The 3 Phases of Love by Dr John Gottman
What do you do if you love your partner, but you are no longer in love with your partner? Does the feeling of love transform or change over time?
Dr John Gottman explains the three natural phases of love. While being in love is a very complex experience, his research has identified choice points when love may either progress to a deeper place, or deteriorate.
The Four Horsemen: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness and Stonewalling by Dr John Gottman
Dr John Gottman can listen to a couple for 5 minutes and determine, with 91% accuracy, whether they’ll divorce. How can he tell who will split up? There are a number of indicators but at the core of Gottman’s research are ” The Four Horsemen.” These are the four things that indicate a marriage apocalypse is on its way: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness and Stonewalling.
The Four Horsemen: The Antidote by Dr John Gottman
Research shows that it’s not the appearance of conflict, but rather how it’s managed that predicts the success or failure of a relationship. Relationship conflict is natural and has functional, positive aspects that provide opportunities for growth and understanding. There are problems that you just won’t solve due to personality differences, your relationship will succeed if you can learn to manage those problems in a healthy way.
A Matter of Choice by Terry Real
In our close relationships, the laws of nature that threaten to grind our love into powder are the multigenerational legacies that come to us, unbidden, in those moments when we’re least responsible and our actions are most automatic. The crux of the difficulties couples experience is the playing out, in ways large and small, of those unresolved feelings of childhood: pain, rawness, fright, anger.
How Compatible Are You With Your Significant Other by Dr Elliot D. Cohen
Are you in or contemplating a serious relationship but wondering whether you are really compatible? Based on 6 functional compatibility areas such as basic values, intellectual, shared interests, temperaments, relatedness, attractedness, this article provides a way that will help you to assess how compatible you are with your partner.
How Good Are You At Loving by Dr Elliot D. Cohen
Love is not merely a feeling. It is an activity that involves skill-building. You can work at cultivating your love for another. You can get better (or worse) at loving someone. It is also possible to rank how well you are doing at loving someone. This article provides a “love inventory” that will help you to determine just how good you (or your significant others) really are at loving.
10 Surprising Facts About Rejection by Guy Winch
As far as the brain is concerned, a broken heart may not be so different from a broken arm. fMRI studies show that the same areas of the brain become activated when we experience rejection as when we experience physical pain. This is why rejection hurts so much (neurologically speaking). To treat the emotional pain rejection elicits and to prevent the psychological, emotional, cognitive, and relationship fallout that occur in its aftermath, we must address each of our psychological wounds (i.e., soothe our emotional pain, reduce our anger and aggression, protect our self-esteem, and stabilize our need to belong).
Where Does Love Goes Wrong by Dr Sue Johnson
Our loved one is our shelter in life. When this person is unavailable and unresponsive we are assailed by a tsunami of emotions – sadness, anger, hurt and above all, fear. There are 3 main Demon Dialogues that trap couples in no-solution emotional starvation and insecurity.
Breaking the Pursue-Withdraw Pattern: An Interview with Dr Scott Woolley
The pursue-withdraw pattern is an extremely common cause of divorce or break up. If left unresolved, it will continue into a second marriage and subsequent intimate relationships. How do couples fall into a pursue-withdraw pattern, and why are men usually the ones that withdraw? How can couples break this destructive pattern for good?
How to Have a Fight Free Relationship by Dr Harville Hendrix & Dr Hellen Lakelly Hunt
Conflict in intimate relationship is not only normal, but inevitable and even valuable. While conflict might make you uncomfortable, it can also invite you to reflect on your situation from a new perspective. You have a choice. You can act in ways that keep the conflict going. Or, you can turn the conflict into creative tension, which gives birth to new insights and talents. In fact, conflict is growth trying to happen.
Love Busters by Dr Willard F. Harley
The love you and your partner have for each other is directly affected by almost all of your behavior. Unless you protect each other from your destructive instincts and habits, you will hurt each other so much that eventually your Love Bank accounts will be deep into the red — you will hate each other.
The 5 Love Languages by Dr Gary Chapman
Many marriages fail not because couples don’t put in the effort, but because they are expressing their love in the “wrong” ways. When you learn to understand and speak your spouse’s love language, you will be able to effectively express your love and truly feel loved in return.
Relationship Tips for the Nine Types by Peter O’Hanrahan
This article provides specific tips to build better relationship with each Enneagram types by not taking their styles personally, building rapport by appreciating their needs, avoiding pressing their buttons, seeing from their perspectives, handling conflict effectively and supporting their growth.
The 45 Combinations of Relationships by David Daniels M.D.
The 45 possible combinations of Enneagram types in relationship with each other. These combinations allow us to see deeply within our own character structure and assist us in developing healthy relationships with our partner. These combinations can help us gain insight and a deeper sense of ourselves and others, which leads to compassion. By getting grounded, receptive, and non-judging, we enhance our ability to see through others’ eyes and experience others’ emotional life and world view.
Arguments happen, and often enough we say the wrong thing, or do the wrong thing, and end up hurting one another. One of the most important tools for building a healthy relationship is knowing how to process a fight in a way that helps you learn from it.
The Ziegarnik Effect by The Gottman Institute
One of the most significant phenomena Dr. Gottman focuses on in the world of trust is called the Ziegarnik Effect. He has found that a theory discovered in 1922 by a bright young psychology student named Bluma Zeigarnik has enormous capacity to destroy human relationships.
The Ziegarnik Effect, in simple terms, is the propensity of human beings to remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. In the world of trust, Dr. Gottman has found that it translates as follows: unprocessed negative events between partners have an enormously destructive power – through an ongoing erosion of trust, they gradually screw-up and ultimately destroy our most intimate relationships.
Guidebook for Aftermath of a Fight or Regrettable Incident by The Gottman Institute
This guidebook is for “processing” past fights, regrettable incidents, or past emotional injuries. “Processing” means that you can talk about the incident without getting back into it again. It needs to be a conversation – as if you were both sitting in the balcony of a theatre looking down on the stage where the action occurred. This requires calm and some emotional distance from the incident.
6 Hours a Week to a Better Relationship by The Gottman Institute
Compare to unhappy couples, happy couples devote an extra six hours per week to their relationship. How these couples split up these six hours depended on their focus and areas of improvement, but there are some clear patterns in their daily partings and reunions, showing appreciation, admiration and affection, and having weekly date-night and discussion on areas of concerns.
The Gottman Method for Healthy Relationships by Dr. John Gottman
Research shows that to make a relationship last, couples must become better friends, learn to manage conflict, and create ways to support each other’s hopes for the future. Drs. John and Julie Gottman have shown how couples can accomplish this by paying attention to what they call the Sound Relationship House, or the nine components of healthy relationships.
Building a Great Sex Life is Not Rocket Science by Dr. John Gottman
Dr. John Gottman identified 13 things all couples do who have an amazing sex life based on his own research studies on more than 3,000 couples over four decades, and the Normal Bar study, an online study with 70,000 people in 24 countries about what might be different about couples who said that they had a great sex life, compared to couples who said that they had a bad sex life.