In doing couples coaching, I draw heavily on the three decades of research by John Gottman, Robert Levenson and colleagues at the Gottman Institute. This group has contributed much to our understanding of healthy relationships through their research with couples. Gottman describes couples as “masters” or “disasters” of relationships. As you would guess, “the masters of relationships” are those couples who remain stable and relatively happy over time. When problems arise, they handle them in ways that maintain relationship health. Gottman studied these couples over the years to learn what works in relationships that go the distance. The principles he discovered can be used as a road map for all couples.

So when Katie and Tim asked for help to better handle marital conflict, I decided to use Gottman’s “Sound Relationship House,” (a seven-level conceptualization of how to build a strong marriage foundation) in order to help them move forward. Both Katie and Tim felt that when conflict escalated, each became tense and couldn’t think clearly.  What they described was difficulty regulating their emotions during conflict situations.

We began  by discussing the first three levels of the Sound Relationship House. The couple described a strong friendship that existed before they married and felt this was still the case (Level 1). Both evidenced a great deal of fondness and admiration for each other (Level 2). And even though they felt temporarily stuck, they turned toward each other to work through their problems rather than turning away (Level 3).

Level 4 of the Sound Relationship House addresses a concept called sentiment override. Sentiment override has to do with the overall feeling you have toward your spouse. It involves how a person perceives a negative comment. Overall, this couple had a positive feeling or sentiment for each other. This is important because it helps to de-escalate negative emotions during conflict.This couple was getting stuck in their inability to stay calm when conflict escalated. Thus the focus was to teach the couple how to recognize when one, the other, or both felt emotionally charged during conflict.

To begin, I presented the Gottman research on gender differences of physiological arousal during conflict. Men and women respond differently. Men tend to remain vigilant before and during conflict, and rehearse distress-maintaining thoughts. Women tend to use self-soothing and rehearse relationship-enhancing thoughts. This doesn’t mean women are better than men, but that women usually need to wait to pursue an issue until men are less physically aroused. In some cases, women are equally aroused. Point is,  problems are best solved when both partners calm down.

Due to gender differences in physiology, women can calm themselves easier than men. However, both partners can help each other. Thus our goal became very specific. It was to learn to regulate emotions during conflict. When emotions escalated, the couple would focus on calming the arousal.

The first step was to help each other recognize his and her physiological arousal levels. Each was taught to take a heart rate during a conflict situation. A heart rate above 95 beats per minute meant he or she was getting too much arousal and needed a break. A 20-minute break, accompanied by thoughts and actions of relaxation, was to be instituted in order to slow down arousal before re-engaging. Basically, I was teaching Katie and Tim how to take a grown up time-out. According to Gottman, learning to stop the arousal and self-soothe, especially in the male, is one of the best predictors of marital outcome.

Once the couple could identify the need for time-out by tuning in to their physical bodies and checking their heart rate, each was asked to practice self-soothing. This included breathing exercises, muscle relaxation and focusing on a soothing image such as a beach or mountain top. Once a number of soothing exercises were learned and practiced, the couple was to re-engage in the conflict, again checking their heart rate. This easy skill was helpful to create  awareness of physiological arousal, attending to the moment, and instituting a pause or time-out in order to regulate emotional arousal. Once the couple was able to accomplish this, they were able to move forward to discuss their differences and conflict issues.

The importance of  couples learning skills to self-sooth cannot be overstated as the Gottman research shows.  Most conflict is not solvable. So working with couples to resolve conflict misses the mark. The better approach is to help couples regulate affect during conflict so that they can continue to work on perpetual problems and yet stay together in happy unions.