How Does the Gottman Method Help Relationships?

A healthy and happy relationship looks like a house. Every floor of the house is one of the seven components of a healthy relationship. Trust and commitment are the two walls holding our couple together.

This is called the Sound Relationship House Theory, and it’s the basis for the Gottman Method.

This method leads us through the floors of the house, one at a time, so we can rebuild our relationship and make it stronger. To achieve that, every component represented in the house has one of three aims: improve communication between us and our partner, increase the closeness between us, and help us build a life we can both enjoy together.

Improve Communication

It’s not uncommon for couples to fight due to misunderstandings. And sometimes, small issues escalate into more serious ones because we don’t listen to one another. But a healthy relationship can only thrive with good communication.

The Gottman Method relies on two components to improve communication: turn towards each other and manage conflict.

Turning towards each other is the second floor of the house, and it involves us and our partner learning each other’s signals for attention. This can be any kind of attention: affection, comfort, or even attention for its own sake. Responding to these signals can make a relationship stronger.

Managing conflict is more complicated. It’s the sixth floor of the house, and, contrary to what we might think, it does not revolve around solving conflict. Not every conflict can be solved, and trying to resolve the unresolvable will only harm us and our relationship.

Instead, this floor teaches us how to live with unresolved conflict. It also teaches us how to communicate during disagreements in a way that allows us to speak without hurting one another.

Increase Closeness

The Gottman Method increases closeness between us and our partner with floors one, two, and seven of the sound relationship house.

Floor one represents love maps. These are maps we build about our partner. They teach us how they move throughout their lives, what they think, what they feel, what they hope for. Everything we ought to know about our partners is safe within those maps.

Floor two is about showing our partner the love and admiration we hold for them. It’s about being able to tell them how much we appreciate them for who they are.

Floor seven, the last floor of the house, encourages us to create a life with shared meaning. Our relationship is important: it has a big impact on our lives and even our struggles are a part of them. This helps us find meaning within our journey, and it helps us create the meaning we both want to attribute to our relationship, to our lives moving forward.

Dealing with Dysfunction

Healing comes from the Self. It’s the Self that takes on the role of mediator between all our parts and helps us restore balance. But in order to do that, we must go through the process of un-blending: separating the Self from the other parts of the mind.

The Self’s mediation is critical to our growth. It allows us to revisit and talk about difficult memories. It validates our hurt and our attempts at coping with our wounds, even if they turned out to be dysfunctional. After all, it was all done with the best of intentions.

Build a Life Together

Building a life together is the ultimate goal of a relationship, and the Gottman Method can help us with that. It teaches us to accept each other’s influence through the fourth floor of the house. We compromise with each other and favor each other’s preferences every now and then. It helps us keep a certain balance within the relationship.

It also teaches us to build a life together by solving the problems that we can solve through the fifth floor of the house. We begin to favor constructive conversations where we tackle the problem head-on while also reassuring each other that we’re in this together. Because at the end of the day, we are a team. We solve problems better together than we do apart.

Sometimes our relationship struggles are too difficult to solve alone. An appointment with a counselor may be able to set us on the right track. It can help us grow both as individuals and as a couple, as long as we make the first step. Contact me to set up an appointment for couples therapy and take that first step.