Strong partners do this when they hear “We need to talk” | John & Julie Gottman

0:00 Great relationships seem to have a model that when you're upset, baby, the world stops and I listen. And I have a little notebook in my back pocket that I take out whenever Julie says the four terrible words, "We need to talk." I whip this out really slowly and I get my pen out really slowly so I can calm myself down and I say, "I'm listening. Talk to me." I'm Julie Gottman.

0:32 And I'm John Gottman. I am a senior scientist at Gottman Incorporated. I'm a co-founder of Affective Software. I'm the co-founder of the Gottman Institute, also the co-founder of Affective Software. And John and I work together as well as have a relationship together. Thank you for watching Big Think. If you'd like to support our work, we encourage you to join our members community. As a member, you'll receive our quarterly print magazine, a beautifully designed collection of the ideas and interviews that matter most. Big Think is for curious people who want to take deep dives into big ideas. To support the media you want to see in the world, go to bigthink.com/membership. And now, back to the interview.

1:19 How relationships repair themselves. You know, a lot of people think that a healthy relationship should have no conflict in it. Just be conflict-free. And if there is a conflict, then there's something really wrong. Well, let me tell you, conflict is completely normal and healthy in a relationship. So, think about it for a minute. You live in this particular body, skin, head, heart, thinking. The other person in a totally different body, skin, skin, etc. And are those always in sync? No.

2:06 What we found in our research is that conflict can really be a way of understanding one another, especially if the conflict is about a fairly important topic like let's say parenting or what kind of vacation should we have? What kind of adventure should we have? What kind of relationship should we have with our in-laws? How should we celebrate holidays? How should we say goodnight to one another and good morning the next morning? There's so many differences that couples can experience between in the relationship. So, there's conflict. For example, let's say John and I can get into a fight. One of us is being critical, the other one's being defensive, and we get the opportunity to say, "You call yourself a marriage therapist?" We're not perfect, either. So, a healthy relationship isn't perfect, but it is capable of repair, and that is one of the big differences between a healthy relationship and a unhealthy one.

3:25 When we studied 130 newlyweds just a couple of months after the wedding, we found that some couples really were building trust, and they were testing the relationship to see whether that trust existed. And what we mean by trust really comes from our using game theory to understand the relationship using the mathematics of game theory. And the answer is very simple. Trust means that each partner is thinking for two. They're not just trying to maximize their own benefits in the relationship. They're trying to maximize the sum of their benefit and their partner's benefit.

4:02 So that when you start really caring as much about what what's good for your partner as what's good for you, you build that trust, and that's the basis of our trust metric. And many of us have times when you know, we do something that really betrays our partner's trust in us, when we hurt our partner's feelings, you know, when we have disappointed our partner, when we've done something to really betray our partner in some way, some small way. And in relationships that work, people stop and repair those things. That's important that loss of trust or that sense of slipping commitment. They notice it, and they talk about it, and they repair those losses of their trust. They recommit to one another. They reestablish trust in a way that is very meaningful for both of them. When a betrayal is discovered, there's a very specific way that couples need to recover from that betrayal, whether it's a big one or a small one. And here are the stages of that recovery from betrayal.

5:19 First of all, there's atonement. The person who has lied, who has deceived, who has betrayed, doesn't get defensive, doesn't blame the betrayal or the lying on the other person. That individual instead takes on full responsibility for it. And empathizes with the other person's pain, sometimes even anguish or despair as a result of being hurt by the betrayal.

5:53 The person who has done the betraying also needs to ask for forgiveness or at least express their remorse that they feel really, really terrible that they have committed that betrayal. It may be very difficult for the person who's broken the trust to hear their partner and empathize with their partner if their partner is expressing the hurt through criticism, maybe through contempt, through labeling the other person.

6:29 They're not describing themselves, their own feelings. Instead, they're saying, "You did this to me. You You are bad. You did this. I don't like it." That's very different than saying "I felt devastated. I felt so hurt when I found out there was this lie that was told. I just fell sinking to the floor. I felt awful." The next stage has to do with really working on the marriage itself or the committed relationship. I like to call it building marriage number two.

7:17 Marriage number one may have burned to the ground. However, marriage number two can be rebuilt by learning alternative ways of talking to one another, learning how to build what we call rituals or traditions in which they are really creating ways of connecting and being transparent. Super important. If they're late coming home from work, they call their partner, tell them that they're late, and they're transparent, and say why they're late.

7:55 Then they come home instead of just leaving a cloud of doubt in that other partner who's home. The final stage has to do with attaching again. And what attaching means is recommitting to the relationship. And remember, if trust has been broken, that commitment has also been broken, right? So, recommitment is the final step in really recovering from betrayal.

8:31 Repair is probably the most important thing that discriminates the masters from the disasters of relationship. They actually go and fix it. Interestingly enough, couples whose whose relationships are in trouble also do the repair attempts, but it's not perceived as a repair attempt by the partner. It's perceived as a manipulation or, you know, more hostility. And, you know, it's not perceived as, you know, let's try to make things better together. And the perception is really important, the perception of repair.

9:08 Now, we took us about 7 years to study repair attempts. Two of my students actually did it. And those students discovered that the most powerful repair of all is when a person takes responsibility for even a part of the problem. That is so powerful. It's even more powerful in heterosexual relationship if if a woman does that. Very powerful for a a when a woman says, "Hey, this isn't all your fault. I you know, I've I've got a role in our miscommunications and I I want to admit that role. I I messed up, you know, in in you know, in the fight we had or the evening that didn't go well." When repair attempts go well, first of all, they're recognized as an attempt to repair rather than an attempt at more hostility or more conflict. And secondly, they really do take the relationship to a new level.

10:06 And there's a new understanding of one another when a repair works. And we've tried to really structure that in our therapy by creating this aftermath of regrettable incident form that people go through five different steps that capitalizes on repair being going really deep in understanding one another and what went wrong in the miscommunication. What that often requires is you being vulnerable. Well, what is being vulnerable actually mean?

10:42 It means, in a manner of speaking, unzipping yourself and exposing your feelings, exposing your emotions, your heart, right? Well, that can be terrifying for some people. Some people really don't want to do that. It's really, really scary. And in fact, some people may not even know what they're feeling. You know, let's take a man for example who was taught that it was not okay to express any emotion whatsoever except anger. Couldn't express sadness, guilt, shame, grief, fear. So, it may be hard for them to access the feelings. How does a person do that? Get to those feelings. You can do it through your body. For example, if you're talking to your partner, pay attention to where is there tension in your body. For example, that tightness in your jaw can be frustration, can be anger, maybe fear that's keeping you keeping your mouth shut so that you don't say anything that really offends the other person. If you have tightness in your chest, that means you're breathing very shallowly. That typically is the feeling of fear, especially when your shoulders are rounded like this. Kicked in the gut can be the same thing.

12:29 can be blown away, can be shocked, can be surprised, can be also afraid. Anger, you feel it maybe in your arms, your shoulders, your fists, right? So, you can translate what's going on in your body, which is much easier to connect with, then your feelings beneath the body. And then, figure out what that feeling is and dare to name it. I've often asked what what's the one thing that you would do? What's one What's the best piece of advice you can give people to start working on their relationships? And my answer is that great relationships seem to have a motto. They seem to operate under this basic rule that when you're upset, baby the world stops and I listen. And I have a little notebook in my back pocket that I take out whenever Julie says the four terrible words "We need to talk." I whip this out really slowly and I get my pen out really slowly so I can calm myself down and I open it up on a clean page and I say, "I'm listening. Talk to me." The goal of conflict is mutual understanding.

14:03 It has a purpose. And I think if you realize the purpose is mutual understanding not persuasion, not convincing your partner that you're right and your partner is wrong but finding a way to be right together then things can work out really well. That's my big invention. And that's what I think people need to do. They need to really realize that when their partner is upset it's the most important thing in the world. Stop what you're doing. Pay attention. Listen.

14:38 Take it seriously. Communicate respect. Communicate affection. When partners really need to make a repair, what brings them really back together again? What's the one thing? You know what it is? It's listening. It's deep listening to the other person. You know, you might think, "Well, if I apologize, then everything is fine and it's all done." But it isn't. What needs to happen is really listening to the other person's perspective on what happened and putting yourself in the other person's shoes when you're listening so that you can really understand the reasons why they acted or spoke the way they did. You know, so many of us think that to build a relationship, you've got to broadcast. You've got to say who you are, you've got to say what you think, you've got to say, you know, what you're feeling, what you believe, etc., etc., describing yourself all the time. And all those things are important too.

15:52 But the greatest gift to create a long-lasting loving relationship is the desire to listen and understand. That is key. The gift of listening that you're giving to the other person and hopefully that other person is also giving to you. So that both people listening to each other reach a much deeper understanding of one another in the process of repair.

16:25 So often start up is something that, you know, we really discovered by taking a look at this active listening that was recommended so strongly by Bernard Guerney in the 1950s. And his idea was that if you would listen well, you could use a formula that says, "Dear partner, when you do X, it makes me feel Y." And it turned out that when people did research with that active listening, they found it was completely ineffective. The Munich Marital Study found that it it was the worst intervention they tried. It had the least effectiveness and the most return to poor communication. And what we decided, what Julie and I decided was that what was wrong was the you. When you do something, it makes me feel this way. It's still pointing the finger at the other person. So, what if we pointed the finger at ourselves? And we took a look and that's what the masters were doing. They were doing this soften startup. They were saying, "Here's how I feel about this situation that we've confronted, not you, but about a situation, and here's what I need. Not here's what I don't need. Here's my positive need." And they were kind of, you know, we realized they were kind of giving their partner a way to shine for them.

17:51 And they made it easier to listen to what their unhappiness was and what they needed from their partner. So, I think what matters most in love and long-term relationships are maintaining affection and respect in the relationship. And fixing it when that goes wrong. I think what matters the most, at least this is what our research shows, in loving long-term relationships is the ability to repair. We have to remember that anybody in a relationship is going to make a mistake, no matter how strong the relationship is.

18:37 And if those repair attempts are not made, if the mistakes or the hurtful feelings are swept under the carpet, well, they tend to add up and fester, right? Until there's more emotional distance because they haven't created repair for whatever was hurtful. So, it's very, very important to always try, at least try, to make repairs when each of you is being human, imperfect, making mistakes, kind of going, "Oh God, why did I say that?" and going back to the partner to really repair the disconnect that's occurred. That's what it takes to have a sustained long relationship.

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