Are you wondering how to repair your relationship? Feeling a bit frustrated by all of the information online and all of the different how-to articles?

I understand and assure you, you're not alone. It is confusing!

In fact, it was confusing for a lot of therapists too, until the amazing John Gottman, PhD and his team at the Seattle Love Lab started to scientifically study couples in happy (and some not-so-happy) marriages.

What Gottman and his team found is that we really need to focus on building our relationship up in positive ways BEFORE starting to tackle our problems.

This seems counter-intuitive to most folks. People tend to what to go right to the heart of the matter and dive head first into dealing with their hardest issues.

The problem with that approach is that dealing with issues and problems is very painful.

If there's been no friendship or kindness in your relationship for a while, there's probably not enough "cushion" of good will or good feelings to allow you to successfully discuss your problems with your spouse.

You can think of it like this: your relationship is essentially a checking account. Certain activities add money to your account, other activities drain money from your account.

Fighting and working on a problem area is expensive, it drains money from your account fast!

So before we start "spending" money on expensive activities, we need to build your bank account up first. We build your bank account up by making lots of positive, loving, supportive "deposits."

With this idea in mind, take a closer look at the image above and when you're ready to start working on your relationship, start at step 1 and work your way up to step 7.

Proceeding in this order will ensure that you have a nice cushion of positivity as you start to fix your relationship.

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