Emotional: Sharing of significant meanings and feelings with one another

Intellectual: Sharing of ideas with one another

Aesthetic: Sharing of deep beauty like movies, plays, music, concerts, sunsets, etc

Creative: Shared creativity – working on a common goal to see it come to fruition

Recreational: Sharing “Stress relieving play” – walking, biking, working out…

Work: Sharing common tasks – maintaining a house, raising a family together, earning a living, or community projects

Spiritual: Sharing a common relationship with a form of spirituality.

Gottman arrives at his conclusions from a longitudinal study that uses videotapes of real couple interactions and psychophysiological measures and extensive interviewing of the subjects. Gottman found that not all negativity is “equally corrosive.” “Certain negative acts” were more predictive of dissolution of the relationship,” Gottman states in his seminal paper, “A Theory of Marital Dissolution and Stability,” published in 1993 in the Journal of Family Psychology.

Suprisingly anger was not one of the predictive factors. What was predictive of divorce was the husband’s defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling and the wife’s criticism, defensiveness and contempt.

Your partner is not so interested in how you view the issue at hand but how much you care about them and being able to experience you as open, reasonable and flexible. This will calm and reassure them that the problem can be worked through. This will prevent the escalation of the destructive cycle and jumpstart the communication process in an effective manner.

Taking the time to learn this way of communicating pays off big time. What have you experienced when you attempt to repair a rupture?

In my practice I observe men compartmentalizing issues in a way that’s different from many women’s response to frustration. By this I mean that women generally have an expectation of an empathic response to an expression of difficulty whether its your son’s fall on the playground or the unreasonable person that you had to deal with in getting the cable fixed. Men might relate the same information but the difference is that they don’t expect an expression of empathy or feel hurt when its not forthcoming.

This week I saw four couples where the women felt hurt and a lack of connection from their partners behaviors at the end of the day. The women all felt that the lack of verbal expression and effort at connecting verbally was a lack of interest in them. The men were looking to blow off their stress from work through action – before being able to settle into connection with their partners. The men were compartmentalizing their needs and dealing with them in a way that didn’t necessarily include verbalizing with their partners. And women often assume that this means they don’t have interest in connecting when its really a matter of timing, style, expectations and assumptions. With a little understanding and some targeted communication a lot of distress is eliminated. But often the way an issue like this is handled just inflames the issue.

Women generally look for connection with empathic responses. They don’t need the problem solved. They just want to feel that their emotional reality resonantes. This is not something that guys generally do naturally. Imagine a couple guys on the golf course and one hits their ball into the sandpit. The response is usually some competitive ribbing. I see so many men puzzling over why their girlfriend or spouse stormed off to the bedroom when they came home. Many times it’s just that buildup over the day and wanting to hear an expression of caring ie “the cable company really can be so difficult. you must have been incredibly frustrated.” If your partner is a male expressing the same situation he would probably prefer a physical expression of caring and not an emotionally coddling response. But what do you think? How do you like your partner to respond when you’re expressing your frustrations from the day.

There is value in talking and exploring the past.  We can learn how certain beliefs were formed and evaluate if those ideas may have been necessary at one time, but may no longer be useful.  It’s also valuable to access where we would like to direct our energy, to have goals for the future.  But when our thoughts and feelings about either the past or the future color our mood we are not living life to its fullest. We are not fully present.  And we are  not using our  ability to direct and control our thoughts and mood.  This ability is the greatest asset which separates us from other species.

Keeping our focus on the past or the future can be a way of avoiding something in the present.  It may be a truth that we need to accept in order to move on.  The energy we invest in keeping our focus on the past or the future keeps up from accepting and living ‘life on life’s terms’, one of the famous phrases of AA.

Being able to balance our ability to attend to the present, while  considering the future and exploring the influence of the past is a balancing act that we can master in the practice of mindfulness and being aware of our intentions.  As with most skills, it takes practice.  I find the practice of mindfulness can be elusive at times.  The task involves practicing the skill of bringing ourselves back to the present yet designating some specific time to consider the past or future, but not allowing them to dominate our thoughts or mood.

We can remind ourselves that we don’t have to figure out the big picture when anxiety invades our mood. We can simply focus on the moment.  Because each time we use the skill to focus we are in essence moving ourselves forward.  A technique that I show clients that brings us back to the present moment is to take a minute and simply focus on our breathing.  As we breathe in we think “in one.”  As we breath out we think “out two.”  With the second breath,  “in two” and as we breathe out, “out two.”  And so one with the third breath.  As we’re doing this we are removed from past or future thoughts and are simply in the moment.  We need to strengthen the muscle that moves us back to the present.  Practicing this several times a day enables this neural network to strengthen.  As we continue to use this technique we gain control over our thoughts and our mood, which is a result of the thoughts, conscious and unconscious that are constantly flowing through our  mind.