the 9 parts of the sound relationship house

  • The first part of The Sound Relationship House consists of three levels that are about the couple’s friendship foundation.

Love Maps

Purpose: To know each other’s world and allocate cognitive room for each partner. Developing a map of the world of their partners, of their relationship and its history, and of their partner’s history, concerns, preferences, and the current world of their partner.

Intervention: Love Map Exercise, Open-Ended Questions Exercise

Fondness & Admiration

Purpose: The antidote for contempt. Changing a habit of mind from scanning the environment for a partner’s mistakes to a habit of mind that scans for what their partner is doing right. Building a culture of appreciation, fondness, affection, and respect.

Interventions: , Fondness & Admiration Questionnaire, Appreciation Exercise, Appreciation Diary

Turn Towards

Purpose: Bids for emotional connection and closeness. Turning towards versus turning away in everyday moments. Building awareness for how one’s partner asks for connection and expresses emotional needs, and deciding to turn towards those bids - building up the “Emotional Bank Account.”

Interventions: Bid Awareness Exercise, Turning Towards Bids Exercise, Rituals of Connection Exercise

  • The second part of The Sound Relationship House is the Positive or Negative Perspective. Exploring this area will help you assess whether or not you as a couple are being driven by a Negative Perspective.

Positive Perspective

Purpose: The presence of positive feelings and emotions in problem solving discussions. Positive perspective fundamentally supports the success of repair attempts during conflict resolution. Positive attitudes and assumptions about each other. Seeing and experiencing your partner not as your adversary, but as your friend.

Interventions: This positive perspective is like an “on” or “off” switch for knowing that your partner has your and the relationship’s best interest at heart and it is built on the foundation of the couple’s friendship. It is not possible to instantly change a Perpetually Negative Perspective to Perpetually Positive Perspective, except by changing the quality of the couple’s friendship by using the first three levels of the Sound Relationship House.

  • The third part of The Sound Relationship House has to do with the Regulation of Conflict. 

Conflict

Purpose: Identify the core issues and understand what triggers escalation of conflict. Triggers for escalation include contempt, criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, belligerence, & domineering. Understand the historical significance of these triggers for each person in the relationship. The history inside and outside of the relationship.

Conflicts are one of two types:

Type 1: Resolvable

Interventions: Softened Startup, Accepting Influence, Repair, Physiological Soothing, Positive Perspective, & Compromise.

Type 2: Perpetual

Interventions: Establish a dialogue about the perpetual problem through a perspective that allows for interest, affection, humor, empathy, excitement, softening, & physiological soothing. Even when discussing a disagreement.

  • The fourth part of The Sound Relationship House has to do with the couple’s ability to honor one another’s dreams and to create meaning together.

Make Life Dreams Come True

Purpose: Intentionally building positive feelings and emotions by helping one’s partner realize important life dreams and making the relationship, in general, effective at making dreams and aspirations come true.

Interventions: This aspect of the relationship is key for unlocking perpetual problem gridlock. Explore each partner’s values in relation to the perpetual problem in order to move towards understanding and compromise.

Create Shared Meaning

Purpose: Intentionally create a sense of shared meaning in life together. This section is about the formal and informal rituals of connection in a relationship and a family. It is an area where the couple explores the meaning of everyday rituals, holiday cycles, rites of passage, roles in the relationship and in each partner’s family of origin. It involves not only rituals within the relationship but rituals involving the relationship with the larger community, the church, charity, others in need, the children’s school, and political events, and so on.

Intervention: Ask and understand your shared goals as a couple; life missions, legacy you wish to leave the world with, career, culture, religion, spirituality. Here we can also search for common ground and discrepancies between each other, and discrepancies between your values and what you actually do with the time you have as individuals and as a couple.

  • The fifth part of The Sound Relationship House consists of the walls, “Trust” and “Commitment,” that hold the house up.

Trust

Purpose: Trust is the state that occurs when a person knows that his or her partner acts and thinks to maximize that person’s interests, and maximize that person’s benefits, not just the partner’s own interests and benefits. In other words, this means “my partner has my back and is there for me.”

Interventions:

Phase 1: Atone through taking responsibility and willingness to make up for the wrongdoing. Be completely transparent about the wrongdoing. Be transparent in the willingness and actions that correct the wrongdoing for your partner.

Phase 2: Rebuild safety, confidence, and intimacy in the relationship through understanding and respecting your partner’s inner world and consistently committing to actions that demonstrate understanding and respect towards your partner.

Commitment

Purpose: The couple’s belief, and acting on that belief, that their relationship with each other is a lifelong journey, for better or for worse.

Intervention: Cherishing your partner’s positive qualities and nurturing gratitude about what you have with this person by comparing your partner favorably with real or imagined others, rather than trashing your partner by magnifying their negative qualities, and nurturing resentment by comparing your partner unfavorably with real or imagined others.

Copyright © 2000–2016 by Dr. John M. Gottman and Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman. Distributed under license by The Gottman Institute, Inc.