by John Gottman
Many factors influence a person’s ability and willingness to turn toward the significant people in their lives—factors such as the way their brains process feelings, the way emotions were handled in the homes where they grew up, and their own emotional communication skills. We’ll take an in-depth look at each of these factors in the chapters ahead. But first let’s look at what happens to relationships when people fail to connect.
Disconnected: The Consequences of Living Without Emotional Bonds
Whether people make bids for emotional connection to a relative, a spouse, a friend, or a coworker, they’re usually seeking to satisfy one of three emotional needs common to all people. Everybody wants (1) to be included, (2) to have a sense of control over their lives, or (3) to be liked. When such needs are met, people experience feelings of well-being and a sense of purpose to their lives.
But what happens when people don’t have the ability to bid effectively or to respond to others’ bids? Such failure can prevent the development of emotional connections or cause existing connections to deteriorate. This can create serious problems for people of all ages, across all walks of life.
When Parents and Children Fail to Connect
The importance of strong, healthy emotional bonds between parent and child can’t be overstated, because these bonds serve as the foundation upon which all other life relationships are built. If a child doesn’t learn how to connect emotionally with a parent (or with another caregiver who serves as a parent), that child will probably encounter difficulty in connecting to people in all sorts of relationships for the rest of his or her life.
Many factors affect children’s ability to bid, respond, and connect to others, including the type of temperament they inherit. We’re all born with certain personality traits—sociable or shy, intense or easygoing, and so on. To some extent, these traits determine how comfortable we feel in reaching out to other people or responding to others’ requests for connection. Still, a large part of a person’s knack for emotional connection is also determined by what happens in the home. Consciously or not, parents teach their children through interaction and example.
Every time an infant cries, that’s a bid. If her parents turn toward those bids with soothing attention such as rocking, patting, and soft words, such exchanges eventually teach babies to soothe themselves. Through cuddling and baby-talk “conversations” with Mom or Dad, babies also learn all the complex, give-and-take processes of verbal and nonverbal emotional communication.
An infant born into a chaotic, neglectful, or abusive environment doesn’t get the same chance. When parents consistently turn away, ignoring a baby’s cries of distress, she doesn’t get to practice exchanging emotional information with her caregivers. Some parents may even turn against the fussy baby, responding to her bids with impatience and anger. Such mistreatment or neglect creates a state of chronic stress for the baby, adversely affecting the development of her brain and nervous system. In fact, such treatment may adversely affect her ability to respond to stress for the rest of her life. She may become quite unfeeling, for example. After all, what good does it do to feel and express anger or fear when you have a remote, abusive, or neglectful parent?
It’s easy to see how problems can snowball for children who don’t learn to bid, respond, and connect with parents early on. Many have persistent problems throughout early childhood because they can’t cope with emotional stress. Often they have difficulty focusing their attention or listening well to others. They have trouble controlling negative impulses and reading their playmates’ social cues. Perceived as too bossy or too shy, they’re labeled as bullies or nerds. They’re the outcasts of the playground.
As they move into their middle-school and high-school years, these same children can find it difficult to unlock the unwritten codes of teenage social interactions. When it comes to the complex tasks of negotiating cliques, making and keeping friends, or getting a date, they may feel awkward or “clueless.” Difficulties can range from fleeting feelings of sadness and alienation to serious mental health problems. For girls—who often turn their feelings inward—such problems typically result in depression. Boys may get depressed, too. But they often lash out as well, becoming belligerent, hostile, or even violent.
One of the most visible and tragic examples of such alienation occurred in the spring of 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. That’s where Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve of their classmates and a teacher, injured twenty-three others, and then turned their guns on themselves. As I watched the news coverage in the days that followed, I was stunned by our society’s lack of insight into what had turned these boys into mass murderers. Like the media coverage of previous school shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Springfield, Oregon, these stories focused on the shooters’ fascination with violent movies and video games and their easy access to firearms. Such factors obviously contributed to their killing sprees. But, to my mind, one more element loomed much larger: the fact that these boys were emotionally disconnected from family, teachers, and friends. Those who were supposed to be the boys’ most important allies seemed unaware of how much pain and torment they were suffering.
Fortunately, the events at Columbine are an extreme and rare example of the consequences of turning away from children. But they’re also a reminder of the astonishing power we have to harm or to heal by our responses to children’s bids for connection. Progress is possible at any point in a child’s development if parents and other caregivers start turning toward the child’s bids for connection on a consistent basis. This may require extraordinary patience and keen perception from parents. They may have to recognize and respond positively to a troubled child’s bids even when those bids are hard to uncover. They may have to commit to helping even in the face of a child’s stone-cold passivity or resistance. But over time, committed, attentive parents can and do earn their children’s trust and willingness to connect.
When Couples Fail to Connect
Problems with connecting don’t end in childhood. They often carry over into the adult years, interfering with a person’s ability to find and keep a mate.
It’s easy to see how the bidding process relates to dating. In fact, one might argue that making successful bids for emotional connection is what dating is all about. People who are adept at reading a potential partner’s cues and responding appropriately are usually more lucky in love than those who don’t possess this skill. Recall that our studies show that happy, stable couples respond positively to each other’s bids at a higher rate than those whose relationships are on the rocks. Still, the lovelorn should take heart. As we’ll explore in chapter 6, emotional communication skills can be learned and perfected at any age.
The greatest test of these skills comes as a couple begins to seek a deeper level of intimacy and understanding in their relationship. If partners can continue to turn toward one another in mutually satisfying ways, their bond will grow stronger. But, as my studies reveal, if they begin habitually turning away or turning against one another, their relationship will disintegrate.
Based on our research, I believe that failure to connect is a major cause of our culture’s high divorce rate. First marriages now face a fifty-fifty chance of divorce within a forty-year period. Divorce rates among second marriages are 10 percent higher.
The cost of unhappy and failing marriages is high. In addition to the emotional turmoil that couples in stressed marriages experience, they also suffer more physical illness than others do. Studies show that being unhappily married can raise your chances of getting sick by more than 35 percent and shorten your life by an average of four years. Living in a constant state of stress is part of the problem. Over time, such stress can contribute to physical problems such as high blood pressure and heart disease, as well as psychological problems, including depression and substance abuse. It can also affect the immune system, making you more susceptible to infectious disease and cancer.
Family stress caused
by a couple’s failure to connect can also affect the well-being of their children. Our studies show that children raised in homes with a high level of marital hostility have chronically elevated levels of stress hormones. When we studied these children in early childhood, we found that they had more bouts of infectious diseases like colds and flu. When we checked back with them at age fifteen, we found that these same kids had far higher rates of psychological and social difficulties as well—problems like depression, rejection by peers, and poor behavior—especially aggression. They were also more likely to get bad grades and skip school.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Learning how to recognize and turn toward each other’s bids for emotional connection can help unhappily married couples and their children to create a more stable, loving family environment. It can also help couples who decide to divorce. As divorced couples who share custody know well, the relationship doesn’t end when you sign the divorce decree. By improving your ability to connect emotionally with each other and your children, you’ll be in a better spot to solve conflicts and create a healthier environment for your kids.
Trouble Connecting with Friends and Siblings
While we hear lots of advice about ways to nurture our marriage relationships and the bonds between parent and child, relatively little is said about strengthening some of the most potentially rewarding relationships in our lives—our relationships with adult siblings and friends.
Connecting with other adults is a challenge for many people, for a variety of reasons. Issues of competition and jealousy may loom large— especially in sibling relationships. Also, matters of trust and intimacy can be sticky to negotiate, particularly when you’re first establishing a relationship with a new friend.
One of the most common barriers to adult relationships these days, however, is a practical one: lack of time. More families than ever now include two wage earners. And workers spend an average of 10 percent more time at their jobs today than they did twenty-five years ago. Many working parents try to reserve whatever leisure time they have for their kids. They often have aging parents who require their attention, too. With so many demands on time, something’s got to give, and for most of us, that something is the time we have for friends and adult siblings.
But there’s a price to pay for cutting ourselves off from relationships with other adults in our lives. Studies show that people with good friends usually have less stress and live longer. They have better health, higher resistance to infection, and stronger immune functioning, and they recover more quickly from illness. Indeed, some research suggests that longevity is determined far more by the state of people’s closest relationships than by genetics. The quality of our bonds with others and the amount of kindness we can gather around us may be the most important factors.
A study of people living in Alameda County, California, for example, showed that people who had close friendships and marriages lived longer than those who didn’t. This was true independent of such factors as diet, smoking, and exercise. Another study, of 2,800 men and women over age sixty-five, showed that those with more friends had a lower risk of health problems and recovered faster when they did develop them. In addition, a study of 10,000 seniors at Yale University showed that loners were twice as likely to die from all causes over a five-year period as those who enjoyed close friendships.
The simple fact is, having a community of close, supportive friends and relatives can make life’s good times even better. And then when tough times hit—crises such as divorce, job loss, a serious illness, or a death in the family—being surrounded by people you can count on makes a big difference in your ability to weather the storm and recover.
Still, sustaining such relationships over the long haul can be challenging. For siblings, problems can be exacerbated by knowing so much about one another’s past. Perhaps you’ve been striving to grow and develop in new ways over the years. If that’s the case, the history you share with your siblings may serve as a constant reminder of all your imperfections, past and present. Also, differences in age, birth order, gender, personality type, or other traits may give you different perceptions of the same childhood experiences—differences that are hard to reconcile. At the same time, however, a sibling’s point of view can be enlightening, helping you to see the past in new ways.
If we can connect with our siblings around our shared history, we may find that it draws us together, especially as we reach our middle years and seek to find deeper meaning in our life stories. And if we can connect with a sibling around our current life circumstances, it’s a bonus; we’ve got a friend who knows not only where we’re going but where we’ve been.
Trouble Connecting on the Job
Much has been written in recent years about the importance of “emotional intelligence” at work—how getting ahead requires more than the kind of intelligence measured by standard IQ tests. Emotional intelligence has been defined in different ways, but I believe that it consists largely of our ability to bid and to respond to another’s bids for emotional connection. This type of connection makes it possible for coworkers to get along, to see issues from one another’s points of view, to solve problems together, and to invest in others’ visions of the future.
Such skills become increasingly important with advances in technology. We’re spending increasingly less time on mundane tasks better suited to computers and robots. To be successful in today’s workplace, we need to excel in areas such as communication, collaboration, motivation, and adaptation to constant change. All these skills require the ability to understand and connect well with other human beings.
What happens when people habitually fail to connect on the job? The same thing that happens when connection fails in families and marriages. Individual workers or entire work teams may begin to feel alienated, passive, or hostile. Employees may feel cut off from vital information or from important sources of control and power. Whole departments may feel isolated or “at war” with other parts of an organization. Supervisors may lose touch with their workers while front-line employees feel misunderstood or disrespected by management. People at lower rungs of the organization may fail to see how their assignments contribute to the big picture, while folks in the executive suite scratch their heads at reports of low morale and high turnover.
It’s hard for me to make a purely economic case for fostering better emotional connections within organizations. I’ve seen too many cases of employers making huge profits by dismissing the human needs of their workers. And on an individual level, I’ve seen too many people grow rich by focusing only on work and ignoring their own feelings and the emotional needs of their families.
But I do believe that employers and individuals who place a high value on encouraging better emotional connections within their organizations can reap significant benefits aside from financial rewards. These benefits include the creation of a less stressful work environment with lower turnover, increased productivity, and a higher quality of life.
Much depends on the dominant leadership style within the organization—a factor over which individual workers have little control. But each of us makes daily choices that affect the quality of relationships we create and sustain at work. How you manage these relationships can determine not only the kind of experience you’ll have on the job today, but also the direction your career may take in the future.
The Good News About Connecting
Failure to connect can hinder your career. It can interfere with friendships. It can weaken your relationships with relatives, including your kids. It can even ruin your marriage.
But here’s the good news: Connecting is not magic. Like any other skill, it can be learned, practiced, and mastered. And there’s never been a better time to master these skills. Recent scientific discoveries about the emotional brain, along with the latest observational studies of human interaction, have helped us to form a body of scientifically proven advice for connecting with one another and improving the quality of our lives.
At that point I had to tell her, “Feeling connected to your husband isn’t going to fix all your problems. It won’t fill your bank account, it won’t land you the perfect job, and it won’t make you stop missing your friends. But it will make the two of you feel closer as you go through this transition together. And that’s as good as it gets.”
That’s the beauty of feeling emotionally connected to others. Whatever you’re facing—serious illness, divorce, job loss, grief over the death of a loved one—you don’t have to face it alone. Sharing your experience with other people who express understanding and empathy may be helpful in ways we’re only beginning to understand. Consider, for example, studies of survival rates among cancer patients who participate in peer support groups. With all other factors equal, those who take part in the group support typically outlive those who don’t.
As healing as connecting can be, it doesn’t happen automatically. Even when people are highly motivated, it takes a certain amount of conscious effort and diligence. A good example is the communication that typically takes place between mother and infant. In one study, researchers found that mothers misread their fussy babies’ bids 70 percent of the time. The mother might think the baby is hungry when he’s not, for instance. Or she might start to bounce the baby, only to find that the stimulation upsets him more. Consequently, the mother must switch strategies, trying something different to meet her baby’s needs. As she does so, both she and the baby learn more about each other’s cues. Her willingness to keep trying, even when things aren’t going well, ensures that the relationship will get better over time.