Ellie Lisitsa

When it comes to parenting, lowered expectations and increased distances are toxic. What can we do? As parents, have power. With great power comes great responsibility! 

Regardless of age, the entanglement of virtual communication and social media is transforming our experience of reality. 

Virtual communication seduces us, offering a myriad of momentary pleasures as the immediacy of response provides instant gratification.

You may have heard the old adage, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” In today’s cyberworld, children are being exposed to messages that teach them apathy, not empathy. 

The fifth and final step of Emotion Coaching according to Dr. John Gottman is to set limits while helping your child to problem solve

In theory, it seems obvious that human kindness is just as necessary online as offline. For some reason, when interacting with others on the web, this becomes easy to forget.

Today on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we would like to share an article with you by Michelle Healy of USA Today.

Today on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we are excited to feature a guest posting from Gottman Bringing Baby Home (BBH) Educator Kim Brickwood.

In the Digital Age, kids may learn quick and easy relationship skills online, building rudimentary, occasionally fulfilling connections using virtual technology. 

As Zach Brittle mentioned on Wednesday, the second step of Emotion Coaching, according to Dr. John Gottman, is to see your child’s expressions of emotion as opportunities for teaching and intimacy.

Today on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we are thrilled to invite back Zach Brittle, LMHC, who we featured as a guest blogger back in September.

When it really comes down to it, empathy is about understanding someone else’s emotions.  The capacity for changing perspective and sharing another’s experience vicariously, as if you were in their place. 

In last Friday’s posting on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we promised to dive into a deeper explanation of Emotion Coaching, reviewing strategies that you can use to build bonds of trust, respect, and mutual understanding with your kids.

To continue our last chapter of our series on relationships in the Digital Age, we’d like to introduce you (or reintroduce you!) to the basics of Emotion Coaching, Dr. Gottman’s five step program for raising emotionally intelligent kids.

With the coming of The Digital Age, our perspective on human connection has been transformed. The tech-revolution’s steadily increasing influence on our patterns of relating (or not relating) to each other often undermines our bonds with those we love.

The internet’s frequent intrusion into our personal lives is often fueled by (and blamed on) the unremitting demands of the workplace.

As we promised in Monday’s post on The Gottman Relationship Blog, today we bring you a short and sweet overview of Dr. Gottman’s skills for Active Listening*.

Last week on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we talked about the ubiquity of multitasking in the Digital Age and its contributions to our endlessly distractible, reliably forgetful, and attention-deficient modern world. 

At the end of our potentially alarming post on Wednesday, we promised to give you some ideas for avoiding the clutches of distraction in the Age of Distraction. 

This week on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we turn our attention from self-esteem to stress. Researchers of cognitive psychology in Quebec, Canada exploring the effect of stress on our brains have found an important link:

In Monday's entry on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we promised to explore and address the reasons for specific difficulties you may be encountering in your relationships as a result of the Digital Age. 

Last week on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we wrote about the necessity of making time for yourself in this increasingly busy-making (and often crazy-making!) age of technology. 

Today on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we bring you a very important Weekend Homework Assignment. If you have read Dr. Gottman's New York Times bestselling The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, this exercise may be familiar to you.

In Monday’s posting on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we encouraged you to consider the significance of choices you make in the digital age – their effects not only on your relationships with others, but also with yourself.

Over the last couple of weeks on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we have written much about the dangers of conducting intimate relationships in The Digital Age using modern communication technologies. 

If you have taken one thing away from our Relationships in the Digital Age series up to this point, we hope it is an awareness of the folly of text warfare. 

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.

Last week on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we launched our new series: Relationships in the Digital Age. We started off by investigating the basics of virtual communication in relationships, enumerating some of its risks and rewards.

Dr. John Gottman has discovered many surprising things about relationships over the past four decades, sharing these findings with us in his books, lectures, conferences, and workshops. 

Technology is changing what it means to be "together." While communication is nearly effortless and instantaneous at any distance, it can be more difficult to connect with others. 

As we have mentioned previously on The Gottman Relationship Blog, Dr. John Gottman’s groundbreaking research with couples has allowed us at The Gottman Institute to apply his work to a much broader spectrum of human relationships.

On Wednesday's posting, we promised to follow our cold, hard facts about stonewalling with a healthy alternative. The first step of overcoming stonewalling is to stop the discussion.

On Monday we introduced Stonewalling, Dr. Gottman’s fourth and fina horseman. It is our goal this week to help you understand this particularly destructive communication style and learn to manage it.

Today on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we would like to continue Wednesday's discussion on Fondness and Admiration, which are two of the most crucial elements in a rewarding and long-lasting romance.

Today on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we would like to continue Monday's discussion on Horseman #3 Contempt.

Contempt is the worst of the four horsemen. In Dr. Gottman’s four decades of research, he has found it to be the #1 predictor of divorce.

Happy Friday! We hope you have learned a lot about Defensiveness and its antidote in this week's postings. Today on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we would like to take the opportunity to share an excerpt from an article which cites our research.

In healthy relationships, partners don’t get defensive when discussing an area of conflict. According to Dr. Gottman, they instead take responsibility for their role in the issue and express an interest in their partner's feelings.

Today on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we would like to give you the opportunity to practice what you’ve learned about criticism this week. 

Today on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we would like to continue Monday's discussion on criticism.

This week on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we will continue The Four Horsemen series by digging deeper into the first horseman of the apocalypse: criticism.

Today on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we would like to continue The Four Horsemen series by providing you with a strong foundation of understanding before we go into further depth about each specific communication style.

Today on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we are excited to introduce a brand-new 5 week series on The Four Horsemen!

Instead of our usual Weekend Homework Assignment, today we would like to conclude The Sound Relationship House Series by sharing suggestions for Creating Shared Meaning from Dr. Gottman's celebrated book, The Relationship Cure. 

Creating shared meaning by establishing traditions and  rituals of connection is not just for couples – you can bring your whole family together in much the same way!

Today on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we are excited to introduce the final level in The Sound Relationship House Series: Create Shared Meaning.

Today on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we’d like to end our discussion of Dreams Within Conflict by sharing Dr. Gottman’s words on trusting our process and offering support to each other.

Perpetual gridlocked problems between you and your partner often conceal underlying feelings and dreams that aren’t getting communicated.

The last two levels of The Sound Relationship House (which we will be covering this week and next!) are inextricably linked.

All couples face times of conflict in their relationship. With that said, it may come as a relief to hear the following: our research shows that the existence of conflict is not an omen portending the end of your relationship!

Today on The Gottman Relationship Blog, we continue Monday’s discussion of processing fights and regrettable incidents with some tips on how to identify and understand what triggers you and your partner. 

Before we continue on with The Sound Relationship House Series and move to Make Life Dreams Come True, the level above Manage Conflict, we want to spend some time this week discussing what to do in the aftermath of a fight or regrettable incident.

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. 

In the entry on “Making Up” in Greenburg and O’Malley’s tongue in cheek handbook for avoiding love and marriage, the following points to consider when resolving a fight are given: 

Today on the Gottman Relationship Blog, we continue the discussion of Manage Conflict by introducing Dr. Gottman's  six skills of conflict management.

In 1974, an important book was published by Harold Raush. It was the first observational longitudinal study to use sequential analysis of interaction in relationship conflict styles.

The presence of positive affect during everyday interaction is crucial. However, for a relationship to be healthy, both positivity and negativity are necessary.

Build Love Maps, Share Fondness and Admiration, and Turn Towards Instead of Away build the fourth story of the Sound Relationship House: The Positive Perspective.

According to our research, fondness and admiration are two of the most crucial elements in a rewarding and long-lasting romance.

Today on the Gottman Relationship Blog, we are happy to announce the beginning of a new seven-week series: "The Sound Relationship House!"

The dynamics of flowcharts, mathematical models, and interpretations for detailed experimental results on trust - a subject that has barely been touched by scientists - are foreign to most of us.

University of Oregon emeritus psychologist Robert Weiss coined the term “Negative Sentiment Override” (NSO) for the emergence of troubling patterns in which trust has been broken in relationships.

Following over 35 years of research, Dr. Gottman has discovered something very surprising. He now understands  something that is counter-intuitive to many of us. 

After spending decades researching the intersections between behavioral economics and relationship psychology, Dr. John Gottman has made a number of incredible discoveries about relationships. 

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. 

Our research shows that adults can help kids who struggle with moments of emotional intensity, largely due to children's natural inexperience in understanding what on earth they are going through.