conscious relationships

BUILD LOVE MAPS: The bottom floor refers to the importance of partners knowing each other’s psychological worlds well enough to map them. Each partner’s inner world is composed of needs, values, past experiences, priorities, stresses, and so on. As partners evolve over time, their love maps change. To build and keep love maps updated, relationship masters ask each other questions, especially open-ended ones. 

SHARE FONDNESS AND ADMIRATION: The second floor creates a culture of appreciation that supplies a relationship’s emotional bank account with assets. Most important at this level is partners not only feeling love and admiration but also expressing it often.

TURNING TOWARDS VERSUS AWAY: The third floor is built from those small moments when partners make a bid for each other’s attention and connection. Relationship masters turn towards most of their partners’ bids rather than away or against their partner. These first three floors of the SRH determine how well couples maintain their friendship, intimacy, and passion. The next floor up is an add-on that results from the relative strengths of the lower three floors plus the floor above it. 

POSITIVE PERSPECTIVE: This level is based on the work of Robert Weiss at the University of Oregon. Weiss observed that couples could either be in positive sentiment override (what we call the “positive perspective”) or negative sentiment override (or “negative perspective”). Positive perspective refers to an overall feeling partners have about each other in which one partner’s positive sentiments outweigh the negative response he or she may have to the other’s occasional bad behavior. If a husband wakes up grumpy, a wife with positive perspective will figure he just had a bad night’s sleep, whereas with negative perspective, she will think he is being mean. Positive or negative perspective is determined by the relative strength of the couple’s friendship plus how well they manage conflict. This floor cannot be worked on directly, but it can be influenced by changes in the other SRH levels. A strong friendship and good conflict management skills help ensure the positive perspective. The next two floors of the SRH are fundamental to good conflict management.

These first three floors of the SRH determine how well couples maintain their friendship, intimacy, and passion. The next floor up is an add-on that results from the relative strengths of the lower three floors plus the floor above it. 

MANAGE CONFLICT: There are six skills that form this floor. The first one is how a complaint is raised. Voicing a complaint with a softened start-up rather than criticism or contempt works best. In a softened start-up, the partner describes him- or herself rather than naming a negative trait of the other person’s. The start-up usually begins with “I feel …” as in, “I feel worried about the bills not getting paid,” rather than words like, “You are so … (lazy, irresponsible, etc.).” The second skill is whether partners accept influence from each other when working towards a compromise. Accepting influence is a strength for both men and women. Third is a couple’s ability to make repairs in the middle of a conversation when it begins to skid downhill— the sooner, the better. Fourth is a couple’s ability to de-escalate a quarrel after the Four Horsemen have taken over the lead. Fifth is each partner’s ability to self-soothe before their physiological arousal explodes their discussion into chaos. Couples who do this well take a break from the conversation in order to calm down. The sixth skill is crucial when all else fails: the couple’s ability to process and recover from a regrettable incident or bad fight. 

MAKE LIFE DREAMS COME TRUE: Most individuals have dreams, hopes, and aspirations. Couples who honor each other’s dreams and support each other to fulfill them have relationships that are nearly unbreakable. Our research revealed that when a couple gets gridlocked on an issue and can’t get near resolving it, each partner may have a dream at the core of their position that hasn’t been aired or understood yet. When partners disclose these dreams to one another, their rigid opposition often melts away which smoothes the way towards compromise. The top floor of the SRH is also the deepest one. It gets at the heart of each partner’s world.

CREATE SHARED MEANING: Life experience etches into every individual a unique set of values and beliefs. It isn’t essential that partners share exactly the same ones, although some overlap is helpful. More important is that couples can talk about them with each other. Couples strong in shared meaning discuss questions like what purpose gives each of their lives meaning and what legacies they want to leave behind. Nothing is left in the dark. Because this level relies on good Love Mapping, it circles us back to the bottom level of the SRH, where Love Mapping lives. John likes to say the SRH is really more like a bagel. 

The seven levels of the SRH stand strong when the two walls supporting them are solid.  The walls are:

TRUST and COMMITMENT 

Trust refers to each partner knowing that the other partner will be there for them in a host of ways: When they are sad, angry, frightened, humiliated, overweight, underweight, triumphant, defeated, joyous, despairing, sick, broken, helpless, hopeful, dream-filled, and so on. Trust is erected by one partner choosing to show up for the other— not perfectly, not every time, but as much as one can. 

Commitment is about loyalty, cherishing one’s partner above all others, not scanning the horizon for who might be better. Commitment doesn’t always imply marriage, given that some partners don’t feel it necessary to legally formalize their commitment, and in some places, partners are forbidden to marry even if they want to. But with or without a legal document, commitment means a life-long promise of devotion and care. Where there is commitment, there is no worry of being replaced if someone “better” comes along. Once the SRH theory was fleshed out and established, it was time to take it out for a clinical dry run.

Gottman, Julie Schwartz; Gottman, John M. (2015-10-26). 10 Principles for Doing Effective Couples Therapy (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) (p. 27). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.