The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Can Couples Learn to Argue Better?

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

No matter how much you love your partner, your relationship will never be totally free from disagreement. And nor should it be, say researchers Dr John Gottman and Dr Julie Schwartz Gottman. We actually just need to learn to argue better. The Gottmans join Dr Laurie Santos to talk us through how to raise complaints with our partners and how to react when they complain about us.  Further reading: Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict into Connection by Dr John Gottman and Dr Julie Schwartz Gottman. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. But more often than not, the problem is usually somebody's phone going off. I turned the phone off, but it didn't. You didn't turn it off. I did, yeah. Uh-oh. This isn't the kind of exchange you might have expected from relationship experts John and Julie Schwartz Gottman. You might have thought that Julie would just brush over John's mistake with some loving yet saccharine comment. Oh, honey, I simply adore your forgetfulness. It fills our lives with so

many surprises. But the Gottmans are realists. They don't like shying away from the disagreements, disputes, and downright arguments that happen in every partnership. And in their decades together as a married couple, they've had their fair share of conflicts. Some of them were pretty fundamental. This was like 30 years ago. We had such a big fight there that we actually went to couples therapy. That must be so intimidating for the poor couples therapist when the Gottmans walk in.

Throughout their careers, and now at the institute that bears their name, the Gottmans have studied countless couples, paying particular attention to the different ways they bring up complaints and solve conflicts. And the central lesson they've observed is that the key to a long and healthy relationship lies in confronting disagreement rather than burying it. But as they explain in their new book, Fight Right,

How Successful Couples Turn Conflict into Connection, there are ways we can argue a bit smarter. And the Gottmans think we need to heed this advice now more than ever. When COVID started, actually, we did a number of interviews and podcasts to give tools and advice for couples who were struggling so hard, you know, especially in the quarantine. It was so painful because most people are used to separation during the day with work and kid care and a variety of things and then coming together. Now they were together 24-7. Oftentimes, they didn't have space to themselves, nothing of solitude for themselves if they needed that. And that has carried over people, at least the people who had distressed marriages,

carried over, people, at least the people who had distressed marriages, became more and more unhappy. They became more domestically violent, more hostile towards one another. And there was emotional damage occurring that still festers inside a lot of couples today, even though COVID is much more under control. So I think we're in a sorry state right now. The other thing, too, is that kids, especially teens, have suffered tremendously from COVID. That puts more pressure on the parents, because now they're dealing with kids who are seriously depressed, who may even be suicidal, who don't want to go to school, who don't want to connect socially because they've almost forgotten how except through technology. And kids are at a loss for, oh my God, going back to what was normal, what is normal. And parents are coping with that

too. That puts more strain on parents too. So we think that fighting isn't broken here in this country. You know, there's so much polarization, political polarization. And in good relationships, people fight in ways that are destructive, that create antagonism. You mean in bad relationships? In bad relationships. Thank you. There's a need to really reexamine the way we deal with conflict. And what this book is about, Fight Right, is turning conflict into connection.

And what are the tools for doing that? Yeah. And the great thing about your work is that you've been able to look predictively at the way people fight to try to figure out how that's going to play out in the rest of their relationship. And in the course of doing that, you've identified what you like to call the four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse, I think is what we're going for. And so, you know, walk me through what these are and why they can be so problematic. All right. So number one is criticism. That, you know, the thing we do the most is one of the most destructive. So criticism means blaming a problem between you and your partner

on a personality flaw of your partner. So it will sound like you're so lazy, you're so thoughtless, you're so inconsiderate. All those put downs are criticisms. That's one. The second one we call contempt. And contempt is really awful. It's like sulfuric acid for the relationship. It destroys it. And not only does it predict the relationship demise, it also predicts how many infectious illnesses the listener of contempt will have in the coming years. That's incredible. in the coming years. That's incredible. So hearing contempt destroys the immune system of the listener. So do we want to do that to the person we love? I don't think so. So how is contempt different than criticism? And I was about to say that. Thank you. Contempt is looking down your nose at your partner from a position of superiority.

So there's often a smear or some scorn or, you know, sarcasm, mockery at times, and of course, name calling. Calling your partner a bad name, which we don't have to repeat here. All of that is contempt. Now, the response to criticism and contempt is defensiveness. Those two first ones make us feel attacked. What do we do when we feel attacked? Well, we're going to fight back or we're going to play innocent victim. or we're going to play innocent victim. So in defensiveness, you either will counterattack or you'll whine and say, I did too pay the bills on time. The whiners. The whiners. Yeah. Our friends, the whiners. And so that's number three. And number four,

we call stonewalling. Stonewalling literally is what it sounds like. The listener who's supposed to be engaged with the speaker shuts themselves down, acts like a stonewall, may not make eye contact, doesn't show any response, any movement, any words that indicates they're actually listening and participating. They turn into a stone wall. We discovered that people who stonewalled, and 85% of those were men, inside were actually in fight or flight, which is really interesting. Their heart rates would be sitting there over 100 beats a minute, sometimes way higher, or for an athlete over about 80, 85 beats a minute, and they were in fight or flight or freeze, which is a horribly uncomfortable feeling inside. Thus, the person was actually going inside themselves, trying to shut out stimuli coming from outside,

including the partner's voice, in order to soothe themselves because they were feeling so awful. That's the stonewaller. So those are the four. Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. And so it seems like one of the reasons we wind up entering this path of the four horsemen of bad relationships is that we kind of don't realize what we're fighting about. We need to kind of figure out what the deeper hidden agenda is in some of these fights. But at a very kind of basic level, what are most fights about? It's kind of surprising, right? They're about absolutely nothing. They're watching TV and he's got the remote and he's cattle surfing. And she says, leave it on

that show. That's interesting. And he says, well, let me see what else is on. She says, no, leave it. He says, well, let me see what else is on. And she says, no, leave it. He says, fine, have it your way. She says, why'd you say fine that way? You know, I don't even want to watch television with you now. Oh, you don't? Okay, fine. And then they stop relating. So what are they fighting about? They're really not fighting about money, sex, in-laws, parenting. You know, they're fighting about the lack of connection, you know, that inability to see one another's viewpoint.

And that really gets in the way of a deeper understanding of what's going on in the moment. And so sometimes finding this deeper understanding really requires going to that hidden agenda. You know, talk to me what you mean by a hidden agenda and why it can lead to so much kind of conflict in relationships. Okay, so by hidden agenda, what we mean is, again, that internal world inside somebody, where resides their values, their core needs, their ideal dreams, their history, which may include some old scar tissue from past parenting or relationships, being abused, all kinds of things. And that remains underground.

They're not talking about that. They're talking about something on the surface. So let me give you a good example. Let's say that, well, I can just take our situation with the books. John is an avid book collector. We're getting books all the time. Where are you going to put them? There's piles of stuff all over the place.

Okay, so John has a personality type. He can focus his attention completely on whatever he's choosing to attend to. And everything else is blocked out. You know, it's a phenomenal skill that he developed growing up in a very crowded tenement apartment in New York. I, on the other hand, the whole environment totally affects me. The colors of the walls, the sounds, the noise, the tidiness, everything affects me. And I can't think straight if things are disorganized, right? So that's a fundamental difference between John and I. So my ideal dream here, I actually have a little postcard that shows a woman sleeping and just waking up.

I dreamed of a tidy house. I mean, it's like, yes, exactly. And to John, that's completely arbitrary, unimportant, right? Okay. But if we don't bring up those differences between us, his dream is to not be netted because he just wants to do what he wants to do, you know, which of course most of us do. We want to have a little bit of control over our time. And so sometimes those hidden agendas seem to be about these personality differences. But I know you've talked about cases where you really had these hidden dreams, right? These deeper values that you had for your life and what you want your choices to be and that that can lead to conflict too. So Julie wanted to buy a small cabin

on Orcas Island and we had been renting places and even rented a lovely place on the ocean, you know, and I didn't think it was, I didn't think it was a good idea to buy, buy another place. You know, I thought it was a waste of money and we could rent and why did we have to do this? And so I was adamant about not doing it and she was adamant about doing it so we went to therapy and the therapist one day said John relationships are about creating boundaries and you can say no to her and she has to live with it and when we left you know I said do I sound like that and she said, you know, I said, do I sound like that? And she said, yeah, you do. And I said, well, I don't want that kind of a relationship. I think we have to talk more about this cabin thing.

And so we really developed a way of going deeper into why was it so important to her to have her own place there rather than renting. What was the big deal about that? Well, and also, needless to say, we fired the therapist immediately. Right. But what we did, we came home and we sat down, I'll never forget this evening, and we started asking each other these huge questions that later became our intervention called the dream within conflict. And we ask questions like, honey, is there some value or ethics or guidelines that are part of your position on this issue? We would ask, do you have some childhood history that somehow is relating to this?

Why is this so important to you? Do you have some ideal dream here? That was a biggie. Do you have some ideal dream that's part of your position on this issue? And oh my god, this whole world opened up. With these six questions, you know, I was able to really look deeply at why I was so opposed to owning property. And it really had to do with my parents having survived the Holocaust in World War II. And my father's messages to me, don't trust in anything but what you can put in your mind, because you may have to flee one day. Jews have always had to flee.

You know, that was my objection. Julie's, you was my objection. Julie's. I can tell mine. You can tell yours. And mine was that I'd grown up in a very unhappy household, very distressed. And so I lived a couple of blocks away from a huge forest. At night, beginning when I was eight or nine years old, I would sneak out of the house after everybody went to bed. I'd go sleep in the forest overnight, no matter what the weather was. Then I would sneak back in before people got up. And nobody knew I was doing that for years, years and years and years.

I had my favorite tree I would sleep in. So I think I'm part monkey or something. I'm not sure. But anyway, what getting a place on Orcas meant to me was having roots in the wilderness, which is exactly what that forest had been to me as a child. So you can see both of our backgrounds, our childhood histories and values that those histories taught us, which were very powerful, were really significant in this difference between us, right? And once we understood that, we were able to arrive at a compromise that really worked for both of us. Which was, we agreed we would buy a little cabin and live in it for two years and see how it felt to be there, whether or not we really liked this, in trade for keeping our house a kosher house, which was a great big deal. A lot of different dishes for milk and meat and all kinds of stuff. different dishes for milk and meat and all kinds of stuff. We did that in exchange, and John discovered he loved having a cabin on Orchis Island.

My golly. Really loved it. Yeah. It was so quiet, so peaceful. You know, we really loved it. And so it just shows the power when you can actually get to these compromises, when you can sort of look at these hidden agendas and figure out a compromise that maximizes both. Both parties can be happy. I think often when we think of compromise, we think, well, somebody's going to have to sacrifice something. But sometimes if you understand what you're really fighting about,

it seems like you can get to like, you know, a compromise that really works for everybody. Yeah. The amazing thing is that the worst issues in a relationship can be the greatest sources of connection and understanding. Right. Let me give you another example of this notion of compromise. We found that the successful couples took an initial step when they were working on compromise that was really important. And that was to take their own position on an issue and divide it into two parts, an inflexible part, the part where nothing could be given up in that little circle, a core need, an ideal dream, a particular value. They could not compromise on those pieces of their position, but there were also flexible things that they could compromise on that might have to do with who, what, where,

when, how much, how long, you know, those fundamental nitty gritty details. So we had a couple in a workshop, for example, where the woman and the man were getting ready for retiring, and they both wanted to sell their house. But then his ideal dream was to buy a sailboat, sail around the world forever and ever into the sunset. Her ideal dream was this. Her family had owned a farm for over 100 years called a Century Farm. She wanted to go live on the farm and take her place in the legacy of ancestors who'd also done so. Where was it? In Iowa. So how do you sail around the world from Iowa? You cannot do this. the world, from Iowa. You cannot do this. So when they looked at their positions in his center circle that was inflexible, he put sailing. Hers was live on the farm. But around that,

the flexible things were whose dream would go first? How long would it last? How much would we spend? Where would we go? When would it begin? When would it end? Et cetera. And they arrived through doing that at this gorgeous compromise. They would first buy a sailboat, sail as far as they could for a year, then put the boat up on dry dock and go for living on the farm for one year, same amount of time it felt fair and just. And after two years, then they would compare their experiences in order to create the next dream together. It was perfect, even though they were coming from totally opposite dreams.

Finding a compromise between Iowa and the open ocean seems pretty impressive. But what about the smaller relationship conflicts that come up even more often in our everyday lives? After the break, we'll look at best practices for starting these lower-grade arguments off right, and what we can do if they wind up going wrong. Why do you always leave all the laundry on the floor? No, honey, I'm starting to feel defensive here. I'm just sick and tired of this stupid, stupid laundry. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

Relationship fights have a way of exploding when we least want them to. Maybe we've been building up small resentments over months or years when something finally sets us off. We're feeling angry, we're hurting, and we open our mouths with little plan for what we're going to say. Relationship expert Dr. Julie Schwartz-Gottman has found that these ad-libbed openings aren't the best way to start an argument. The first three minutes of a fight is incredibly important. The first three minutes of a conflict conversation not only predicts how the rest of the conversation will go, it also predicts how well the relationship is going to go six years down the road with over 90% accuracy. So how we bring up our complaint is absolutely crucial. Say what you feel. You're describing

yourself. I feel stressed. I feel disappointed. Then step two, about what? Now notice that's not about who, about your partner and how rotten they are. But you also have some best practices once the fight starts in order to how to do it right. And one of my favorite ones, because I think this is a tendency that I need to work on with my own husband, is to make sure I'm not kitchen sinking in the middle of the fight. What is kitchen sinking and why is it so bad for a fight? One of the things that we find that people do that gets in the way of mutual understanding is that they don't feel entitled to their complaints. So they kind of stockpile their grievances.

They try to live with it and say, oh, it's no big deal. I don't have to bring that up. But then there's another one. They do that again and again until resentment builds to such an extent that all of the complaints spill out at once. And that's what we call kitchen sinking. Everything but the kitchen sink is in there, you know, and they just let it all out at once. And it's really overwhelming when you do that, when you say, hey, Fred, I've got this list of 15 things that you're doing wrong. And here they are. And you come up with 15. And to Fred, it feels like an avalanche. You know, he cannot listen. He just immediately goes into the flooded state, fight or flight. And that's what kinship thinking is about. So you really

need to bring up your complaints when they matter to you. One at a time. One at a time. And so starting with one particular positive need, but that's the point where I think a partner needs to respond after you've done that well. And so talk about what the right kind of response is from a partner after you've expressed those needs, how they can sort of show that you've been heard? Well, the right response from a listener might be some empathy and some validation, maybe even beginning with summarizing what you hear the partner say. That might sound like, why don't you express a need and then I'll show it. I really need you to be with me in the morning and not sleep in, you know, because I feel really lonely in the morning. You're just inconsiderate.

You don't think about my needs. Okay. Now do it right. Okay. Okay. So I'm really upset that a lot of mornings you're sleeping in and I feel really alone. I wish you would make an effort to be with me at breakfast. It's an important meal and I'd like to be with you and have you accompany. Wow. Okay. So you're saying that you miss me in the morning when you're having breakfast alone? Yeah, exactly. I'm still sleeping? Mm-hmm. Ah, okay. Well, I can understand feeling lonely, you know, when you first wake up and you're downstairs and you're wanting some company, you know, connection first thing in the morning.

That really makes sense to me. I get that. Okay. So that should precede your response. And what that was, was empathy first. Empathy with their summary, then empathy with his feelings, and then validating his right to have those feelings. If I were him stepping into his shoes, yeah, I could see where he would feel lonely and want some company. That totally makes sense to me.

However, I can still disagree with his point of view. I can respond by saying something like, if I want to say no, honey, you know, I really understand what you're needing and why you're needing it. But I'm usually up till about 2.30 in the morning. Yeah. Feeding the baby and getting very terrible sleep. So getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning is really hard for me. I get it.

So would it be possible, maybe we could compromise somehow? Yeah. I know you have to get up early some mornings, but maybe on the weekends we could both sleep in together? You're more of a night owl, you're saying, and you're up later. So getting up at six, you only get four or five hours of sleep. Right.

And that doesn't work for you. Right. So we can sleep in the weekends is your best thing. Well, it's a possibility. Yeah. How would you feel about that? Yeah, it kind of makes sense. So that's kind of what it looks like. That's beautiful.

I mean, I heard you each hearing one another. I heard you quickly going to compromising. And I heard something else that you talk about, which is this lovely idea that you call yielding to win, which comes up during compromise. So explain yielding to win and maybe how it played out in that scenario. Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, we really discovered this when we studied domestic violence. And these guys who were domestically violent just refused to accept any influence at all. I mean, they acted like they were baseball players.

Just whatever their wives asked for, they would bat it back and say no. And when you always say no, when you refuse influence, you become powerless because nobody wants to talk to you when you're like that. There's no give and take. So why would anybody have a conversation with you about what they needed? So that accepting influence is the only way to be influential in a relationship. And that's kind of a surprising finding. It was counterintuitive that if I accept influence from Julie, she's more likely to accept influence from me. If I refuse to accept influence, she's even unlikely to accept influence from me. If I refuse to accept influence,

she's even unlikely to talk to me about an issue. Yeah, think about it this way. If John makes a request and I accept influence from him, then, you know, basically when he makes a request, he's opening up his arms and he's saying, please be there for me. And if I am, I'm saying back to him, I value you. I love you. I want to be there for you. I'm going to do the best I can to be there for you. She in turn, hopefully, is going to feel grateful about that and appreciative, which draws him closer to me. And if he feels closer to me and safer with me to express his own needs, he's also more likely to listen to mine. And that's part of that beautiful reciprocity,

going back and forth, being there for one another, that builds trust and eventually leads to commitment. And that's why power, sharing power in a relationship is really the only thing that works. You know, when you have this dominance hierarchy, one person's in control and the other person is subordinate, it just doesn't work. It doesn't feel good. Eventually, people will withdraw from that kind of interaction, and then everybody gets lonely. And this is kind of gets the beauty of kind of what we can use conflict for overall, which is that, you know, again, we tend to think of fighting in a relationship as this bad thing. But ultimately, if you point it out, it's like a really important moment where you can get closer together. It can kind of lead to something better after the fact.

May I tell you a story, Lori? So when our daughter was about three or four years old, you know, we'd be having dinner and she would be listening to our discussions about these relationships and couples and so on. So one night after dinner, we were all hanging out in the kitchen. John and I were cleaning up. She was there, maybe four years old. And we turned to her and we asked her, honey, what do you think it's like in a house when mommy and daddies don't get along and they fight a lot? And she ended up saying, well, there's no rainbows in the house. And it was like, oh, my God, did you say that? Can I use that in our next book? I mean, it was really the truth. The truth, right? That the delight, the warmth, the glow that you have in a relationship that is cooperative

and egalitarian and caring of one another, that's building trust and feeling safe, is what creates those rainbows. One of my favorite things is when you just kind of walk through the transcripts of couples having these kind of conflicts out. And you kind of like annotate like, oh, they did a good thing here. I thought it was so helpful because it really gave us the sense that like, you know, couples are just trying, they're not going to be perfect. Sometimes you can mess up, but you can sort of come back if you sort of fix things. And I love that in your book, you have a list of like, here's where you can go to if you're having a tough time and you need to kind of fix things too. Yeah. Repair is really as good as it gets in relationships,

really trying to make repairs and accepting your partner's attempts at repair as really positive things and receive the repairs and intention to make things better for both of you. Give me an example of maybe a repair that you might say in a fight. Like if you're in the middle of a conflict and you say something unfortunate, what would a repair look like? John, I'm really sick and tired of the laundry being all over the floor. Why do you always leave all the laundry on the floor? No, honey, I'm starting to feel defensive here. Can you say that in a gentle way?

Well, let's see if I can. I don't think I can. I'm just sick and tired of this stupid, stupid laundry. No, wait a minute. You know, I'm just saying it the wrong way. Great. Okay. The laundry's on the floor.

I really don't like seeing it. Would you please clean it up before we have dinner? Yeah, yeah, I will. Thank you. That was a lot better. You're welcome. Okay. One of the best repairs in the whole wide world is when you start feeling criticized or put down,

just say, I'm feeling defensive. Could you say that another way? Instead of going defensive, right? Just say, I'm feeling defensive. And it's a great one. I think you both are like the Jedi of understanding relationships and how we can sort of build empathy in them. I'm just curious, you know, do you ever take this on the road? You know, I know you watch so many couples in the lab, but are you ever just out at a restaurant or hanging out in the grocery store watching these couple and family dynamics? And do you ever intervene?

100% of the time. And no, we don't intervene. I've got an appliance, and they're not asking us to intervene. So why would we do that? That's intrusive. It's mortifying for them. So the last thing I want to do is shame somebody for how they're acting in a restaurant. So we'll just sit back and watch, and I'll usually feel sad if they're having a hard time. There is only one situation,

typically, where I might intervene just a little bit. And that is in a grocery store. We've all seen it. When a child is having a temper tantrum, the mother may have, you know, a baby in the grocery cart along with this child who's having the temper tantrum. And you can see she's turning red. She's feeling mortified. She's feeling embarrassed, horrified, and getting more and more stressed. Her voice is getting louder. I may go over to her and I may say to her, boy, this is a hard day for you, isn't it? This is really tough, God. It's so hard when your kid starts screaming in a grocery store. Now notice, I'm not criticizing her, which many people might want to do if she's yelling at her kid. I'm trying to use empathy to help her not feel so alone. That's the key to reducing somebody's stress, helping them not feel so alone with what they're going through by using empathy and validation. Validation meaning, yeah, it makes sense to me that you're feeling that. Yeah. And

sure enough, that's what happens. Her voice drops down. She makes contact, you know, eye contact with me. I'm smiling at her. We share some warmth and then her voice gets quieter. It's a very simple little intervention. Otherwise, we sit back and watch and predict, you know, what's going to happen to these couples in a restaurant with their phones, not looking at each other six years down the road. And that can be fun too. You should try it. And that can be fun too. You should try. That's all we have from our interview with the Gottmans.

But we're not done with the topic of love just yet. So far, we've learned from the masters of relationships and the champions of complaining. But in our next episode, we'll examine what we can learn about thriving as a couple from super communicators. What we know about these people is that they are not super charismatic. They are not people who are born with this.

Oftentimes exactly the opposite. They're folks who if you ask them, they say, my parents got divorced and I had to become the peacemaker between them. They're people who had to think just a little bit more about how communication works. And it's that thinking about it just half an inch deeper that makes us into super communicators.

But it's skills that anyone can learn. And if anyone learns them, anyone can connect with other people. All that in our next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.