Transcription
[Music] Welcome back everybody. As we all know, there are many things that can put stress on a marriage or a relationship. The experts at the Gottman Institute have pinpointed four signs of real trouble and the best ways to turn things around. Here with some insight, plus a special offer, please help me welcome Dr. Julie Gottman. It's good to meet you. I've heard so much about you over the years and we were just discussing how much Dr. Gottman loves her work because you know helping to keep a family together has effects for the extended family for kids for everybody when a marriage is intact.
That's exactly right. Tell me about the Gottman Institute. What do you guys do? Sure. Well, at the Gottman Institute, we based our work on 40 years of research that my husband Dr. John Gottman and I conducted over time with over 3,000 couples all over the world and we predicted whether couples would stay together or divorce with videotape of hundth of a second by hundth of a second interactions and what they were doing as well as what was going on inside their bodies physiologically. And we found these incredible predictors that told us in about 15 minutes whether couples would stay together or split up 5 years down the road.
You're kidding. No, that's Wow. Okay, that's right. Well, let's talk about these four signs. Now, the first one is criticism. And in 29 years of marriage, I of course have never criticized my husband. So, I don't really understand this one, but let's discuss it. Okay. So what criticism means is you have a problem in your relationship, but rather than just bringing up the problem neutrally, you bring it up by criticizing your partner, putting down something about their personality. Also saying things like, "You always are lazy. You never empty the dishwasher." Things like that are ways of putting down your partner and locating the problem squarely in the body of the partner. That's a problem.
Defensiveness. What are you going to do if you hear that from your partner? Well, with defensiveness, what you do, of course, is shield yourself from it by either counterattacking, pointing out something, well, you don't pay the bills, or whining like, I do, too. Oh, I do too. Empty the dishwasher. Those are problems that predict marital demise down the road. Let's talk about three and four together because I think they have something to do with one another. Contempt and stonewalling. Okay. So, what contempt is, it's similar to criticism, but contempt is doing criticism from a position of moral superiority. It's also uh sarcasm, mockery. Oh, you're so angry. You know, that's contempt. Really putting down your partner with a snide look of disgust. Yeah. Stonewalling occurs when people feel so attacked interpersonally that their physiology goes way way up. Their heart rates go way up. They can't think straight. They go into fight or flight and they shut down. The relationship is in trouble.
So, you guys have a workshop called the art and science of love. How does it help marriages get back on track? What we do, it's a 2-day weekend workshop. And at this workshop, we give couples specific tools to use to counteract all of those four predictors of marital demise. We also help build romance. We help build passion in the relationship. We give people specific, easy to use tools that really enhance their relationship and strengthen it.
Well, the proof of course is always in the pudding. So, Shantel and Paul are here. Um, they've been through the workshop. How did this work for you guys? Well, um, at least for me, I think, um, it was a tuneup. I like this body language, by the way. That looks good. It was a tuneup for our relationship. I think that, uh, we've been together for a very long time. Um, 21 years. And, um, you know, there's certain things that get in the way and it's sometimes hard to communicate that. And I think what the workshop helped us to do is to build tools to be able to kind of give our relationship a oil change of sorts, right? You agree? Um, you know, in our line of work, we also work with families and with children and we're able to use the tactics that we learned in the workshop um with those families. It's it's huge when you're understanding why you're mad as opposed to just attacking each other. That's a wonderful. That's a wonderful point because these are skills not only I'm so happy for you by the way. You guys look happy and that's a good solid marriage going there. But these are skills that help you in in the rest of your life as well.
And you have this workshop in a DVD set. So we can use this actually at home if we can't make it to the workshop. Exactly. So we put all the tools in a box with DVDs. So people didn't have to risk feeling, no, a little bit too exposed. Maybe they could do it in their own living room in front of their own TV and go through everything all that they get in the workshop with privacy and time to be able to really absorb what they're learning. Right. What a wonderful thing. And the the even better thing is that there is a great deal on this right now. That's right. Uh and what what a good investment what a better investment than the foundation of your life. Dr. Gottman, thank you so much. the home.