The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples
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15
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An eminent therapist explains what makes couples compatible and how to sustain a happy marriage. For the past thirty-five years, John Gottman’s research has been internationally recognized for its unprecedented ability to precisely measure interactive processes in couples and to predict the long-term success or failure of relationships. In this groundbreaking book, he presents a new approach to understanding and changing couples: a fundamental social skill called “emotional attunement,” which describes a couple’s ability to fully process and move on from negative emotional events, ultimately creating a stronger relationship. Gottman draws from this longitudinal research and theory to show how emotional attunement can downregulate negative affect, help couples focus on positive traits and memories, and even help prevent domestic violence. He offers a detailed intervention devised to cultivate attunement, thereby helping couples connect, respect, and show affection. Emotional attunement is extended to tackle the subjects of flooding, the story we tell ourselves about our relationship, conflict, personality, changing relationships, and gender. Gottman also explains how to create emotional attunement when it is missing, to lay a foundation that will carry the relationship through difficult times. Gottman encourages couples to cultivate attunement through awareness, tolerance, understanding, non-defensive listening, and empathy. These qualities, he argues, inspire confidence in couples, and the sense that despite the inevitable struggles, the relationship is enduring and resilient. This book, an essential follow-up to his 1999 The Marriage Clinic, offers therapists, students, and researchers detailed intervention for working with couples, and offers couples a roadmap to a stronger future together.
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A lot of ground is covered in this book about relationships. A good side of the book is that the author explains most of the terms and phenomena that is referenced here, from game theory to Zeigarnik effect, and those descriptions are apt and accurate. Other than those, there are a lot of terminology introduced by the author, which are again well explained.
The book breaks down for me at two points, stretching external references beyond their descriptive power, and using anecdotes and subjective observations (or pure practice based evidence) as a basis for conclusions. Some examples of stretching referenced effects is Zeigarnik effect, which is a relatively obscure and barely scientific idea on its own which can be narrowly attributed to short time horizons (hours), but the author uses it to explain certain tension build ups in spans of months and years between couples, it just doesn't hold. And then we move to practice based evidence, which without an accompanying randomised controlled trial or such rigorous process is not scientific: adds up to just some nice anecdotes, but not beyond that.
Don't get me wrong, a lot of explanation and advice about trust and betrayal checks out with common sense, I just wouldn't call it “science of trust” without some rigor.
