arrows are drawn from each stick figure to the other figure’s list of words, demonstrating that empathy takes giving up one’s own point of view, temporarily, in order to grasp the other’s point of view. The presenters briefly role-play this concept by looking at each other and describing what each sees, which are different parts of the room. Both views are obviously correct, although different. The leaders teach that every partner has a unique history, culture, agenda, and experience, and understanding those of the other partner becomes essential before proceeding any further. Understanding before compromise or finding a solution is stressed.

There is a period of time for each partner to discuss his or her point of view. Listening carefully is stressed. Questions are given for the listener to ask in order to help the speaker go more deeply into his or her point of view, feelings, and history on the topic. The listener is encouraged to give adequate feedback so the speaker knows he or she is understood and not misunderstood. Then the partners switch roles. After both have understood the other’s point of view fully, the partners work on compromise using tools taught in the ASL workshop.

The workshop concludes with an affirmations exercise. The intention is to provide the experience of expressing positive regard even in the space of working through difficult conflict and strengthening couples’ friendship.

The following is an example of how a couple was helped by this workshop: The couple needed assistance in recovering from an affair. The husband was forty-two years old, the wife twenty-seven; they had two children. He was a professional, working full time, and she was a stay-at-home mom. Some months prior to coming into session, he had had an affair. Convinced that he might do it again, she decided that the only choice was a divorce. He was distraught and was certain that the maintenance of the marriage would be the optimum thing for them as individuals, as a couple, and as parents. She finally agreed to work on the relationship under the condition that they meet weekly with a couples’ therapist. They both wanted to understand why he engaged in that behavior.

They began couples’ therapy. They also decided very quickly to attend the Art and Science of Love workshop and explored the effects of the affair using the tools and exercises presented there. They also decided to continue their repair by attending the Deepening the Gottman Method workshop. Within the context of the workshop, the couple continued to explore the emotional distress that the affair had on both of them. Each followed the clear instruction repeated often from the presenters—that listening and understanding the other was primary in handling their differences. At each step with each exercise presented on the Sound Relationship House model, they addressed the affair. With time, it was possible to discuss their sexual relationship. Each partner was able to practice listening and understanding, even on this difficult issue. Each also practiced editing out the four horsemen and doing repair as quickly as they were aware repair was needed. The listener was focused on understanding the speaker, knowing the listener would have an opportunity to be the speaker. Both understood that convincing the other and arguing on their own behalf was not effective.

With these understandings, practiced in sessions with their counselor, practiced in the ASL, and practiced in the Deepening workshop many times, they were able to speak clearly and with respect about their sexual relationship. They realized that their sexual relationship had felt incomplete and unsatisfactory for each of them, but neither had been willing to discuss that with the other. In the course of this healing and rebuilding of trust, they understood that using the communication tools they had learned was essential to their success.

This couple has now learned to stop their communication when they are not feeling heard or understood. Each can use a repair to say, “Stop; let’s start over.” There is commitment that the listener will try to understand the speaker without imposing his or her own misinterpretations on what is being said. They are practicing how to suspend judgment and deepen understanding rather than reflexively reacting to what the other is saying. They are also working on knowing when either partner is flooded and taking a break before continuing their conversation.

Through the workshop, the couple has reestablished their emotional relationship and moved toward rebuilding trust. They also understand that the affair and its consequences will probably resurface over the ensuing years and are prepared to continue to work through any of the hurt that might be triggered. What has made the difference is their ability to listen fully to one another when the related matters surface.

In another example, a couple who had been to the ASL came to the workshop. They had learned many tools and new ways to think about themselves and their relationship and had practiced many times, including looking over the manual from the ASL together. An event happened in their lives that caused each of them to forget their new learnings and experiences. She went into criticism and contempt; he used defensiveness and then stonewalling. That was the condition in which they came to the workshop. In other words, they were not talking to each other. Both said they were tired of what was happening and were not sure they would stay together. They had already worked diligently on their relationship and it wasn’t working. Both were obviously distressed.

The couples seemed to have some trust and hope in the process of the workshop, because they were very present as information was being shared. However, although they were involved with the process, they were not involved with each other. They were willing to do the first exercise related to love maps, which was to choose an area of their lives not related to their relationship to discuss, such as health or friends. They seemed distant and disconnected but willing to participate. Next, they were able to practice the speaker-listener model because they were familiar with it and the presenters’ instructions were specific and repeated often.

This couple continued to participate with each of the next sections, paying close attention during the present related exercises. In the afternoon, the four horsemen were presented in detail with questionnaires given to each person so each can look closely at his or her own behavior and help identify their own tendencies toward criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. The wife in this couple realized that she had been extremely critical and contemptuous of her husband. She was able to say to one of the staff assistants helping them that she now realized that under stress, she did not know how to say anything to her husband that was not critical and contemptuous: “I don’t know how not to be contemptuous when he does something wrong. All the things he has done wrong lately and forever come rushing into my head. Then I want to tell him what a jerk he has been and is.” That was a big opening experience for her. The Gottman-trained assistant helped her see that when she was under stress, she moved quickly into the negative perspective and that’s when the list of everything her partner had done wrong came out. She was reminded that when this happens, at these times she was probably flooded and needed to self-soothe, and then examine what just happened that warranted repair, and to then voice her needs without criticism and contempt. Now she was able to apologize to her husband.

Meanwhile, the husband realized that when he was criticized even slightly, he became defensive and stonewalled his wife right away, which caused her to become more critical and then contemptuous. He understood the effect of his stonewalling on his wife and apologized to her. They were still distant, but the healing had begun. Each of these steps was part of the repair this couple needed in order to begin to reconnect with each other. In the aftermath of a fight exercise, both partners were able to state their own feelings and be listened to. They discussed what happened for each of them when they felt compelled to stonewall one another. As they talked to each other, the distance between them began to melt.

On the second day of the workshop, the couple was finally able to listen to one another in depth using the dreams-within-conflict exercise. Both spoke clearly about their dreams, their distress, and what they were hoping for. Each felt listened to by the other. By the end of the second practice session, they were holding hands and looking at each other eye to eye, which they had avoided until that point. By lunchtime, they were laughing with each other. They proceeded to do the other exercises in the afternoon and at the end of the day were committed to their relationship and each other. Both had been able to recognize, own, and apologize for their part in the disruption of the relationship. They recognized that when their emotions were triggered, the best course was to first get clear on what they were thinking, feeling, and needing and then communicate these with each other in the speaker-listener format, editing out the four horsemen. If they got into a fight, they could practice the aftermath of a fight and repair the relationship. They no longer felt hopeless, powerless, nor distressed. Like all participants, this couple took home a box that contained all the tools they had learned in the workshop, with instructions to discuss their favorites with one another.

Quantitative study has not yet been conducted on the effect of the Deepening workshop. However, anecdotally many couples have reported that practicing the speaker-listener dreams-within-conflict exercise has transformed their relationship. They have replaced blame, judgment, and distance with understanding, compassion, and respect for one another. They have been able to deepen their love maps and to stay connected with one another, verbally and nonverbally expressing admiration and respect for one another. They have been able to recognize when they are flooded, and to then take a break and self-soothe, using a smorgasbord of ways to self-soothe that works for each of them. They can practice repair, early and often, and get back on track in their communication. They also practice the aftermath of a fight when needed, long form or short form, and appreciate that tool as well.

In summary, therapists sometimes believe conflict is the enemy of long and happy relationships. It is not. Conflict in couples is common, normal, and necessary. It highlights differences between individual partners and provides a pathway to understanding that can deepen intimacy. The key is how conflict is managed. As the research reveals, conflict conducted with criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling, and blame is destructive. Conflict expressed through personal self-disclosure, clear articulation of needs, awareness of each partner’s viewpoints, and willingness to compromise builds the scaffolding for interpersonal safety, friendship, and connection—admirable goals for all relationships.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN AN EMPIRICALLY BASED APPROACH TO COUPLES’ CONFLICT