The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships

by John Gottman

  Below are some expressions commonly heard when a disapproving adult addresses a fussy or misbehaving child. Perhaps they’ll remind you of reprimands you may have heard as a child.

  “Stop that crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a baby! Grow up!”

  “Don’t use that tone of voice with me!”

  “Say something nice or don’t say anything at all.”

  Many people who disapprove of emotional expression tend to frame their relationships as power struggles. In this context, they see expressions of anger, sadness, or fear as an unfair strategy that people use to manipulate others. An emotion-disapproving person is likely to describe an upset family member as “spoiled.” He or she might say, “If you don’t get your way, you’re going to cry about it—is that it?” Or, “He’s just throwing a fit so we’ll do what he wants to do.”

  This perspective fails to recognize an important choice we have in relationships: We can accept people’s feelings, and even empathize with them, without having to agree with their position. For instance, you might say to a child, “You’re very angry that you can’t go outside right now because it’s getting dark. I know how you feel. Sometimes I get angry, too, when I can’t do what I want. That’s when I take a deep breath and try to think what to do instead.” Or you might say to your spouse, “I know you’re not happy that I’ve decided to take this trip right now. I might feel the same way if I were in your shoes. But I feel that it’s something I just have to do.” To respond this way, you must first recognize the other person’s anger as a bid for connection. This recognition allows you to turn toward another’s feelings with empathy and support, and without having to disapprove of the way they feel.

  One key factor to this approach is the ability to focus on the feelings underneath a person’s behavior rather than on the behavior itself. Here’s an example:

  Craig’s wife, Angela, comes home from work one night as angry as he’s ever seen her. She barges into the house, slams the door, and heads straight for the bedroom, where she slams that door, too. Craig has talked to her about her temper before, and she knows he doesn’t like it when she acts like this. He disapproves of her “tantrum,” so he decides he’ll try to nip the problem in the bud.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he calls up the stairs. “Is that any way to shut the damned door?”

  But because his response to her anger is so unsympathetic, Angela slams another door—the door to connection and intimacy.

  “Screw you, Craig!” she yells back down the stairs.

  Now imagine what might have happened if Craig had recognized Angela’s anger as a bid for connection first and saved his concern about the door-slamming until later on. Upon her stormy arrival, he might have called up the stairs, “Angela, are you okay?”

  To which she might have replied, “No! I’m so mad I could spit!”

  Then he could have followed her upstairs and said through the door, “Well, that’s kind of obvious. What happened?”

  At that point she might have opened the door and blurted, “Everything went wrong! Jessie blew the presentation and then blamed me. We get back to the office and she runs to Mel. Then I get called on the carpet and he says he’s putting me on probation! And it’s all her fault! He wouldn’t even listen to me!”

  To which Craig might have responded, “That sounds awful. No wonder you’re so upset. Come here and sit down. Take off your coat and I’ll get you a drink. You look exhausted.”

  At this, Angela’s rage melts into tears. She leans into Craig’s arms and they spend the next hour talking it over. Although Angela feels the whole world is against her, she knows she’s got Craig on her side.

  Of course, this happy ending presumes that Craig can tolerate Angela’s initially intense expression of anger and see it as a bid. If he can, he’s got an opportunity for intimacy and connection by turning toward her in the midst of a crisis—the very time when she needs him most. If he can’t tolerate her rage, he may turn against her and they could spend the rest of the evening in stony silence or arguing about the value of slamming doors.

  Our research reveals that people who disapprove of emotional expression often have the same beliefs as those who dismiss it. They fear that negative feelings are toxic, uncontrollable, that they can overwhelm your life and leave you incapacitated. In addition, many in both groups talk about feelings as if they were a limited commodity. You don’t want to “waste your tears” on problems that don’t merit such strong emotion.

  While some think it’s okay to express anger, sadness, or fear for short periods, they believe that expression ought to be time-limited—that is, it’s all right to be angry immediately following some betrayal or loss, for example, but you ought to get over it quickly. You’ve got to “get on with your life.”

  People raised in emotion-disapproving families eventually learn that emotional intimacy leads to trouble. Express your feelings and you’re likely to get scolded, humiliated, and even abused.

  And, finally, our studies show that kids who grow up in emotion-disapproving families have many of the same problems as children from emotion-dismissing families. They’re not as capable as other kids of soothing themselves when they get upset, so they have more trouble concentrating and picking up on social cues. This leads to more behavior problems, academic failure, trouble with peers, and chronic health problems later on. In adulthood, it leads to greater loneliness.

  The Laissez-Faire Philosophy

  If you were raised in a home with a laissez-faire philosophy of emotion, your family culture probably had a high tolerance for openly expressing negative feelings like fear, sadness, and anger. In fact, families with a laissez-faire philosophy seem to believe that expressing emotion is like “letting off steam.” You convey your feelings freely, no matter what that expression entails—tears, temper tantrums, rants, rages—you name it. And once the storm is over, it’s over. All your work is done.

  Parents with this style usually turn toward their children’s emotional bids with empathy, even if the bids involve the expression of anger, fear, or sadness. They might try to comfort a child who is crying, frustrated, or piping mad by saying something validating:

  “You must be feeling so sad.”

  “I can see that you’re mad right now.”

  “I know you’re frightened. That used to scare me when I was little, too.”

  While such acknowledgments are validating, they’re also lacking in an essential element—they give kids no guidance on how to soothe themselves or how to solve the problems that cause bad feelings in the first place.

  Laissez-faire parents also have trouble setting limits on kids’ angry behavior. A raging five-year-old might knock all his older brother’s toys off the table, breaking a few along the way. A parent with a laissez-faire philosophy of emotion might see this behavior, turn toward the child’s anger with empathy, and then let it go, without ever addressing the child’s destructive act.

  It’s not that laissez-faire families intend to be negligent; most of them simply lack the knowledge and skills they need to help their children to cope. Many have been raised in chaotic, oppressive, or abusive homes, where they missed out on lessons about calming down and solving problems. Because of their difficult upbringing, these parents often vow to raise their own kids differently, but they don’t know where to start. They don’t know what to teach children about emotions, other than to accept emotional behavior unconditionally. Such lessons have their limitations, however—especially when children behave in ways that are detrimental to themselves and others. When this happens, parents with a laissez-faire philosophy may feel helpless to remedy the situation. Consequently they withdraw from the scene, failing to give the kids what they truly need in terms of limits and guidance.

  Not all laissez-faire parents lack the knowledge and support they need, however. Some are simply distracted by problems or other life priorities. Many are like Amy, the sin
gle mother and law student described in chapter 2, in that they let their work take over their lives, stripping away the time and attention they need to guide their children.

  What happens to people raised in a laissez-faire family? Because they’ve had little guidance on how to handle difficult feelings, they don’t learn to regulate their emotions very well. When they’re angry, for example, their anger is indeed more likely to turn to aggression. When they’re sad, they may not have the ability to regulate that sadness, so they’re more likely to become depressed.

  How Emotional Philosophy Influences Connections

  Exercise: Emotional Philosophy and Today’s Relationships

  Here’s a list of questions designed to help you explore how your family’s emotional philosophy may be affecting your relationships today. (The exercise on this page—What Was Your Family’s Philosophy of Emotion?—can help you determine whether your family was primarily emotion-coaching, emotion-dismissing, emotion-disapproving, or laissez-faire.)

  Again, you can do this exercise either alone or with someone you trust, and then share your answers. If you do it on your own, you can try to imagine how somebody close to you might answer the questions about his or her own family’s emotional philosophy. Doing so may provide insights into how the two of you connect.

  Write your answers to the questions below in your Emotion Log.

  • How does your family’s philosophy of emotion affect your ability to express difficult emotions such as sadness, anger, or fear?

  • Are there certain emotions that you have a difficult time acknowledging in others? In yourself?

  • Do you often feel unjustified or guilty when expressing negative emotions? How does this relate to your family’s philosophy of emotion?

  • Think of a particular relationship that’s important to you. When you have a choice to turn toward, turn away from, or turn against this person’s bids for connection, what do you do? Are you likely to make the same choice, whether this person’s bid is expressed in a negative or positive way? How do your choices differ from how your parents might have reacted in a similar situation?

  • When somebody you’re close to gets sad, angry, or fearful, do you focus more on their behavior or on the feelings underneath the behavior?

  • Over the next two weeks or so, jot down the times you recognize people’s expression of sadness, anger, or fear as a bid for connection.

  • Do you usually respond to these expressions by turning toward, turning against, or turning away?

  • Do you see a correlation between your response and the emotional philosophy with which you were raised?

  • What happens if you turn toward other people’s expressions of negative feelings with validation?

  • What happens if you turn toward other people’s expressions of negative feelings with more than validation? What if you offer support or guidance?

  Which Philosophy Works Best?

  In our two ten-year studies of more than one hundred families, the answer is clear. Families that create emotion-coaching environments fare much better than families that are dismissing, disapproving, or have a laissez-faire attitude toward emotions. Couples who accept, respect, and honor each other’s feelings are less likely to divorce. Their children tend to do better over the years as well. Because these emotion-coaching families create environments that help children to regulate their feelings, their children can concentrate better than can the kids in the other groups. They get better grades in school. They have fewer behavior problems, and they get along better with peers. Lab results show that they have fewer stress-related hormones in their bloodstreams and that, over time, they suffer from fewer minor health problems like coughs and colds.

  Emotional Intelligence Versus Detachment and Denial

  My findings about families’ emotional expression, along with concurring evidence from others in my field, attracted lots of media attention in the mid-1990s. Despite this growing evidence of the value of accepting and respecting one another’s feelings, however, many experts still get it wrong. In fact, many promote the idea that “emotional intelligence” is simply a matter of controlling our emotions and substituting positive feelings for negative ones.

  I disagree with this perspective. I think that people operate best when they can experience the whole breadth of their emotional palette, and then use those feelings in the service of the goals they most desire.

  One example of the way experts have mischaracterized the nature of emotional intelligence involves a Stanford University study of four-year-olds and delayed gratification. In the study, each child was taken individually by an experimenter to a study room and given one marshmallow. Then they were told that the experimenter had to leave for fifteen minutes. If they wanted to eat the marshmallow while the experimenter was gone, that was fine. But if they waited until the experimenter returned, they would get another marshmallow as well.

  The Stanford researchers found some remarkable differences between the kids who devoured the first marshmallow immediately and those who waited patiently for the second. By high school, for instance, the kids who couldn’t wait for marshmallow number two were seen as more shy, stubborn, and indecisive. They were more likely to think of themselves as “bad” or unworthy. And their SAT scores were dramatically lower than those of kids in the other group.

  These are interesting results, but here’s the $64,000 question that the Stanford researchers didn’t answer: What motivated the kids who delayed gratification to wait? In his book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (Bantam Books, 1995), Daniel Goleman writes, “They were able…to distract themselves while maintaining the necessary perseverance toward their goal—the two marshmallows.” In other words, he attributes their success to their ability to squelch their feelings of desire.

  But I think there’s more to the story than Goleman suggests. I think the children demonstrated an equally important strength: an ability to get in touch with their desire for marshmallows and allow that desire to motivate them to wait. Rather than simply denying themselves the object of their passion, they were able to project themselves into the future and imagine how happy they would be when they finally achieved their ultimate goal—two marshmallows. In this way the successful management of emotions is not a matter of denying “inappropriate” feelings. Instead, it’s a matter of accepting all of our emotions—including our passion for goals that may or may not be within our reach—and then using the energy of that desire to propel us toward what we want most from life. This interpretation is most consistent with my own data, which show that people who accept emotion lead more successful, fulfilling lives.

  There are many incentives in our culture to stay emotionally detached, to dismiss and deny uncomfortable feelings. For one thing, it takes time and effort to be with your emotions. While emotional awareness at work pays off in the long run, in the short term, grief, anger, and fear can be tremendously distracting from the workaday world. In other words, dealing with difficult emotions interferes with productivity.

  Our culture also discourages people from paying attention to difficult feelings, because getting to the root of what makes you angry or sad can bring about change in your life. It can take you away from the role into which you’ve been cast—whether that role fits or not.

  I’m reminded of the Nike ad that so pervaded our culture in recent years: “Just Do It.” To me, the subtext read, “Don’t think of how you feel about doing it, because then you may not do it at all. You may never set records, you may never achieve success. You’ll wind up a failure.”

  But I suggest that if you look into your heart and find that you really don’t want to do it—whether “it” is to pursue a certain career goal, commit to a new relationship, or go for some other brass ring that others define as ultimate success—then perhaps you shouldn’t.

  As a college professor, I see many students set aside their dreams to follow the job market, believing they’ll have more satisfaction in a higher
-paying field. I remember one woman in particular who had a passion for mathematics. She might have become a stellar mathematical theorist, but she discovered she could make more money in accounting. So, even though accounting bored her, she switched her major, became an accountant, and ended up quite successful financially. When I met her years later, she said she had been very depressed. Although she was proud of her success, she felt she couldn’t enjoy it. Why? Her work lacked “spirit,” she said. She regretted that she had silenced that small but uncomfortable voice inside that was telling her she was headed in the wrong direction.

  Fear of changing paths is certainly a major reason that people try to detach from their feelings. But perhaps the strongest and most basic reason is to avoid experiencing the very real pain that emotions can bring. Self-help psychology sections in bookstores are bulging with titles from dozens of authors who offer simplistic “just be happy” formulas for modern life. Such prescriptions for detachment work, to some degree. But in the long run you pay a very high price for detachment—namely, depression and isolation.

  It’s hard to be authentic and feel close to people if you feel you must always “cheer up” and put a smiling face forward. Life is filled with opportunities to feel serene, content, happy—even joyful. But it’s also filled with irritation, anger, terror, and despair. As our exploration of the brain’s emotional command systems shows us, such feelings are written into our genetic code; they’re part of what it means to be human. To deny the existence of difficult feelings is to live a half life. But here’s the worst of it: If you always try to stay emotionally detached, you erect an obstacle between yourself and others who are in the same boat. Unless you know and understand your own feelings, you can’t know and understand what others are feeling. And unless you can show evidence that you do indeed understand, you won’t bond emotionally to others.