Build Bridges Of Trust
You can build trust with your partner with simple, everyday actions that show them you care and you're in this together.
Ellie 's Posts
How To Share Compassion & Empathy in Intimate Conversation
Try these techniques in your own relationship. The results may surprise you.
Trust in Relationships is Built and Broken in Everyday Conversation
Intimate conversation is about sharing closeness and solidifying emotional bonds.
Dr. Gottman’s 3 Skills (and 1 Rule!) for Intimate Conversation
Protect your relationships from unnecessary stressors and weather the storms that come by making emotional connection a priority.
Homework Assignment: Learn To Trust Yourself
Trusting our partners is not the same thing as giving up all control.
Combat Stonewalling with Self-Care
Nip stonewalling in the bud with a healthy alternative. The antidote to stonewalling is self-soothing.
The Trouble with Contempt
Contempt to be the #1 predictor of divorce. What is contempt, and what makes this horseman the worst?
Accepting Responsibility
When it comes to your problems as a couple, ditch defensiveness and learn how to accept responsibility for your role. Here's how.
Homework Assignment: Connect With Your Friends
These are Gottman-approved activities to bond with your friends
Ways To Turn Towards Your Friends
What makes you a great partner can also make you a good friend
Dr. Gottman’s Guide to Recognizing Bids
Bids come in all shapes and sizes. How can you be sure?
Homework Assignment: Improve Your Relationship By Focusing on You
Can meeting your needs help you be a better friend and lover?
Statements That Deepen Connection
Here are simple ways to build trust and friendship in your relationship
Emotional Attunement
It is impossible to nurture healthy relational dynamics without practicing attunement.
Homework Assignment: Thanksgiving Every Day
Practice gratitude and express appreciation for your loved ones every day.
Arguments and Self-Care
By engaging in self-care, we can create the conditions necessary work out conflict and arguments with family and friends.
Homework Assignment: Self-Care (Who Am I?)
Dr. John Gottman offers questions to ask yourself that will help you reflect on the past and look forward to the future.
New Year’s Relationship Resolutions
Make New Year's resolutions for your relationship.
Building Family Culture: Holiday Stories That Connect
Make storytelling a part of your holiday family tradition.
Dr. John Gottman’s Tips for Creating Your Own Holiday Rituals
Instead of going through the motions of the holiday season, be intentional about what connects you and your loved ones as a family.
Homework Assignment: Make the Holidays Your Own!
Make this holiday your own with rituals of connection that create shared meaning for the whole family.
Holiday Gifts That Connect: Can’t Buy Me Love!
Give gifts from the heart, not just the wallet.
Sliding Door Moments: The Holidays
Find sliding door moments in your holiday season.
Thanksgiving: A List Of Minor Bids for Connection
Recognize and communicate bids this holiday season.
The Digital Age: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
Parents are the ones to model healthy online habits for their children and show them there's life beyond the screens.
The Digital Age: Trouble in Utopia
There is little room for genuine intimacy or authentic connection.
The Digital Age: Invalidating Indifference
The thoughtless nature of online interactions is harmful for children to consume.
Setting Limits Using Emotion Coaching
You can help your children solve problems at any age.
The Digital Age: Labeling Emotions
Emotion Coaching can encourage your kids to come to you for support.
The Digital Age: Communicating With Your Kids
By giving your kids attention and understanding, you can show them love and help them to see that they are not alone.
The Digital Age: Bringing Baby Home
Are you spending more time with your smartphone or tablet than you are with your child?
The Digital Age: Slowing Down
Parents can help kids process their offline worlds.
The Digital Age: Emotion Coaching & Empathy
As parents, you can model treating others with empathy, selflessness, affection, and respect.
How to Engage in Emotion Coaching
Emotion coaching gets to the heart of your child's feelings and behaviors.
The Digital Age: Two Realities
You want to strike a balance or overcome the split between the online and offline parts of your life. Here's how.
The Digital Age: Who Am I?
To truly know your partner, especially in the Digital Age, it is necessary to first know yourself.
The Digital Age: How Has It Changed Your Life?
Whether or not you use digital media often or seldom, you can feel the effects of virtual communication on your life.
Homework Assignment: Choosing Better
Choose to connect with the people in the room instead of connecting through technology. Here are ways to do just that.
The Digital Age: Building Intimacy
Be close even when you're far away.
The Digital Age: Long-Distance Relationships
Using virtual communication to connect with a partner long-distance confers unexpected benefits
The Digital Age: 10 Tips for Avoiding Conflict in Cyberspace
Getting into warfare over text or social media is a losing fight.
The Digital Age: What’s Beneath the Conflict?
In our last post on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we introduced the topic of Conflict in Cyberspace. Today, we would like to explore the subject in greater depth.
The Digital Age: Conflict in Cyberspace
As you spar online, intimacy goes out the window.
Homework Assignment: Bids in the Digital Age
The gadgets that we use to communicate with one another are conduits for sending and receiving bids for emotional connection.
Self-Care: Cherishing Yourself And Your Relationship
These are ideas that can keep you and your relationship from being overwhelmed in daily life.
Timeless Tips for Sleeping Well
Research indicates that a sleepless night is associated with greater relationship conflict the following day.
Bringing Baby Home: The Research
In sixteen studies conducted on parents before and after their baby’s birth, Drs. John and Julie Gottman discovered the following.
Summer Romance: Turning Towards
Turning towards one another can be easy in the summer months with these outdoor activities you can do with your partner.
Finding Common Ground: Homework Assignment
Here are ways to find common ground with your partner.
Finding Common Ground: The Harvard Negotiation Project
Instead of suffering in your relationship, you can use a simple approach to change the nature of negotiation.
Emotional Attraction: Maintaining Connection in Conflict Discussions
Conflict can result in flooding and stonewalling. However, how you repair can build emotional attraction.
How to Have A Stress-Reducing Conversation
Easy, straightforward instructions for having a stress-reducing conversation.
Emotional Attraction: The Stress-Reducing Conversation
Your relationship can build resistance to outside stressors by developing an attraction that goes deeper than the physical.
Desire in a Long-Term Relationship
You can build long-term happiness and stability in your relationship with the proper tools.
An Introduction to the Gottman Method of Relationship Therapy
The Gottman Method has helped thousands of couples have the relationship that they want with better communication.
How to Practice Self-Soothing
Remember: the ability to self-soothe is one of the most important skills you can learn. Practicing it can help you not only in romantic relationships, but in all other areas of your life.
The Four Horsemen: Stonewalling
The last, but certainly not least, of the Four Horsemen is stonewalling.
The Four Horsemen: Contempt
Contempt is the worst of the four horsemen. It is the number one predictor of divorce, but it can be defeated.
The Four Horsemen: Defensiveness
Defensiveness is really a way of blaming your partner.
The Four Horsemen: Criticism
The first of the Four Horsemen, and likely the most common, is criticism.
The Four Horsemen: The Antidotes
Luckily, for every Horseman of the Apocalypse, there is an antidote, and you can learn how and when to use them below.
The Four Horsemen: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling
Being able to identify the Four Horsemen in your conflict discussions is a necessary first step to eliminating them and replacing them with healthy, productive communication patterns.
The Workplace: Rituals of Connection with Coworkers
Create a community at work with these tips and ideas.
The Workplace: The Delicate Art of Giving Feedback
Learn how to give feedback that's both conducive and constructive.
The Workplace: What Does Your Job Mean To You?
Discovering common ground may help you to establish stronger emotional connections, resulting in a better working relationship.
The Workplace: Things To Do Together
All of these activities are great ways to form or strengthen the emotional connection in the workplace. Try them out or make up your own.
The Workplace: How Your Past Influences Your Connections with Coworkers
What you bring from your past to the workplace influences your connections with coworkers.
The Workplace: The Emotional Communication Game
Apply your understanding from this exercise the next time you're at work.
Homework Assignment: Turn Toward Your Coworkers
Here a list of suggestions from Dr. John Gottman for building better emotional connections in coworker relationships
The Workplace: The Ideal Praise-to-Criticism Ratio
How often do you get praise at work? How often do you get criticism? This ratio makes the difference for a successful workplace.
Homework Assignment: Spring Cleaning
Spring clean your marriage and refresh the love with these tips based on years of research from The Gottman Institute.
The Research: Linkages Between Parent-Child Interaction and Conversations of Friends
Children whose parents were disengaged and used derisive humor were more likely to have negative peer play with their friends.
How to Fight Smarter: Soften Your Start-Up
Softening the start-up of your arguments and complaints is crucial to resolving relationship conflicts.
Predicting Divorce From The First 3 Minutes of Conflict Discussion
Drs. Carrère and Gottman found that the startup of the conflict discussion was key to predicting divorce or marital stability.
Homework Assignment: How Marital Conflict Affects Children
Learn what conflict does to kids and how you can show empathy by being the emotion coach your child needs.
Physiological Self-Soothing
Try something that may feel totally foreign in the heights of your distress: breathe.
The Research: Physiological and Affective Predictors of Change in Relationship Satisfaction Part II
In relationships that are working well, the couple's interaction style is constructive, affirming, and enjoyable.
The Research: Physiological and Affective Predictors of Change in Relationship Satisfaction
What factors can impact relationship satisfaction? The Gottman Relationship Blog explores the research and what you can do.
The Research: Predicting Divorce from an Oral History Interview Part II
Both husbands' and wives' presence or lack of “we-ness” during an oral history interview is a strong indicator of whether a couple will divorce or not.
The Research: Predicting Divorce from an Oral History Interview
After studying married couples, Dr. John Gottman could predict which couples would separate or stay together with over 94% accuracy. So, how was he able to do this?
Apply The Research: Building Your Emotional Bank Account
Dr. John Gottman's research shows that a major indicator of a couple's overall happiness is their Emotional Bank Account.
The Research: Behavior Exchange Theory and Marital Decision Making
This particular study directly relates to building an Emotional Bank Account by taking the opportunity to Turn Towards your partner's bids for emotional connection in Sliding Door Moments.
Valentine’s Day: The Gottman Way
Valentine's Day is a great opportunity to do something a little special with your partner, if you do it the Gottman way.
Create Shared Meaning: Suggestions from Dr. Gottman
Dr. John Gottman offers practical ways to turn toward each other and create shared meaning in your relationship.
Create Shared Meaning: Rituals for the Family
Creating shared meaning by establishing rituals of connection is not just for couples. Traditions can bring your whole family together.
Create Shared Meaning: Examining Your Rituals
What rituals of connection to you and your partner have together? Here's how to look at what you've got that connects you.
Make Life Dreams Come True: Trusting Each Other
Building trust, and feeling your partner begin to trust you, will bring you to a place in which this kind of connection is possible.
Make Life Dreams Come True: Self-Discovery
Follow this exercise where you play both the speaker and the listener to share the source behind conflict: life dreams and goals!
Make Life Dreams Come True: Dreams Within Conflict
Make each other's dreams come true.
Manage Conflict: Moving Forward
The real predictor of a relationship’s failure is a couple’s inability to manage conflict in a healthy manner and to move forward.
Manage Conflict: Identifying Your Triggers
Working on understanding each other’s triggers is one of the most important things that you can do to avoid hurting one another.
Manage Conflict: The Aftermath of a Fight
When you make repair attempts early, you can salvage the point of the conversation and create a more productive and positive outcome.
Homework Assignment: Compromise
Many couples fail to compromise on issues because they go about trying to compromise in the wrong way.
Manage Conflict: The Art of Compromise
We’ve all been in the middle of an argument that we know we cannot win, understanding that our frustration has overwhelmed all sense of perspective.
Manage Conflict: Repair and De-Escalate
Here are a few examples of phrases that you can use to help repair and de-escalate when conversations get tense.
Six Tips for the Six Skills of Managing Conflict
Sometimes you need to build up to having effective communication in your partnership. Here are the smalls steps it takes to master conflict management.
Build a Culture of Appreciation
Negative Sentiment Override can kill any appreciation you have for your partner. Learn how to develop an eye for your partner's good characteristics.
The Positive Perspective: More on the 5:1 Ratio
Watch this video of Dr. John Gottman explaining the 5:1 ratio.
The Sound Relationship House: The Positive Perspective
A fundamental principle of maintaining The Positive Perspective in your relationship is to let your partner influence you.
5 Tips for Filling Your Holiday Season with Romance
Despite a difficult time of year, you can still connect with your partner with small gestures that yield big results.
The Sound Relationship House: Turn Towards Instead of Away
Playful bids and enthusiastic efforts to turn towards each other result in heightened levels of positivity during conflict discussions.
Love Quiz: Fondness and Admiration
If life chipped away at your fondness and admiration for each other, the route to bringing them back begins with realizing how valuable they are.
The Sound Relationship House: Build Love Maps
Love Maps help you develop greater personal insight and a more detailed understanding of each other’s life and world.
Date Night in a Jar
A stash of date night ideas can present fun surprises for you and your partner when you want alone time to connect.
How to Know Your Bids
The first step to responding to bids is recognizing one when you see or hear it.
What “Turning Against” Really Means
A partner who turns against bids may not be doing it maliciously. See what the real cause could be.
Turning Against Bids: A Relationship Killer
Recognizing your interactions with your partner allows you to catch and reverse toxic patterns of behavior that cause damage to your relationship.
The Mechanics of Bidding: Messages You Don’t Even Know You’re Sending
Pay attention to how you and your partner interpret each other’s responses to bids, so that you learn exactly how to create positive change in your relationship.
A Deeper Look Into Turning Away From Your Partner
Though it may not seem to make an impact on your emotional connection, the build-up of these moments can incur damage over time.
A Deeper Look Into Turning Towards Your Partner
Here are the different ways you can "turn towards" your partner's bids.
How to Set Goals for Self-Care
Set goals, big and small, to take care of yourself and watch both you and your relationships get a boost of energy.
Building Trust In Stressful Times
If you establish positive rapport, you and your partner can make leaps and bounds towards the establishment of trust.
Mindfulness in Emotional Moments
Watch how mindfulness allows you to increase your attention to mechanisms underlying the formation of stable, satisfying relationships.
An Introduction to Emotional Bids and Trust
Turning toward your partner's bids for emotional connection builds trust in your relationship.
Expressing Compassion and Empathy
Intimate conversation requires you to lean into your partner's pain before you offer advice or try to help.
Following Up With Statements That Deepen Connection
When you can reflect what your partner is sharing, you encourage them to open up more and intimacy follows.
Put Feelings Into Words and Ask Open-Ended Questions
Enjoy more intimate conversations by learning to label your emotions and asking questions that beg for a detailed response.
Intimate Conversations and Collective Monologue
Stop having superficial conversations where you're talking but not communicating.
Building Bridges
If partners build habits of turning towards each other in simple everyday moments, they build bridges of affection, fondness, and admiration.
The Zeigarnik Effect
This theory discovered an enormous capacity to destroy human relationships.
Love Quiz: Are You Experiencing Negative Sentiment Override?
Take this quiz to see if your relationship is suffering from a negative perspective.
‘Sliding Door’ Moments
Sliding door moments are the seemingly inconsequential everyday moments that make or break the most important relationships in our lives.
Exclusive Interview With John Gottman
Attunement is the desire and the ability to understand and respect your partner’s inner world.
The Three Boxes
Drs. John and Julie Gottman divides the behaviors of conversing couples into three clear boxes: Nice, Neutral, and Nasty.
Inside the Love Lab
Dr. Gottman’s research on trust is groundbreaking. Widely recognized as the world’s foremost researcher on marriage and relationships, his intuition and natural ease with people are not his only gifts.
The Love Lab
Dr. Gottman opens his long-awaited book, What Makes Love Last?, with an unsettling anecdote about trust: suspecting his wife of cheating, one man crept outside in the morning before he left for work to draw chalk marks on his wife's rear tires.
Activities to Help You Manage Conflict
Conflict is inevitable, but these tips serve as a jumping off point to managing it well.
Overcoming Gridlocked Conflict
Almost all gridlocked conflicts stem from unfulfilled dreams.
Managing Conflict: Recognizing Gridlock
By using this simple checklist, you can determine whether or not you have reached total gridlock in any of those infuriatingly repetitive problems you may have in your relationship.
Premarital Relationships: Making the Honeymoon Last
The honeymoon phase never has to end if you keep wanting to know more about your partner. Created shared meaning before you say "I do."
Premarital Relationships: Building Love Maps
Here are examples that will help you build a love map to your partner's heart.
Emotion Coaching Step 5: Helping the Child Problem Solve and Setting Limits
Emotion coaching not only teaches children how to manage big feelings, but it also helps them solve problems on their own.
Emotion Coaching Step 4: Helping Your Child to Find Words For Their Emotions
Emotion Coaching system is one in which you have the opportunity to help your child through difficult moments that is astoundingly useful for them.
Emotion Coaching Step 3: Treating a Child’s Feelings with Empathetic Listening and Validation
Drs. John and Julie Gottman suggest a combination of attentiveness, offerings of simple observations, and validation of your child's emotions in difficult moments.
Emotion Coaching Step 2: Seeing Expressions of Emotion as Opportunities for Teaching and Intimacy
You can work through tough emotions instead of trying to "fix" them.
Emotion Coaching Step 1: Empathy
Use Emotion Coaching and empathy in your conversations with your child, and see the differences it makes in difficult moments.
An Introduction to Emotion Coaching
Learn how to help your children navigate their feelings through being an emotion coaching parent.
Parenting as Your Kids Grow Up
Managing conflict well and being your child's emotion coach are just a few effective parenting tips from the Gottmans.
Parenting: Avoiding Relationship Meltdowns
Here are ways to keep your relationship going strong once a newborn arrives.
Love Map Building
Learn the inner world of your partner by building love maps.