March 9, 2026 • 35 mins
In Part 2 of Dr. Laurie’s conversation with researchers Dr. John Gottman and Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, we learn how couples can raise complaints without damaging their relationship — and how to respond constructively when a partner voices a concern. Their research shows that fighting doesn’t have to pull couples apart. When handled well, conflict can actually make relationships stronger.
Further reading: Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict into Connectionby Dr. John Gottman and Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Hi Happiness Lab listeners. This week, we're wrapping up
our mini season on the science of relationships with the
second of two in case you missed it, throwback episodes
some of my favorites in the history of the Happiness Lab. Today,
(00:35):
you'll get to hear the second half of my two
part conversation with husband and wife research team John and
Julie Gotman, a couple who spent over fifty years studying
the science of love. In this episode, the Gotman's share
what science shows about how couples can argue better and
why the way you fight matters more than what you
fight about. If you're in a relationship wherever hope to be,
(00:57):
these insights are not to be missed, so stay with
us to hear their amazing advice right after these short ads.
When we tape interviews for this show, a lot of
(01:19):
small things can go wrong. Planes fly overhead, trains rumble by,
recording devices break, but more often than not, the problem
is usually somebody's phone going off.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I turned the phone off, but they didn't turn it off.
I did.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yeah, this isn't the kind of exchange you might have
expected from relationship experts. John and Julie Schwartz Gottman. You
might have thought that Julie would just brush over John's
mistake with some loving, yet sacarine comment. Oh, honey, I
simply adore your forgetfulness. It fills our lives with so
many surprises. But the Gutmans are realists. They don't like
(01:54):
shying away from the disagreements, disputes and downry arguments that
happen in every partnership, and in their decades together as
a married couple, they've had their fair share of conflicts.
Some of them were pretty fundamental.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
This was like thirty years ago, as it's such a
big fight there that we actually went to couple therapy.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
That must be so intimidating for the poor couple of
therapists when the Gotman's walk in. Throughout their careers and
now at the institute that bears their name, the Gotments
have studied countless couples, paying particular attention to the different
ways they bring up complaints and solve conflicts, and the
central lesson they've observed is that the key to a
long and healthy relationship lies in confronting disagreement rather than
(02:35):
burying it.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
But as they.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Explain in their new book fight right, how successful couples
turn conflict into connection. There are ways we can argue
a bit smarter, and the gotments think we need to
heed this advice now more than ever.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
When COVID started, actually we did a number of interviews
and podcasts to give tools and advice for couples who
were struggling so hard, you know, especially under quarantine.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
It was so.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Painful because most people are used to separation during the
day with work and kid care and variety of things,
and then coming together. Now they were together twenty four
to seven. Oftentimes they didn't have space to themselves, you know,
nothing of solitude for themselves if they needed that, And
that has carried over people. At least the people who
(03:28):
had distress marriages became more and more unhappy. They became
more domestically violent, more hostile towards one another, and there
was emotional damage occurring that still festers inside a lot
of couples today, even though COVID is much more under control.
(03:53):
So I think we're in a sorry state right now.
The other thing, too, is that kids, especially teens, have
suffered tremendously from COVID. That puts more pressure on the
parents because now they're dealing with kids who are seriously depressed,
who may even be suicidal, who don't want to go
(04:15):
to school, who don't want to connect socially because they've
almost forgotten how except through technology, And kids are a
loss for whom we got going back to what was normal,
what is normal, and parents are coping with that too.
That puts more strain on parents too. So we think
(04:36):
that fighting isn't broken here in this country. You know,
there's so much polarization, political polarization, and you know, polarization
around even to get vaccinated against them a pathogen. In
good relationships, people fight in ways that are destructive, that
(04:58):
create antagonism, I mean in bad relationships.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
In bad relationships, thank you. There's a need to really
re examine the way we do with conflict and what
this is about fight, right, is turning conflict into connection
and what are the tools for doing that? Yeah, And the.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Great thing about your work is that you've been able
to look predictively at the way people fight to try
to figure out how that's going to play out and
the rest of their relationship. And in the course of
doing that, you've identified what you like to call the
four horsemen of the four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse,
I think, is what we're going for. And so you know,
(05:37):
walk me through what these are and why they can
be so problematic.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
All right, So number one is criticism. That you know,
the thing we do the most is one of the
most distructive. So criticism means blaming a problem between you
and your partner on a personality flaw of your partner.
So it will sound like you're so lazy, you're so
(06:01):
thought Look, you're so inconsiderate. All those put downs are criticisms.
That's one. The second one we call contempt, and contempt
is really awful. It's like sulphuric acid for the relationship.
It destroys it and not only does it predict the
(06:22):
relationship demise, it also predicts how many infectious illnesses the
listener of contempt will have in the coming years. That's incredible.
So caring contempt destroys the immune system of the listener.
So do we want to do that to the person
(06:44):
we love? I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
So how does consent different? And I was.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
About to say that, thank you. Contempt is looking down
your nose at your partner from a position of superiority.
So there's often a smear or some scorn or you know, sarcasm,
mockery at times, and of course name calling calling your
(07:12):
partner a bad name, which we don't have to repeat here.
All of that is contempt. Now, the response to criticism
and contempt is defensiveness. Those two first ones make us
feel attacked. What do we do when we feel attacked, Well,
we're going to fight back or we're going to play
(07:34):
innocent victim. So in defensiveness, you either will counterattack or
rewine and say I did to pay the bills on time.
Likes the whiners, Yeah, our friends the whiners. And so
that's number three and number four we call stonewalling. Stonewalling
(07:55):
literally is what it sounds like. The listener who's supposed
to be engaged with the speaker shuts themselves down, acts
like a stonewall. May not make icontact, doesn't show any response,
any movement, any words that indicates they're actually listening and participating.
(08:18):
They turned into a stone wall. We discovered that people
who stonewalled, and eighty five percent of those were men inside,
were actually in fight or flight, which is really interesting.
Their heart rates would be sitting there over one hundred
beats a minute, sometimes way higher, or for an athlete
(08:40):
over about eighty eighty five beats a minute, and they
were in fight or flight or freeze, which is a
horribly uncomfortable feeling inside. Thus the person was actually going
inside themselves, trying to shut out stimuli coming from outside,
(09:01):
including the partner's voice, in order to soothe themselves because
they were feeling so awful the stone waller. So those
are the four criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
And so it seems like one of the reasons we
wind up kind of entering this path of the four
horsemen of bad relationships is that we kind of don't
realize what we're fighting about. We need to kind of
figure out what the deeper, hidden agenda is in some
of these fights. But at a very kind of basic level,
what are most fights about.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
It's kind of surprising, right, they're about absolutely nothing. They're
watching TV and he's got the remote and he's cattle
surfing and she says, leave it on that show that's interesting,
and he says, well, well, let me see what else
is on. She says, no, leave it. He says, well,
let me see what else is on and she says, no,
leave it. He says, fine, have it your way. She said,
(10:00):
why'd you say fine that way? You know, I don't
even want to watch television with you now? Oh you don't? Okay, fine,
And then they saw relating. So what are they fighting about.
They're really not fighting about money, sex, in laws, parenting,
you know, they're fighting about the lack of connection, you know,
(10:21):
that inability to see one another this viewpoint, and that
really gets in the way of a deeper understanding of
what's going on in the moment.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
And so sometimes finding this deeper understanding really requires going
to that hidden agenda. You're talking about what you mean
by a hidden agenda and why it can lead to
so much kind of conflict and relationships.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Okay, So by hidden agenda, what we mean is again
that internal world inside somebody where resuldes their values, their
core needs, their ideal dreams, their history, which may include
some old scar tissue from past parenting relationships, being abused,
(11:07):
all kinds of things, and that remains underground. They're not
talking about that. They're talking about something on the surface.
So let me give you a good example. Let's say that, Well,
I can just take our situation with the books. John
is an avid book collector. We're getting books all the time.
(11:29):
Where are you going to put them? There's piles of
stuff all over the place. Okay, So John has a
personality type. He can focus his attention completely on whatever
he's choosing to attend too, and everything else is blocked out.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
You know. It's a phenomenal skill.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
That he developed growing up in a very crowded tenement
apartment in New York. I. On the other hand, the
whole environment totally affects me. The colors of the walls,
the sounds, the noise, the tidiness, everything affects me, and
I can't think straight. Things are disorganized, right, So that's
(12:14):
a fundamental difference between John and I. So my ideal
dream here, I actually have a little postcard that shows
a woman sleeping and just waking up.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
I dreamed of the tidy house, you know.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
I mean it's it's like, yes, exactly, And to John
that's completely arbitrary, unimportant, right, Okay, But if we don't
bring up those differences between us, his dream is to
not be n need it because he just wants to
do what he wants to do, you know, which, of course, most.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Of us do.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
We want to have a little bit of control over
our time.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
And so sometimes those hidden agendas seem to be about
these personality differences. But I know you've talked about cases
where you really had these hidden dreams, right, these these
deeper values that you had for your life and what
you want your choices to be, and that that can
lead to conflict too.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
So really wanted to buy a small cabin on Orches Island,
and we have been renting places and even rented a
lovely place on the ocean, you know, And I didn't
think it was I didn't think it was a good
idea to buy buy it another place. I thought it
was a waste of money and we could rent and
why did we have to do this? And so I
(13:31):
was adamant about not doing it. She was adamant about
doing it. So we went to therapy, and the therapist
one day said, John, relationships are about creating boundaries and
you can say no to her and she has to
live with it. And when we left, you know, I said,
do I sound like that? And she said, yeah, you do,
(13:52):
and I said, well, I don't want that kind of
a relationship. I think we have to talk more about
this cabin thing, and so we really developed a way
of going deeper into why was it so important to
her to have her own place there rather than renting?
What was the big well?
Speaker 3 (14:10):
And also, needless to say, we fired the therapist immediately.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
But what we did.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
We came home and we sat down. I'll never forget
this evening, and we started asking each other these huge
questions that later became our intervention called the Dream within Conflict,
and we asked questions like, Honey, is there some value
or ethics or guidelines that are part of your position
(14:40):
on this issue? We would ask, do you have some
childhood history that somehow is relating to this? Why is
this so important to you? Do you have some ideal
dream here that was a biggie? Do you have some
ideal dream that's part of your position on this issue?
(15:01):
And oh my god, this whole world opened up.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
With these six questions. You know, I was able to
really look deeply at Hyo was so opposed to owning property,
And it really had to do with my parents having
survived the Holocaust in World War Two and my father's
messages to me, don't trust in anything but what you
can put in your mind, because you may have to
(15:26):
flee one day. Jules have always had to flee, you know.
That was my objection, Julie's you can tell yourself.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
And mine mine was that I'd grown up in a
very unhappy household, very distressed, and so I lived a
couple of blocks away from a huge forest. At night,
beginning when I was eight or nine years old, I
would sneak out of the house after everybody went to bed,
I'd go sleep in the forest overnight, no matter what
(15:56):
the weather was. Then I would sneak back in before
people got up, and nobody knew I was doing that
for years, years and years and years. I have my
favorite tree I would sleep in, So I think I'm
part monkey or something. I'm not sure, but anyway, what
getting a place on Orcus meant to me was having
(16:17):
roots in the wilderness, which is exactly what that forest
had been to me as a child. So you can
see both of our backgrounds, our childhood histories, and values
that those histories taught us, which were very powerful, were
really significant in this difference between us, right.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
And once we understood that, we were able to arrive
at a compromise that really worked for both of us,
which was.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
We agreed we would buy a little cabin and live
in it for two years and see how it felt
to be there, whether or not we really like this,
in trade for keeping our house a kosher house, which
was a great, big deal, a lot you know, different
(17:08):
dishes from elk and meet and you know, all kinds
of stuff. We did that in exchange, and John discovered
he loved having a klan.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Non organ see my knowledge. Really loved it. Yeah, we're
so quiet, so peaceful, you know, we really loved it.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
And so it just shows the power when you can
actually get to these compromises, when you can sort of
look at these hidden agendas and figure out a compromise
that maximizes both both parties can be happy. I think
often we think of compromise, we think, well, somebody's going
to have to sacrifice something. But sometimes if you understand
what you're really fighting about, it seems like you can
get to, like, you know, a compromise that really works
for everybody.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Yeah. The amazing thing is that the worst issues in
a relationship can be the greatest sources of connection and understanding.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
Right, let me let me give you another example of
this notion of compromise. We found that the successful couples
took an initial step when they were working on compromise
that was really important, and that was to take their
own position on an issue and divide it into two parts,
(18:15):
an inflexible part, the part where nothing could be given
up in that little circle, a core need, an ideal
dream of particular value. They could not compromise on those
pieces of their position, but there were also flexible things
(18:38):
that they could compromise on that might have to do
with who, what, where, when, how much, how long? You know,
those fundamental nitty gritty details. So we had a couple
in a workshop, for example, where the woman and the
man were getting ready for retiring, and they both wanted
(18:59):
to sell their house. But then his ideal dream was
to buy a sailboat sail around the world forever and
ever into the sunset. Her ideal dream was this. Her
family had owned a farm for over one hundred years
called a century farm. She wanted to go live on
the farm and take her place in the legacy of
(19:22):
ancestors who had also done so. Where was it in Iowa?
So how do you sail around the world from Iowa?
You cannot do this, So when they looked at their positions.
In his center circle, that was inflexible he put sailing,
hers was live on the farm. But around that the
(19:46):
flexible things were whose dream would go first, how long
would it last, how much would we spend, where would
we go, When would it begin, when would it end?
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Etc.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
And they arrived through doing that at this gorgeous compromise.
They would first buy a sailboat, sail as far as
they could for a year, then put the boat up
on dry dock, and go for living on the farm
for one year, same amount of time. That felt fair
and just, And after two years then they would compare
(20:23):
their experiences in order to create the next dream together.
It was perfect, even though they were coming from totally
opposite dreams.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Finding a compromise between Iowa and the open ocean seems
pretty impressive. But what about the smaller relationship conflicts that
come up even more often in our everyday lives. After
the break, we'll look at best practices for starting these
lower grade arguments off right and what we can do
if they wind up going wrong.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Why do you always leave all the laundry on the floor.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
No, honey, I'm starting to feel defensive here.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
I'm just sick and tired of this stupid, stupid laundry.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
The happiness lab will be right back. Relationship fights have
a way of exploding when we least want them to.
Maybe we've been building up small resentments over months or years.
(21:23):
When something finally sets us off. We're feeling angry, we're hurting,
and we open our mouths with a little plan for
what we're going to say. Relationship expert doctor Julie Schwart
Scottman has found that these ad libbed openings aren't the
best way to start an argument.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
The first three minutes of a fight is incredibly important.
The first three minutes of a conflict conversation not only
predicts how the rest of the conversation will go, it
also predicts how well the relationship that's going to go
six years down the road, with over ninety percent accuracy.
(22:01):
So how we bring up our complaint is absolutely crucial.
Say what you feel. You're describing your self. I feel stressed,
I feel disappointed. Then step two about what now? Notice
that's not about who, about your partner and how rotten
they are.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
But you also have some bess practices once the fight starts,
in order to how to do it right. And one
of my favorite ones, because I think this is a
tendency that I need to work on with my own husband,
is to make sure I'm not kitchen sinking in the
middle of the fight. What is kitchen sinking and why
is it so bad for a fight.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
One of the things that we find that people do
that gets in the way of mutual understanding is that
they don't feel entitled to their complaints, so they kind
of stockpile their grievances. They try to live with it
and say, ah, it's no big deal, I don't have
to bring that up. But then there's another one. They
do that again and again until resentment builds to such
(23:03):
an extent that all of the complaints spill out at once.
And that's what we call kitchen sinking. Everything but the
kitchen sink is in there, you know, and they just
let it all out at once. And it's really overwhelming
when you do that, when you say, hey, Fred, I've
got this list of fifteen things that you're doing wrong,
and here they are, and you know, you come up
(23:24):
with fifteen and to Fred it feels like an avalanche.
You know, he cannot listen. He just immediately goes into
the flooded state fight or flight, and that's what Kinchin's
thinking is about. So you really need to bring up
your complaints when they matter to you, one at a time,
one at a time.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
And so starting with one particular positive need. But that's
the point where I think a partner needs to respond
after you've done that well. And so talk about what
the right kind of response is from a partner after
you've expressed those needs, how they can sort of show
that you've been heard.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Well.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
The right response from a listener might be some empathy
and some validation, maybe even beginning with summarizing what you
hear the partner say, sound like why don't you express
a need?
Speaker 2 (24:12):
And then I'll show it. I really need you to
be with me in the morning and not sleep in,
you know, because I feel really lonely in the morning.
You're just inconsiderate, you don't think about my needs. Okay,
now do it right, Okay, Okay, So I'm really upset
that a lot of mornings you're sleeping in and I
(24:34):
feel really alone. I wish you would make an effort
to be with me at breakfast. It's an important meal
and i'd like to be with you and have your company. Wow.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
Okay, So you're saying that you missed me in the
morning when you're having breakfast alone. Yeah, I'm sleep Oh okay,
Well I can understand feeling lonely. You know, when you
first wake up and you're downstairs and you're wanting some company.
(25:06):
You have connection first thing in the morning. That really
makes sense to me.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
I get that. Great.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
Okay, So that should proceed your response. And what that
was was empathy first, empathy with their summary, then empathy
with his feelings, and then validating is right to have
those feelings. If I were him stepping into his shoes, yeah,
(25:34):
I could see where he would feel lonely and want
some company. That totally makes sense to me. However, I
can still disagree with his point of view. I can
respond by saying something like, if I want to say, no, honey,
you know, I really understand what you're needing and why
(25:56):
you're meaning. But I'm usually up till about two thirty
in the morning, Yeah, feeding the baby and getting very
terrible sleep, So getting up at six o'clock in the
morning is really hard for me.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
I get it.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
So would it be possible, maybe we could compromise somehow.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
You have to get up early some mornings, but maybe
on the weekends we could both sleep in together.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Yeah, you're more of a night out, you're saying in
Europe later getting up at six, so you only get
four or five hours of sleep, right, and that doesn't
work for you? Right? So yeah, we can sleep in
the weekends, is yourst thing. It's a possibility. Yeah, how
would you feel about that? Kind of makes sense.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
So that's kind of what it looks like.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
That's beautiful. I mean I heard you each hearing one another,
or heard you quickly going to compromising, and I heard
something else that you talk about, which is this lovely
idea that you call yielding to win, which comes up
during compromise. So explain yielding to win and maybe how
it played out in that scenario.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean we really just discovered
this when we studied domestic violence, and these guys who
were domestically violent just refuse to accept any influence at all.
I mean they acted like they were baseball players. Just
whatever their wives asked for, they would bat it back
and say no. And when you always say no, when
(27:29):
you refuse influence, you become powerless because nobody wants to
talk to you when you're like that. There's no give
and take, So why would anybody have a conversation with
you about what they needed? So that accepting influence is
the only way to be influential in a relationship, and
that's kind of a surprising finding. It loll counterintuitive that
(27:52):
by accept influence from Julie, she's more likely to accept
influence from me. If I refuse to accept influence, she's
even unlikely to talk to me about an issue.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
Yeah, think about it this way. If John makes a
request and I accept influence from him, then you know, basically,
when he makes a request, he's opening up his arms
and he's saying, please be there for me, And if
I am, I'm saying back to him, I value you,
(28:27):
I love you, I want to be there for you.
I'm going to do the best I can to be
there for you. He, in turn, hopefully is going to
feel grateful about that and appreciative, which draws him closer
to me. And if he feels closer to me and
safer with me to express his own needs, he's also
(28:49):
more likely to listen to mine. Right, And that's part
of that beautiful reciprocity, going back and forth, being there
for one another. That builds trust and eventually leads to commitment.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
And that's why power sharing power in a relationship is
really the only thing that works. You know, when you
have this dominance hierarchy, one person's in control and the
other person's subordinate, it just doesn't work. It doesn't feel good.
Eventually people will withdraw from that kind of interaction and
then everybody gets lonely.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
And this is kind of gets the beauty of kind
of what we can use conflict for overall, which is
that you know, again, we tend to think of fighting
in a relationship as this bad thing, but ultimately, if
you point it out, it's like a really important moment
where you can kind of get closer together. It can
kind of lead to something better after the fact.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
May I tell you a story or so, when our
daughter was about three or four years old, you know,
we'd be having dinner and she would be listening to
our discussions about these relationships and couples and so on.
So one night after dinner, we were all hanging out
in the kitchen, John and I were cleaning up. She
was there, maybe four years old, and we turned her
(30:06):
and we asked her, honey, what do you think it's
life in a house when mommy and daddy's don't get
along and they fight a lot. And she ended up saying, well,
there's no there's no rainbows in the house. And it
was like, oh my god, they say that. Can I
(30:26):
use that in her next book? I mean, you know
it was it was really, uh, the truth, the truth
right that the delight, the warmth, the glow that you
have in a relationship that is cooperative, an egalitarian and
caring of one another, that's building trust and feeling safe
(30:51):
is what creates those rainbows.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
One of my favorite things is when you just kind
of walk through the transcripts of couples having these kind
of conflicts out and you kind of like annotate, like, uh,
they did a good thing here. I thought it was
so helpful because it really gave us the sense that, like,
you know, couples are just trying. They're not going to
be perfect. Sometimes you can mess up, but you can
sort of come back if you sort of fix things.
(31:15):
And I love that in your book you have a
list of like here's a spot, here's where you can
go to if you're having a tough time and you
need to kind of fix things too.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Yeah. Repair is really as good as it gets in relationships,
really trying to make repairs and accepting your partner's attempts
at repair as really positive things and receive the repairs
and intention to make things better for both of you.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Give me, give me an example and maybe a repair
that you might say in a fight, Like if you're
in the middle of a conflict and you say something unfortunate,
what would a repair look like?
Speaker 3 (31:48):
John, I'm really sick and tired of the laundry being
all over the floor. Why do you always leave all
the laundry on the floor.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
No, honey, I'm starting to feel defensive here. You know.
Can you sing in in a general way?
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Well, let's see if I can. I don't think I can.
I'm just sick and tired of this stupid, stupid laundry. No,
wait a minute, you know I'm just saying it the
wrong way. Great, Okay, the laundry is on the floor.
I really don't like seeing it. Would you please clean
(32:23):
it up before we have Yeah?
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah, I will, thank you. That was a lot. You're welcome. Okay.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
One of the best repairs in the whole wide world
is when you start feeling criticized or put down, just
say I'm feeling defensive. Could you say that another way
instead of going offensive? Right, just say I'm feeling defensive,
and it's it's a great one.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
I think you both are like the Jedi of understanding
relationships and how we can sort of build empathy in them.
I'm just curious, you know, do you ever take this
on the road. You know, I know you watch so
many couples in the lab, but are you ever just
out at a restaurant or hanging out in the grocery
store watching these couple in family dynamics? And do you
ever intervene.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
One hundred percent of the time? And no, we don't intervene.
I've got enough client, you know, and they're not asking
us to intervene, So why would we do that. You know,
that's intrusive, it's mortifying for them. So the last thing
I want to do is shame somebody for how they're
acting in a restaurant. So we'll just sit back and
(33:30):
watch and I'll usually feel sad if they're having a
hard time. There is only one situation typically where I
might intervene just a little bit. And that is in
a grocery store. We've all seen it. When a child
is having a temper tantrum. The mother may have, you know,
(33:51):
a baby in the growth free card along with this
child who's having the temper tantrum. And you can see
she's turning red. She's feeling mortified, she's feeling embarrassed, horrified,
and getting more and more stress. Her voice is getting louder.
I may go over to her and I may say
to her, boy, this is a hard day for you,
(34:15):
isn't it. This is really tough. God, it's so hard
when your kids starts screaming in a grocery store. Now,
notice I'm not criticizing her, which many people might want
to do if she's yelling at her kid. I'm trying
to use empathy to help her not feel so alone.
(34:36):
That's the key to reducing somebody's stress, helping them not
feel so alone with what they're going through by using
empathy and validation. Validation meaning yet makes sense to me
that you're feeling that. Yeah, And sure enough, that's what happens.
Her voice drops down, she makes contact, you know, eye
(34:56):
contact with me. I'm smiling at her. We share some warmth,
and then her voice gets quieter. It's a very simple
little intervention. Otherwise we sit back and watch and predict.
You know, what's going to happen to these couples in
a restaurant with their phones, not looking at each other
six years down the road, and that can be fun
(35:21):
to you should try.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
We've now come full circle with our short season on
happiness and love, but hopefully you won't be thinking of
ditching us for someone else because The Happiness Lab has
many new shows in store. With me, Doctor Laurie Santos,
Pushkin Hi Happiness Lab listeners. This week, we're wrapping up
our mini season on the science of relationships with the
second of two in case you missed it, throwback episodes
some of my favorites in the history of the Happiness Lab. Today,
(00:35):
you'll get to hear the second half of my two
part conversation with husband and wife research team John and
Julie Gotman, a couple who spent over fifty years studying
the science of love. In this episode, the Gotman's share
what science shows about how couples can argue better and
why the way you fight matters more than what you
fight about. If you're in a relationship wherever hope to be,
(00:57):
these insights are not to be missed, so stay with
us to hear their amazing advice right after these short ads.
When we tape interviews for this show, a lot of
(01:19):
small things can go wrong. Planes fly overhead, trains rumble by,
recording devices break, but more often than not, the problem
is usually somebody's phone going off.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I turned the phone off, but they didn't turn it off.
I did.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yeah, this isn't the kind of exchange you might have
expected from relationship experts. John and Julie Schwartz Gottman. You
might have thought that Julie would just brush over John's
mistake with some loving, yet sacarine comment. Oh, honey, I
simply adore your forgetfulness. It fills our lives with so
many surprises. But the Gutmans are realists. They don't like
(01:54):
shying away from the disagreements, disputes and downry arguments that
happen in every partnership, and in their decades together as
a married couple, they've had their fair share of conflicts.
Some of them were pretty fundamental.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
This was like thirty years ago, as it's such a
big fight there that we actually went to couple therapy.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
That must be so intimidating for the poor couple of
therapists when the Gotman's walk in. Throughout their careers and
now at the institute that bears their name, the Gotments
have studied countless couples, paying particular attention to the different
ways they bring up complaints and solve conflicts, and the
central lesson they've observed is that the key to a
long and healthy relationship lies in confronting disagreement rather than
(02:35):
burying it.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
But as they.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Explain in their new book fight right, how successful couples
turn conflict into connection. There are ways we can argue
a bit smarter, and the gotments think we need to
heed this advice now more than ever.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
When COVID started, actually we did a number of interviews
and podcasts to give tools and advice for couples who
were struggling so hard, you know, especially under quarantine.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
It was so.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Painful because most people are used to separation during the
day with work and kid care and variety of things,
and then coming together. Now they were together twenty four
to seven. Oftentimes they didn't have space to themselves, you know,
nothing of solitude for themselves if they needed that, And
that has carried over people. At least the people who
(03:28):
had distress marriages became more and more unhappy. They became
more domestically violent, more hostile towards one another, and there
was emotional damage occurring that still festers inside a lot
of couples today, even though COVID is much more under control.
(03:53):
So I think we're in a sorry state right now.
The other thing, too, is that kids, especially teens, have
suffered tremendously from COVID. That puts more pressure on the
parents because now they're dealing with kids who are seriously depressed,
who may even be suicidal, who don't want to go
(04:15):
to school, who don't want to connect socially because they've
almost forgotten how except through technology, And kids are a
loss for whom we got going back to what was normal,
what is normal, and parents are coping with that too.
That puts more strain on parents too. So we think
(04:36):
that fighting isn't broken here in this country. You know,
there's so much polarization, political polarization, and you know, polarization
around even to get vaccinated against them a pathogen. In
good relationships, people fight in ways that are destructive, that
(04:58):
create antagonism, I mean in bad relationships.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
In bad relationships, thank you. There's a need to really
re examine the way we do with conflict and what
this is about fight, right, is turning conflict into connection
and what are the tools for doing that? Yeah, And the.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Great thing about your work is that you've been able
to look predictively at the way people fight to try
to figure out how that's going to play out and
the rest of their relationship. And in the course of
doing that, you've identified what you like to call the
four horsemen of the four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse,
I think, is what we're going for. And so you know,
(05:37):
walk me through what these are and why they can
be so problematic.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
All right, So number one is criticism. That you know,
the thing we do the most is one of the
most distructive. So criticism means blaming a problem between you
and your partner on a personality flaw of your partner.
So it will sound like you're so lazy, you're so
(06:01):
thought Look, you're so inconsiderate. All those put downs are criticisms.
That's one. The second one we call contempt, and contempt
is really awful. It's like sulphuric acid for the relationship.
It destroys it and not only does it predict the
(06:22):
relationship demise, it also predicts how many infectious illnesses the
listener of contempt will have in the coming years. That's incredible.
So caring contempt destroys the immune system of the listener.
So do we want to do that to the person
(06:44):
we love? I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
So how does consent different? And I was.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
About to say that, thank you. Contempt is looking down
your nose at your partner from a position of superiority.
So there's often a smear or some scorn or you know, sarcasm,
mockery at times, and of course name calling calling your
(07:12):
partner a bad name, which we don't have to repeat here.
All of that is contempt. Now, the response to criticism
and contempt is defensiveness. Those two first ones make us
feel attacked. What do we do when we feel attacked, Well,
we're going to fight back or we're going to play
(07:34):
innocent victim. So in defensiveness, you either will counterattack or
rewine and say I did to pay the bills on time.
Likes the whiners, Yeah, our friends the whiners. And so
that's number three and number four we call stonewalling. Stonewalling
(07:55):
literally is what it sounds like. The listener who's supposed
to be engaged with the speaker shuts themselves down, acts
like a stonewall. May not make icontact, doesn't show any response,
any movement, any words that indicates they're actually listening and participating.
(08:18):
They turned into a stone wall. We discovered that people
who stonewalled, and eighty five percent of those were men inside,
were actually in fight or flight, which is really interesting.
Their heart rates would be sitting there over one hundred
beats a minute, sometimes way higher, or for an athlete
(08:40):
over about eighty eighty five beats a minute, and they
were in fight or flight or freeze, which is a
horribly uncomfortable feeling inside. Thus the person was actually going
inside themselves, trying to shut out stimuli coming from outside,
(09:01):
including the partner's voice, in order to soothe themselves because
they were feeling so awful the stone waller. So those
are the four criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
And so it seems like one of the reasons we
wind up kind of entering this path of the four
horsemen of bad relationships is that we kind of don't
realize what we're fighting about. We need to kind of
figure out what the deeper, hidden agenda is in some
of these fights. But at a very kind of basic level,
what are most fights about.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
It's kind of surprising, right, they're about absolutely nothing. They're
watching TV and he's got the remote and he's cattle
surfing and she says, leave it on that show that's interesting,
and he says, well, well, let me see what else
is on. She says, no, leave it. He says, well,
let me see what else is on and she says, no,
leave it. He says, fine, have it your way. She said,
(10:00):
why'd you say fine that way? You know, I don't
even want to watch television with you now? Oh you don't? Okay, fine,
And then they saw relating. So what are they fighting about.
They're really not fighting about money, sex, in laws, parenting,
you know, they're fighting about the lack of connection, you know,
(10:21):
that inability to see one another this viewpoint, and that
really gets in the way of a deeper understanding of
what's going on in the moment.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
And so sometimes finding this deeper understanding really requires going
to that hidden agenda. You're talking about what you mean
by a hidden agenda and why it can lead to
so much kind of conflict and relationships.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Okay, So by hidden agenda, what we mean is again
that internal world inside somebody where resuldes their values, their
core needs, their ideal dreams, their history, which may include
some old scar tissue from past parenting relationships, being abused,
(11:07):
all kinds of things, and that remains underground. They're not
talking about that. They're talking about something on the surface.
So let me give you a good example. Let's say that, Well,
I can just take our situation with the books. John
is an avid book collector. We're getting books all the time.
(11:29):
Where are you going to put them? There's piles of
stuff all over the place. Okay, So John has a
personality type. He can focus his attention completely on whatever
he's choosing to attend too, and everything else is blocked out.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
You know. It's a phenomenal skill.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
That he developed growing up in a very crowded tenement
apartment in New York. I. On the other hand, the
whole environment totally affects me. The colors of the walls,
the sounds, the noise, the tidiness, everything affects me, and
I can't think straight. Things are disorganized, right, So that's
(12:14):
a fundamental difference between John and I. So my ideal
dream here, I actually have a little postcard that shows
a woman sleeping and just waking up.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
I dreamed of the tidy house, you know.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
I mean it's it's like, yes, exactly, And to John
that's completely arbitrary, unimportant, right, Okay, But if we don't
bring up those differences between us, his dream is to
not be n need it because he just wants to
do what he wants to do, you know, which, of course, most.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Of us do.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
We want to have a little bit of control over
our time.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
And so sometimes those hidden agendas seem to be about
these personality differences. But I know you've talked about cases
where you really had these hidden dreams, right, these these
deeper values that you had for your life and what
you want your choices to be, and that that can
lead to conflict too.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
So really wanted to buy a small cabin on Orches Island,
and we have been renting places and even rented a
lovely place on the ocean, you know, And I didn't
think it was I didn't think it was a good
idea to buy buy it another place. I thought it
was a waste of money and we could rent and
why did we have to do this? And so I
(13:31):
was adamant about not doing it. She was adamant about
doing it. So we went to therapy, and the therapist
one day said, John, relationships are about creating boundaries and
you can say no to her and she has to
live with it. And when we left, you know, I said,
do I sound like that? And she said, yeah, you do,
(13:52):
and I said, well, I don't want that kind of
a relationship. I think we have to talk more about
this cabin thing, and so we really developed a way
of going deeper into why was it so important to
her to have her own place there rather than renting?
What was the big well?
Speaker 3 (14:10):
And also, needless to say, we fired the therapist immediately.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
But what we did.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
We came home and we sat down. I'll never forget
this evening, and we started asking each other these huge
questions that later became our intervention called the Dream within Conflict,
and we asked questions like, Honey, is there some value
or ethics or guidelines that are part of your position
(14:40):
on this issue? We would ask, do you have some
childhood history that somehow is relating to this? Why is
this so important to you? Do you have some ideal
dream here that was a biggie? Do you have some
ideal dream that's part of your position on this issue?
(15:01):
And oh my god, this whole world opened up.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
With these six questions. You know, I was able to
really look deeply at Hyo was so opposed to owning property,
And it really had to do with my parents having
survived the Holocaust in World War Two and my father's
messages to me, don't trust in anything but what you
can put in your mind, because you may have to
(15:26):
flee one day. Jules have always had to flee, you know.
That was my objection, Julie's you can tell yourself.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
And mine mine was that I'd grown up in a
very unhappy household, very distressed, and so I lived a
couple of blocks away from a huge forest. At night,
beginning when I was eight or nine years old, I
would sneak out of the house after everybody went to bed,
I'd go sleep in the forest overnight, no matter what
(15:56):
the weather was. Then I would sneak back in before
people got up, and nobody knew I was doing that
for years, years and years and years. I have my
favorite tree I would sleep in, So I think I'm
part monkey or something. I'm not sure, but anyway, what
getting a place on Orcus meant to me was having
(16:17):
roots in the wilderness, which is exactly what that forest
had been to me as a child. So you can
see both of our backgrounds, our childhood histories, and values
that those histories taught us, which were very powerful, were
really significant in this difference between us, right.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
And once we understood that, we were able to arrive
at a compromise that really worked for both of us,
which was.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
We agreed we would buy a little cabin and live
in it for two years and see how it felt
to be there, whether or not we really like this,
in trade for keeping our house a kosher house, which
was a great, big deal, a lot you know, different
(17:08):
dishes from elk and meet and you know, all kinds
of stuff. We did that in exchange, and John discovered
he loved having a klan.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Non organ see my knowledge. Really loved it. Yeah, we're
so quiet, so peaceful, you know, we really loved it.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
And so it just shows the power when you can
actually get to these compromises, when you can sort of
look at these hidden agendas and figure out a compromise
that maximizes both both parties can be happy. I think
often we think of compromise, we think, well, somebody's going
to have to sacrifice something. But sometimes if you understand
what you're really fighting about, it seems like you can
get to, like, you know, a compromise that really works
for everybody.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Yeah. The amazing thing is that the worst issues in
a relationship can be the greatest sources of connection and understanding.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
Right, let me let me give you another example of
this notion of compromise. We found that the successful couples
took an initial step when they were working on compromise
that was really important, and that was to take their
own position on an issue and divide it into two parts,
(18:15):
an inflexible part, the part where nothing could be given
up in that little circle, a core need, an ideal
dream of particular value. They could not compromise on those
pieces of their position, but there were also flexible things
(18:38):
that they could compromise on that might have to do
with who, what, where, when, how much, how long? You know,
those fundamental nitty gritty details. So we had a couple
in a workshop, for example, where the woman and the
man were getting ready for retiring, and they both wanted
(18:59):
to sell their house. But then his ideal dream was
to buy a sailboat sail around the world forever and
ever into the sunset. Her ideal dream was this. Her
family had owned a farm for over one hundred years
called a century farm. She wanted to go live on
the farm and take her place in the legacy of
(19:22):
ancestors who had also done so. Where was it in Iowa?
So how do you sail around the world from Iowa?
You cannot do this, So when they looked at their positions.
In his center circle, that was inflexible he put sailing,
hers was live on the farm. But around that the
(19:46):
flexible things were whose dream would go first, how long
would it last, how much would we spend, where would
we go, When would it begin, when would it end?
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Etc.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
And they arrived through doing that at this gorgeous compromise.
They would first buy a sailboat, sail as far as
they could for a year, then put the boat up
on dry dock, and go for living on the farm
for one year, same amount of time. That felt fair
and just, And after two years then they would compare
(20:23):
their experiences in order to create the next dream together.
It was perfect, even though they were coming from totally
opposite dreams.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
Finding a compromise between Iowa and the open ocean seems
pretty impressive. But what about the smaller relationship conflicts that
come up even more often in our everyday lives. After
the break, we'll look at best practices for starting these
lower grade arguments off right and what we can do
if they wind up going wrong.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Why do you always leave all the laundry on the floor.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
No, honey, I'm starting to feel defensive here.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
I'm just sick and tired of this stupid, stupid laundry.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
The happiness lab will be right back. Relationship fights have
a way of exploding when we least want them to.
Maybe we've been building up small resentments over months or years.
(21:23):
When something finally sets us off. We're feeling angry, we're hurting,
and we open our mouths with a little plan for
what we're going to say. Relationship expert doctor Julie Schwart
Scottman has found that these ad libbed openings aren't the
best way to start an argument.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
The first three minutes of a fight is incredibly important.
The first three minutes of a conflict conversation not only
predicts how the rest of the conversation will go, it
also predicts how well the relationship that's going to go
six years down the road, with over ninety percent accuracy.
(22:01):
So how we bring up our complaint is absolutely crucial.
Say what you feel. You're describing your self. I feel stressed,
I feel disappointed. Then step two about what now? Notice
that's not about who, about your partner and how rotten
they are.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
But you also have some bess practices once the fight starts,
in order to how to do it right. And one
of my favorite ones, because I think this is a
tendency that I need to work on with my own husband,
is to make sure I'm not kitchen sinking in the
middle of the fight. What is kitchen sinking and why
is it so bad for a fight.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
One of the things that we find that people do
that gets in the way of mutual understanding is that
they don't feel entitled to their complaints, so they kind
of stockpile their grievances. They try to live with it
and say, ah, it's no big deal, I don't have
to bring that up. But then there's another one. They
do that again and again until resentment builds to such
(23:03):
an extent that all of the complaints spill out at once.
And that's what we call kitchen sinking. Everything but the
kitchen sink is in there, you know, and they just
let it all out at once. And it's really overwhelming
when you do that, when you say, hey, Fred, I've
got this list of fifteen things that you're doing wrong,
and here they are, and you know, you come up
(23:24):
with fifteen and to Fred it feels like an avalanche.
You know, he cannot listen. He just immediately goes into
the flooded state fight or flight, and that's what Kinchin's
thinking is about. So you really need to bring up
your complaints when they matter to you, one at a time,
one at a time.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
And so starting with one particular positive need. But that's
the point where I think a partner needs to respond
after you've done that well. And so talk about what
the right kind of response is from a partner after
you've expressed those needs, how they can sort of show
that you've been heard.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Well.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
The right response from a listener might be some empathy
and some validation, maybe even beginning with summarizing what you
hear the partner say, sound like why don't you express
a need?
Speaker 2 (24:12):
And then I'll show it. I really need you to
be with me in the morning and not sleep in,
you know, because I feel really lonely in the morning.
You're just inconsiderate, you don't think about my needs. Okay,
now do it right, Okay, Okay, So I'm really upset
that a lot of mornings you're sleeping in and I
(24:34):
feel really alone. I wish you would make an effort
to be with me at breakfast. It's an important meal
and i'd like to be with you and have your company. Wow.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
Okay, So you're saying that you missed me in the
morning when you're having breakfast alone. Yeah, I'm sleep Oh okay,
Well I can understand feeling lonely. You know, when you
first wake up and you're downstairs and you're wanting some company.
(25:06):
You have connection first thing in the morning. That really
makes sense to me.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
I get that. Great.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
Okay, So that should proceed your response. And what that
was was empathy first, empathy with their summary, then empathy
with his feelings, and then validating is right to have
those feelings. If I were him stepping into his shoes, yeah,
(25:34):
I could see where he would feel lonely and want
some company. That totally makes sense to me. However, I
can still disagree with his point of view. I can
respond by saying something like, if I want to say, no, honey,
you know, I really understand what you're needing and why
(25:56):
you're meaning. But I'm usually up till about two thirty
in the morning, Yeah, feeding the baby and getting very
terrible sleep, So getting up at six o'clock in the
morning is really hard for me.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
I get it.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
So would it be possible, maybe we could compromise somehow.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
You have to get up early some mornings, but maybe
on the weekends we could both sleep in together.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Yeah, you're more of a night out, you're saying in
Europe later getting up at six, so you only get
four or five hours of sleep, right, and that doesn't
work for you? Right? So yeah, we can sleep in
the weekends, is yourst thing. It's a possibility. Yeah, how
would you feel about that? Kind of makes sense.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
So that's kind of what it looks like.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
That's beautiful. I mean I heard you each hearing one another,
or heard you quickly going to compromising, and I heard
something else that you talk about, which is this lovely
idea that you call yielding to win, which comes up
during compromise. So explain yielding to win and maybe how
it played out in that scenario.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean we really just discovered
this when we studied domestic violence, and these guys who
were domestically violent just refuse to accept any influence at all.
I mean they acted like they were baseball players. Just
whatever their wives asked for, they would bat it back
and say no. And when you always say no, when
(27:29):
you refuse influence, you become powerless because nobody wants to
talk to you when you're like that. There's no give
and take, So why would anybody have a conversation with
you about what they needed? So that accepting influence is
the only way to be influential in a relationship, and
that's kind of a surprising finding. It loll counterintuitive that
(27:52):
by accept influence from Julie, she's more likely to accept
influence from me. If I refuse to accept influence, she's
even unlikely to talk to me about an issue.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
Yeah, think about it this way. If John makes a
request and I accept influence from him, then you know, basically,
when he makes a request, he's opening up his arms
and he's saying, please be there for me, And if
I am, I'm saying back to him, I value you,
(28:27):
I love you, I want to be there for you.
I'm going to do the best I can to be
there for you. He, in turn, hopefully is going to
feel grateful about that and appreciative, which draws him closer
to me. And if he feels closer to me and
safer with me to express his own needs, he's also
(28:49):
more likely to listen to mine. Right, And that's part
of that beautiful reciprocity, going back and forth, being there
for one another. That builds trust and eventually leads to commitment.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
And that's why power sharing power in a relationship is
really the only thing that works. You know, when you
have this dominance hierarchy, one person's in control and the
other person's subordinate, it just doesn't work. It doesn't feel good.
Eventually people will withdraw from that kind of interaction and
then everybody gets lonely.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
And this is kind of gets the beauty of kind
of what we can use conflict for overall, which is
that you know, again, we tend to think of fighting
in a relationship as this bad thing, but ultimately, if
you point it out, it's like a really important moment
where you can kind of get closer together. It can
kind of lead to something better after the fact.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
May I tell you a story or so, when our
daughter was about three or four years old, you know,
we'd be having dinner and she would be listening to
our discussions about these relationships and couples and so on.
So one night after dinner, we were all hanging out
in the kitchen, John and I were cleaning up. She
was there, maybe four years old, and we turned her
(30:06):
and we asked her, honey, what do you think it's
life in a house when mommy and daddy's don't get
along and they fight a lot. And she ended up saying, well,
there's no there's no rainbows in the house. And it
was like, oh my god, they say that. Can I
(30:26):
use that in her next book? I mean, you know
it was it was really, uh, the truth, the truth
right that the delight, the warmth, the glow that you
have in a relationship that is cooperative, an egalitarian and
caring of one another, that's building trust and feeling safe
(30:51):
is what creates those rainbows.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
One of my favorite things is when you just kind
of walk through the transcripts of couples having these kind
of conflicts out and you kind of like annotate, like, uh,
they did a good thing here. I thought it was
so helpful because it really gave us the sense that, like,
you know, couples are just trying. They're not going to
be perfect. Sometimes you can mess up, but you can
sort of come back if you sort of fix things.
(31:15):
And I love that in your book you have a
list of like here's a spot, here's where you can
go to if you're having a tough time and you
need to kind of fix things too.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Yeah. Repair is really as good as it gets in relationships,
really trying to make repairs and accepting your partner's attempts
at repair as really positive things and receive the repairs
and intention to make things better for both of you.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Give me, give me an example and maybe a repair
that you might say in a fight, Like if you're
in the middle of a conflict and you say something unfortunate,
what would a repair look like?
Speaker 3 (31:48):
John, I'm really sick and tired of the laundry being
all over the floor. Why do you always leave all
the laundry on the floor.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
No, honey, I'm starting to feel defensive here. You know.
Can you sing in in a general way?
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Well, let's see if I can. I don't think I can.
I'm just sick and tired of this stupid, stupid laundry. No,
wait a minute, you know I'm just saying it the
wrong way. Great, Okay, the laundry is on the floor.
I really don't like seeing it. Would you please clean
(32:23):
it up before we have Yeah?
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah, I will, thank you. That was a lot. You're welcome. Okay.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
One of the best repairs in the whole wide world
is when you start feeling criticized or put down, just
say I'm feeling defensive. Could you say that another way
instead of going offensive? Right, just say I'm feeling defensive,
and it's it's a great one.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
I think you both are like the Jedi of understanding
relationships and how we can sort of build empathy in them.
I'm just curious, you know, do you ever take this
on the road. You know, I know you watch so
many couples in the lab, but are you ever just
out at a restaurant or hanging out in the grocery
store watching these couple in family dynamics? And do you
ever intervene.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
One hundred percent of the time? And no, we don't intervene.
I've got enough client, you know, and they're not asking
us to intervene, So why would we do that. You know,
that's intrusive, it's mortifying for them. So the last thing
I want to do is shame somebody for how they're
acting in a restaurant. So we'll just sit back and
(33:30):
watch and I'll usually feel sad if they're having a
hard time. There is only one situation typically where I
might intervene just a little bit. And that is in
a grocery store. We've all seen it. When a child
is having a temper tantrum. The mother may have, you know,
(33:51):
a baby in the growth free card along with this
child who's having the temper tantrum. And you can see
she's turning red. She's feeling mortified, she's feeling embarrassed, horrified,
and getting more and more stress. Her voice is getting louder.
I may go over to her and I may say
to her, boy, this is a hard day for you,
(34:15):
isn't it. This is really tough. God, it's so hard
when your kids starts screaming in a grocery store. Now,
notice I'm not criticizing her, which many people might want
to do if she's yelling at her kid. I'm trying
to use empathy to help her not feel so alone.
(34:36):
That's the key to reducing somebody's stress, helping them not
feel so alone with what they're going through by using
empathy and validation. Validation meaning yet makes sense to me
that you're feeling that. Yeah, And sure enough, that's what happens.
Her voice drops down, she makes contact, you know, eye
(34:56):
contact with me. I'm smiling at her. We share some warmth,
and then her voice gets quieter. It's a very simple
little intervention. Otherwise we sit back and watch and predict.
You know, what's going to happen to these couples in
a restaurant with their phones, not looking at each other
six years down the road, and that can be fun
(35:21):
to you should try.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
We've now come full circle with our short season on
happiness and love, but hopefully you won't be thinking of
ditching us for someone else because The Happiness Lab has
many new shows in store. With me, Doctor Laurie Santos,
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