The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  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.

  Figure 37.1 The Sound Relationship House Theory

  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 dee
per 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.