Lessons from the ‘Love Lab’ on how to strengthen your relationship, with John Gottman, PhD, and Julie Schwartz Gottman, PhD

Strong, supportive relationships are key to our mental and even physical health. But what are the keys to a healthy, loving relationship? John Gottman, PhD, and Julie Schwartz Gottman, PhD, talk about why it’s so important to pay attention to your partner’s “bids for connection,” how to have productive rather than destructive fights, whether any couple can learn to communicate better, and why it’s a myth that you should never go to bed angry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Kim Mills?

  Strong supportive relationships are a key to our mental and even physical health. But what makes for a healthy relationship? Today, we're going to talk about that with two psychologists who've spent decades studying the differences between relationship masters and relationship disasters, and translating that research into resources for couples and families. So what do relationship masters do that relationship disasters don't? What's the right way to fight with your partner? Do fights have to be destructive? Or is it possible to have a constructive fight? Is it true that you should never go to bed angry? And what are the most important things you can do to make sure your partner feels loved

• 1:10Kim Mills?

  and supported and to strengthen your relationship bond? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guests today are Dr. John Gottman and Dr. Julie Schwartz-Gottman, the co-founders of the Gottman Institute. Dr. John Gottman began his research on marital stability and divorce prediction in the 1970s. He's an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington, where he founded the Love Lab and where much of his research on couples' interactions was conducted. Dr.

• 1:52Kim Mills?

  Gottman is the author or co-author of more than 200 academic articles and has won numerous awards for his research. Dr. Julie Schwartz-Gottman is a clinical psychologist with expertise working with distressed couples, abuse and trauma survivors, and people with substance use problems and their partners. She brings her expertise in clinical psychology to the Gottman Institute, co-creating the art and science of love workshops for couples, and co-designing the National Clinical Training Program in Gottman Method Couples Therapy. Together, the Gottmans have translated the science of relationships into books, workshops, trainings for therapists, and other resources for the public. They've co-authored many books together, including their latest, Fight Right: How to

• 2:36Kim Mills?

  Turn Conflict Into Connection. They've also practiced what they preach in their all-nearly-four-decade marriage. Dr. Gottman, Dr. Schwartz-Gottman, thank you both for joining me today.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Thank you, Kim. Yeah, thank you, Kim. We're really happy to be here.

• 2:51Kim Mills?

  Well, let's start by talking about the background each of you brings to this work. John, you're a researcher, and Julie, you've always been a practicing clinical psychologist. How did you decide to bring your work together into what became the Gottman Institute?

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Well, here's how it happened. John and I met in 1986, married in 87. I, at the time, was working with very severe trauma, as well as some of the other fields you mentioned, Kim. But every night at dinner, I was listening to John talk about his research, and I got sucked in. I was desperately trying to be individuated, which was popular at the time, but it didn't happen. We merged completely. And now, four decades later, I have half a brain, he has half a brain, but together we make one brain.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  So, basically, we were out in a canoe about, hmm, six, seven years later, and I said, "Honey, why don't we take this work out of the ivory tower and into the population who desperately needs help? We've learned a lot from your research, and there's no point in leaving it in the university. Let's take it out and bring it to the people." And that's what we did.

• 4:17Kim Mills?

  So John, one of the most well-known findings of your early research was that you were able to predict whether a couple would divorce years later just by analyzing a few minutes of video of their interactions early in their marriage. Tell us about that work. How did you do that research and what clues to a relationship's outcome were evidence so early on?

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Well, this research was really done in conjunction with my best friend, Robert Levinson, who's a psychology professor at UC Berkeley. And Bob and I had a lab back in the 1970s. We had our own computer, which was very unusual in the 1970s. Every university had one big mainframe computer. But Bob and I had a computer called a PDP-11, which is about the size of three refrigerators. And all it did was synchronize the video time code to physiological measures we're collecting from both people as they talked to each other, we're measuring respiration, heart rate,

• 5:22Speaker 03

  blood velocity, skin conductance, how much they jiggle and move. And so we had couples meet at the end of the day after being apart for at least eight hours. And once we got good physiological signals, we just asked them to talk about how their day went and videotaped that. And then we interviewed them about the major conflict areas in their relationship and had them pick the top area to talk about for 15 minutes. And we asked them to try to solve the problem. And then they selected from a list of positive topics like planning a vacation, talked for another 15 minutes.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  When they were done with that, they separately viewed their videotapes and were still collecting physiological data and videotape as they watched their tapes and turned a dial to let us know inside what they were feeling from the dial that ranged from very negative to very positive. And then we basically sent them home. Bob and I had no clue of how to help anybody at that time. And our own intuitions were terrible because we were going from one disastrous relationship with a woman to another. And our ignorances really motivated this research because we had no hypotheses at all.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  Well, three years later, we recontacted these couples. And it turned out that we could predict with over 90% accuracy how the relationship had changed over that three-year period. And whether couples got happier or less happy, whether they broke up or not. So the predictions were very high. And that was very unusual at that time for psychologists to have that level of prediction. And it turned out that just about everywhere we looked, we could tell the difference between the people who were in disastrous relationships, like the ones Bob and I had, and the people who were really masters of relationship. And even when they talked about how their day went,

• 7:27Speaker 03

  the disasters went out of their way to communicate their boredom and lack of interest in their partner's day. Whereas the masters were totally involved and interested, asked a lot of questions and communicated that they really cared about how their partner's day went. During conflict, we had our best prediction of the future of a relationship. And it turned out there that when we looked just simply at the ratio, the number of seconds that people were nice to one another, divided by the number of seconds that they were nasty to one another, that ratio averaged five to one among the masters and averaged 0.8 among the disasters, a little bit more negativity.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  And in particular, there were four things that couples did in relationships that were doomed, that really predicted the future very well. They started with criticism, they used contempt, they were defensive. And when they got physiologically aroused, when their heart rates exceeded 100 beats a minute, they would withdraw from the interaction and stonewall and not give any cues to the speaker that they were listening and interested. So those behaviors, we wound up calling the four horsemen of the apocalypse. But I must say that Bob and I had no clue of how to help anybody. And without Julie's clinical experience, we never would have figured out how to help people.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  We needed the researcher and the therapist to really combine their knowledge. And Julie's knowledge of how to help extremely distressed people was essential in building a therapy for helping people.

• 9:11Kim Mills?

  But then that material, your research data must have been sitting there for a while, right before you met Julie. I mean, Julie, when did you come on the scene and start looking at all of this and then coming up with your part of the whole theory?

• 9:25Speaker 02

  We started working together. So of course I was hearing it every night at dinner, beginning in 1987. But then in 19, about 92, maybe 93, we started really trying to analyze theoretically what the successful couples were doing to create the success of their relationships. So we were, already John had analyzed the data. He discovered the four horsemen of the apocalypse. There were also really important factors involving supporting friendships and also what created shared meaning for the couple, which meant

• 10:09Speaker 02

  not only talking about what values they shared, but what each individual partner valued deeply and really communicating that with their partner and each partner supporting the other person's dreams and values. So we began to create our theory, which we called the Sound Relationship House Theory. And later on, the brilliant John Gottman began to do much more mathematical analyses back in about 1990 and began to discover what we called

• 10:48Speaker 02

  the trust metric, which was a mathematical formulation that really predicted whether couples retained trust or had lost it, as well as looking at commitment in the couple. Then we looked at what did the successful couples do and combining our knowledge, our information base, we created interventions that helped couples do what the successful couples did. Now, mind you, nobody took Relationships 101 in high school or college. You know, we still don't, right? So, people really read Lost.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  They were groping in the dark for what the heck do we do instead of the bad patterns and behaviors we're using with one another? So, John wrote his first popular book. Uh, when was that, honey? Right around, um, 1990 something. Nine. 1999. And low and behold, people grabbed hold of it and really, really were hungry for more. So, we worked on interventions. We created a couples workshop, a two-day workshop that we later tested that created a huge difference in not only sustaining friendship

• 12:17Speaker 02

  or creating friendship in partners, but really helping them to manage conflict in, as you said earlier, Kim, a constructive way rather than a destructive way. Replacing the four horsemen with much more, uh, listening, much better description of I, I feel, I'm thinking, I'm imagining, I'm fantasizing, rather than pointing their fingers and blaming their partner. And in our workshop, we saw that 87% of the couples who came, and there were 1,000 couples at a time that would come to this workshop,

• 12:59Speaker 02

  actually, 87% of them had major breakthroughs in gridlock conflict that they had been suffering from for many years. So, we really knew we were on to something.

• 13:13Kim Mills?

  So when you talk about the four horsemen, is any one worse than the other? And if you have three of the four, are you doomed? I mean, how do you kind of gauge these things?

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, contempt was the worst. Contempt is criticism, but with an air of superiority. And you're talking down to your partner. So the masters essentially didn't do contempt at all. It was essentially zero. And Bob and I were very interested in how relationships affected health and longevity, because there was a link there. And it turned out that contempt was the best predictor of relationship breakup of all. And we also found that the number of seconds that somebody listened to their partner be contemptuous toward them predicted how many infectious illnesses they would have in the next four years. So that was the worst of the four horsemen.

• 14:08Kim Mills?

  So Julie, to what degree is it possible to change these problematic patterns in a relationship? Were some couples that you worked with particularly early on as you were learning, were they doomed to divorce from the start? Or is it possible, have you found, for almost any couple to change and improve the way that they interact?

• 14:28Speaker 02

  That's a wonderful question, Kim. And we were astonished to see, frankly, that many, many couples, even ones who had come back from the lawyer's offices for divorce, were dramatically changing their relationships. The real key was this. Was there any spark of love, just a little tiny ember that still remained, that the therapist could blow on, basically? Or that they could learn more tools in our workshops?

• 15:05Speaker 02

  That then kindled a fire that then created the ability for these couples to change their patterns and then really talk in much more depth with much more understanding and compassion. We had in particular an intervention that I just deeply love in which when a couple suffered from a gridlock conflict, meaning a conflict that came up over and over and over again, 69% of couples' problems are perpetual problems, they never go away, by

• 15:41Speaker 02

  the way, when they stopped and slowed down and then one person asked the other a series of six deepening questions that really ferreted out the underlying values, feelings, childhood experience, and underlying ideal dreams in terms of their position on the issue with the other person just listening, and then they would trade roles. Wow, that made a huge difference because most people would talk about a conflict just on the surface, right? They would just argue parenting styles, for example, but they would never get into

• 16:26Speaker 02

  how they themselves were parented, what they appreciated and what they did not like in how they were raised themselves that then helped formulate their values about parenting here and now. So when those factors were unearthed and shared with the partner, what resulted was much greater understanding and compassion that then really helped them arrive at a compromise. So there were tools like that that couples hadn't ever practiced before. Now, mind you, it takes practice, right?

• 17:06Speaker 02

  To change anything that is habitual, that you have been practicing for years, maybe decades, it takes a lot of work to kind of resist that gravitational pull that draws you back into the old patterns. But these couples wanted to change so badly, they were in so much pain, that then they really worked at changing and by golly, they did change.

• 17:35Kim Mills?

  Can most couples do this on their own? Can they get your books, read, learn and practice what you're saying? Or is it really important to have a therapist to work with you?

• 17:45Speaker 02

  You know, it depends on the issues. For example, if a couple suffers a terrible betrayal, whether there's been adultery in an affair, whether there's been financial betrayal, somebody hiding a lot of debt they have, or perhaps there's an addiction within the relationship or severe trauma, very, very severe trauma. Typically, in those cases, a therapist is really essential to create change. But for those of us who suffer from distress,

• 18:24Speaker 02

  maybe a bit of trauma because most of us have had something go wrong in our upbringing, couples, I think, can get a lot of help from the books themselves. And what we are also doing now, which is to democratize this work, make it more accessible to people who cannot afford to have a therapist or go to a workshop. We're putting this work, all of our interventions, assessment methods, on a software platform. It's already completed, that couples can access in the privacy of their own home for much less money

• 19:05Speaker 02

  and get help through instructive, really hilarious videos that John and I made, 87 little tiny videos, showing how to do something and how not to do something, which we've had a lot of practice ads, so they're great.

• 19:24Kim Mills?

  Now, one piece of advice that I've heard you both discuss is the importance of paying attention to your partner's bids for connection. You've already said this even here in our conversation. What exactly does that mean in real life and day-to-day interaction with your partner?

• 19:39Speaker 03

  So in this apartment lab that Julie and I designed, 130 newlywed couples spent 24 hours there, and we videotaped them for 12 of those hours while they were awake. And the camera operators noticed very quickly that there would be one person at some point, when they were hanging out, just trying to get their partner's attention and interest. And we call that making a bid for connection. Like, somebody would look out the window and say, "Oh, there's a beautiful boat." And, you know, we had this lab that was on the Montlake Cut in Seattle, where boats

• 20:20Speaker 03

  were going from Saltwater to Lake Washington, and all these boats were going by the locks. And so a woman might look out the window and say, "There's a beautiful boat." And the operators of the cameras would turn one of the cameras toward the husband and see what the response was. And, you know, in some cases, I remember one tape where the guy was having cereal while he was watching TV, and here's his wife saying, "There's a beautiful boat," and this guy doesn't respond at all, he just keeps eating the cereal. We call that turning away, you know, that lack of a response. Now, if he had looked up and said, "Huh," that would be turning toward.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  That was good enough, you know, to count as turning toward. If he was enthusiastic about it, if he went over to her and said, "Hey, baby, why don't we get a boat and sail off together, quit our jobs?" And that would be called enthusiastic turning toward. Or if he was irritable and said, "Would you be quiet? I'm trying to watch this TV show." That was called turning against. And so, six years later, when 17 couples out of 130 had divorced, we look back six years earlier in this lab, in this apartment lab, the Love Lab, and turned out those people had turned toward bids an average of 33% of the time.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Whereas the people who were still married six years earlier had turned toward their partner's bid an average of eighty-six percent of the time. So a big difference, you know, that probably over time, you know, they really filled the pages of a Russian novel with all the times that they turned toward and acknowledged their partner's immediate needs. So that was the idea of turning toward.

• 22:10Speaker 00

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• 23:11Kim Mills?

  So the example that you just gave, the husbands watching TV and eating cereal, what about what's happening today with phones and other screen devices? Are they making it harder for couples to stay connected?

• 23:23Speaker 02

  You know, that is such an interesting question, Kim, because it's it's two sides of a coin. On the one hand, couples are communicating with one another a lot more frequently through texting, right? Because it's so easy to do. You've got your phone right at your desktop. However, what's also happening is that couples may be sucked in to their work, into other activities on their phone, maybe they're gaming on their phone, or they're watching something on their phone. And the phone comes out at the dinner table, and guess what happens?

• 24:06Speaker 02

  There's a lot of turning away because one individual is really focused on their phone. And I'm sure, you know, all of us in the audience has seen folks at a restaurant, you know, especially kids, sitting at a table, four people in a booth. They're all on their phones. What are they doing? Some are actually conversing with one another on their phones, rather than opening their mouths and uttering words. So, you know, there's the two sides. The other thing too, is that there's a research starting to come out that especially with younger kids,

• 24:49Speaker 02

  all of the technology and the quick little conversations folks are having over the phones is actually changing a little bit of brain development. So that the brain is getting reduced in terms of its ability to attend. How long can the brain attend on one particular focus? It's growing shorter and shorter because there aren't extensive long conversations that we, shall I say, the mature generation, not really, the older generation are used to having these deeper conversations, right?

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Face to face, or on the phone, talking to one another. So, the jury is really out right now. On the other hand, in terms of the pandemic, the technology was crucial because especially kids in the teenage years really suffered dramatically because they couldn't see each other, they couldn't communicate. Set through technology, that was it, as they were isolated. So, you know, we still have severely depressed kids, uh, kids who were also very anxious coming out of the pandemic, not having developed the same kinds of social

• 26:14Speaker 02

  strategies, social skills that kids normally attending school would have developed by now. So, you know, we're trying to catch up, but is technology a help? Or is it not? You know, we're not sure yet.

• 26:32Kim Mills?

  Speaking of the pandemic, have you looked at all at what that did to relationships? Since we were all so isolated, I mean, you would be really in close quarters with your partner and very few other people during that timeframe. Did that help or hurt relationships? Do we know yet?

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, we, we know quite a lot about that now. And it turned out if your relationship was good, the pandemic actually helped and they got closer. Uh, that was true for Julie and I, we traveled so much less and had so much time together to take walks and talk to each other and cuddle. But if the relationship was ailing, the pandemic sort of acted like a pressure cooker and they were together with no way to get apart from each other and the relationships got worse. Domestic violence actually increased for those unhappily married couples. So when you average it all out, it looked like there was no change.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  But actually the rich got richer and the poor got poorer in the sense of the relationships.

• 27:33Kim Mills?

  Well, let's talk for a few minutes about your most recent book, Fight Right, How to Turn Conflict Into Connection. What does it mean to fight right?

• 27:41Speaker 02

  So finding right means in a nutshell, fighting to understand, fighting to understand. So, you know, even as a therapist, sitting across from a client I've known for a year, let's say, I never assume I really understand anything fully unless I ask more questions, I really listen.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Much more carefully and so on. Uh, and the questions need to be the deepening questions, not questions that remain superficial. So fighting right really means, first of all, trying to eliminate as many of the four horsemen as we can. You know, nobody's perfect here and we're not going for the perfect relationship. You know, I'm always going to sink back into some criticism every now and then and defensiveness. And my darling partner may as well, uh, though we really try hard to avoid contempt as much as we can.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Um, so what takes the place of those, right? This book really focuses in on how to make calm, constructive and more compassionate our conflict conversations rather than those escalations that many of us have experienced. Those times when we get flooded, meaning we go into fight or flight, when we're so upset that our physiology is jacking up and our heart rates are over a hundred beats a minute. We can't think straight. We can't listen well. We can't creatively problem solve at all.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Our prefrontal cortex is offline. So this book gives very specific, practical information about how to create fights as a pathway to understanding. That doesn't mean you should, you know, seek out lots of fighting. There's many ways of understanding one another, but fights happen. They happen to almost everyone. And at the time that we started writing this book, the country was incredibly polarized. It is still today, as all of us know.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  And, you know, we were, you know, very astounded at how little listening was happening between folks in one compartment versus folks in another, who had very different ideas about the way things should be. So, we thought, well, my God, you know, we're never going to stop fighting, but we have to help folks, if we can, learn how to fight so that there's greater understanding, even if there's still disagreement. And that is what this book provides.

• 30:42Kim Mills?

  So, what are the common types of fights? And how should couples handle?

• 30:48Speaker 03

  Here's the interesting thing. Most couples fight about absolutely nothing. Fights emerge out of these moments of disconnection, and where people are left alone, when they're reaching out for something, their partner, and it doesn't go right. Like, they're watching TV together, and they've made popcorn, and he's got the remote, and she says, "Leave it at that station." He says, "Well, yeah, let me see what else is on." She says, "No, leave it." He says, "Well, let me see what else is on." She says, "I said, leave it." And he says, "You know, I don't even want to talk to you." You know, and he throws the remote down. What are they fighting about? Now, they're not fighting about in-laws, money, sex.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  They're fighting about the lack of connection. And that is the thing that Julie was emphasizing. Conflict always has a goal, which is mutual understanding. We actually need conflict to continue to love each other over time as we both change. And so, really, what we're doing in the book Fight Right is helping people understand these situations where they're actually reaching out for one another for emotional connection most of the time, and being left alone.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Let me jump in and add a little bit more here. In some of John's earliest research, and we find this still to be true, there are three types of conflict management styles that people may have. One is what we call avoiders, conflict avoiders. And those are folks who, you know, of course, they're going to have disagreements. They're going to have differences, oftentimes based in lifestyle preferences or personality differences. But what they do, they may express just a little bit of what they think or what they feel, but then they say, okay, not a big deal.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  You know, let's, let's drop it. Let's just agree to disagree. And they go on with their lives. Those are conflict avoiders. Then we have conflict validators. And validators are folks who stay fairly calm and fairly rational. However, they do express their feelings about a particular issue, but they'll do so quickly. And then they'll move into problem solving, you know, very fast. And they work on problem solving. So those are validators. And then we have the volatiles, of which I am a proud member. And volatiles are folks who express their feelings passionately, intensely.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  They immediately jump to 60 miles an hour. And they express feelings intensely. That doesn't mean that they're flooded. There's a real difference between being physiologically flooded and expressing things passionately and intensely. One doesn't necessarily go with the other. So volatiles will express feelings very, very intensely. And eventually they'll get into working on compromise. But all that passionate feeling comes out first. So those are our conflict volatiles. And people typically are mismatched.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  So in our relationship, for example, John is a wonderful conflict avoider, or maybe a little bit of a validator, and I'm a delightful volatile. Now, he can also be volatile. In his best moments, I should say, and then we're off and running. So, you know, we have to talk sometimes about the differences in our style of how we want to talk about a conflict, how we want to process trying to just understand one another's position on an issue, given, let's say, that one just doesn't want to talk about it at

• 34:54Speaker 02

  all, there's our avoider, and one passionately wants to talk about it, there's our volatile. How are they going to arrive at a system in which they can talk gently with one another without the volatile scaring away the avoider and the avoider angering the volatile? So that's a conversation in itself that is an important one to have when there is an extreme difference. But couples work that stuff out all the time. So, and all three types of couples can have successful relationships, all of them.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  As long as they have that five to one.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  As long as, that's it, as long as they have that five to one ratio of positive to negative interactions that they're having during the conflict itself.

• 35:51Kim Mills?

  So I want to go back to the couple who were having the argument over the remote. So what is the solution? I mean, how should you work that out in a way that doesn't, I mean, should the woman go to another room and watch a different TV? Or do they, you know, how do you resolve that?

• 36:06Speaker 03

  Well, part of it is really understanding what's underneath that unhappiness around the remote and understanding that there's a power struggle there. And maybe there's a power struggle in their relationship in general, and it feels unfair to one or both people. And that sort of gets underneath the issue of the remote. The remote is kind of a surface issue of this perceived inequity and power in the relationship. So by asking those six questions that Julie mentioned earlier, they wind up really looking at the dreams within the conflict. And once those get surfaced, there's much more empathy and understanding, and they

• 36:50Speaker 03

  get to this, the real goal of conflict, which is mutual understanding.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I think there's another part of this too, which is accepting influence. We found that it was incredibly important for people to accept influence from the other person. And in particular, in heterosexual relationships, not surprisingly, given social conditioning in our culture, it was more important for men to accept influence from their female partners typically than vice versa. So, accepting influence means, okay, honey, I'll let you stay on this channel, let's stay on this channel and we'll see if we both like it.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  And then maybe, you know, we can look around a little bit more. How does that sound?

• 37:44Kim Mills?

  So, you just brought up sexual orientation, just the idea of same-sex couples, opposite-sex couples. Do the patterns that you have observed, do they hold true for both? Or because of socialization, will you find same-sex couples will behave differently because two women together, they were socialized the same way, two men together, they were socialized the same way? What happens?

• 38:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Bob and I were quite surprised when we studied gay and lesbian relationships for a dozen years, that in fact, gay and lesbian couples are a lot nicer to each other than heterosexual couples. They have more of a sense of humor about themselves, they're gentler in the way they present an issue, they can laugh at themselves more easily, and they're much more direct when it comes to their needs about sexual intimacy than heterosexual couples. So, you know, we were pretty surprised by that, and it turns out that that's really kind of a general finding, that we heterosexual couples have a lot to learn.

• 38:46Kim Mills?

  John, does the advice that you've developed for couples work for other relationships? For example, parents and children, other family relationships, friendships?

• 38:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, one of the things that I was very interested in, Bob wasn't too interested in parent-child interaction, but I was very interested in children and their development and to investigate how parent relationships affected children and how children affected the parental relationships. We did some longitudinal research and looked at parent-child interaction and we discovered an amazing thing, that there were some parents who really were emotion coaches of their children. They really took these moments when their children were feeling strongly about something, feeling heard or rejected, and some parents would try to minimize that and cheer their

• 39:40Speaker 03

  child up and help their child get over the moment. And other parents would really focus in on that moment and see it as an opportunity for learning or teaching or getting closer to their child. And they would do five things as emotion coaches. You know, help their child understand the emotions, put labels on those feelings, help their child problem solve if they were unhappy about something, and you know, put limits on misbehavior if they occurred. So those five steps of emotion coaching turned out to be really critical in the longitudinal development of emotional intelligence in their children. That was really kind of surprising.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  So in fact, those parents were very different toward one another. When one of them was emotional, the other parent would really zoom in and say, okay, baby, what, what are you feeling? Because when you're upset, the world stops and I listen. And those were the emotion coaches. So we really did discover that the way people interacted with one another was strongly related to the way they would zoom in on their child's emotions as well. And that had big implications for the longitudinal development of emotional intelligence in their child.

• 41:04Kim Mills?

  So I think many of us have heard the advice that you shouldn't let the sun set on your anger, don't go to bed mad. And I know you said that's a myth. Why is that?

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Because it's impossible to do. Here's the thing. There's a difference between wrath and anger, right? So, you know, the, the original statement really comes up in the Bible. But in the Bible, it's about wrath. And wrath is, you know, the most severe intense anger. It's rage, you know, multiplied a hundred times. So wrath also contains a lot of hatred, all kinds of stuff. So anger is hardwired in. You know, it's an emotion that is very primal to us. And if something has happened late at night that has really angered a partner,

• 42:00Speaker 02

  um, it's almost impossible for that person to then stop feeling angry, feel loving and warm, go to bed and have sex. It's not gonna happen. Usually, I mean, maybe there are a few people out there that can do that, but most of us can't.

• 42:19Kim Mills?

  Makeup sex, yeah.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, makeup sex or just aggressive sex, you know, whatever it is. Anyway, um, so, uh, and couples who are successful couples don't follow that particular, um, statement, you know, they don't do it. So somebody may be angry and what they need to do is make sure that they're physiologically calm enough to go to sleep. They may still feel some anger, but they're not flooded. Their heart rates are not 150 beats a minute. Otherwise they'll never be able to sleep. The mistake that couples make, here's the big one. Um, and we can call this a myth.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  You're able to solve your problems late at night when you're tired. No, you're not able to. You can't do it. People are so tired by the ends of their days, right? Most of the time they've worked hard or they have kids. They've been raising their kids. Kids are running around like crazy. So they're exhausted. They're exhausted. So to think that you can creatively problem solve or you can talk very gently and calmly and deeply late at night? There's your myth. And people should not try to do that. Thus, you know, the opposite is what people really, you know, might more realistically do,

• 43:47Speaker 02

  which is, yeah, you go to bed angry, but get a good night's rest and the next day, then you talk about it when you're well rested and you actually have access to most of your mental powers.

• 44:04Kim Mills?

  So just to to wrap up, because this has been interesting and I could go on and on and on with, and I'm sure you could too, but we all have things to do, but I want to ask you this question. You have both been working in this space for a very long time. Are there any big research questions on relationships that you feel you still need to answer?

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Let's both answer that. John, you want to start?

• 44:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, the important thing to say is that all of these techniques, you know, like gentle startup, finding out the dreams within conflict, none of them work without trust and commitment being there in the relationship. And trust means that people really are thinking for two. They're thinking of the benefits of their partner. Conflict isn't a zero sum game. One person wins and the other one loses, but they're really working collaboratively on the problem together. And commitment really means that they've said, this is the journey of my life and nobody can replace you. You know, there isn't, there isn't a woman on the planet that, for me, that can come close to Julie.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  She has my whole heart for my whole life and all of my money and I have nothing to offer any other woman.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Am I the luckiest woman on the planet?

• 45:17Speaker 03

  So, you know, I mean, she's, she's really it for me. So, you know, Carol Rustbald's research showed us how important commitment was and our research with the trust metric showed us how important that is. Without trust and commitment, none of these techniques will work. So we really don't understand.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  What it is that goes into building trust and building commitment is some people and not others. It could be insecure attachment gets in the way, but we don't know the answer to that question yet. It's a really big research question.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Okay. And here are mine. So, so far, a couple of things we haven't had time to talk about, but one is that we have created a treatment, a particular treatment model that looks like it's really working to treat affairs, to treat betrayal. And we're very excited about that. We've done the first controlled randomized study of treatment, therapeutic treatment for affairs that's ever been done. There hasn't been any others done up until now. So we have pre and post. We're starting to get follow-up.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  And our treatment looks very, very successful at this point. We've also done a research study on the treatment of what's called situational domestic violence, which is minor to moderate domestic violence without a clear perpetrator and a clear victim in which the victim can't do anything to change things. You know, the case being there where we've got to get the victim out of the relationship. But with situational domestic violence, we actually do have a treatment that is very successful in eliminating domestic violence, eliminating hostility between the partners, and increasing their friendship and connection.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  But we still have to learn, and this of course is one of my big thoughts about.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Trying to help people, we need to help couples learn how to manage their relationships and strengthen their relationships when one or both partners has post-traumatic stress disorder. And these days, you know, between environmental calamities like Hurricane Helena and background abuse and combat or, you know, shootings in schools, people are so traumatized they can't see straight. And oftentimes that stress will spill over into the relationship and contaminate the connection between the partners.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  So I have started to create a treatment for couples where there is PTSD, but we haven't done a research study yet, and I would really like to flesh out more that treatment model and test it with random controlled study.

• 48:32Kim Mills?

  Well, John, Julie, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. This has been really interesting. I think the work you do is so important and so helpful to many, many people. Thank you.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  Thank you. And thank you, Kim. Wonderful interview. Yeah, I was just about to say the same thing because we have the same brain.

• 48:51Kim Mills?

  Because you have one brain.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  That's right. But this has been wonderful. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you, Kim. It was really fun.

• 48:58Kim Mills?

  You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at [email protected]. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.

• 50:14Speaker 00

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