Humainologie creative dialogue theme for February and topic for our next team practice

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

-Mahatma Gandhi

In response to the pandemic, our dialogue team is moving toward a more closely-knit and mutually supportive community, keeping in mind the joy of movement itself. Calgary can become a moveable feast for our time. It is already happening.

In sharp contrast, what we are trying to move away from is humorously illustrated in this ten-minute animated video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfK79Xblpus

At team practice this week, we connected the dots of two themes, and confirmed Love and Service to Others as our theme for February. I’ll suggest we might keep that theme for both February and March. There is so much to explore there. We can decide on whether to make it a two-month exploration at our team practice near the end of February.

Imam Fayaz Tilly shared his wisdom on where to find happiness, starting with “Be the first to forgive,” and afterwards I realized how often we can take offense even at very trivial things, and that our forgiveness is something to keep practicing every day.

Mary-Ann suggested that one evening we might light a fire at one of the community fire pits available in Calgary parks. Leila seemed interested in taking the lead for this initiative, raising the very interesting possibility of singing around the fire. Imagine that!

Next Wednesday February 3, Erica Amery will facilitate a session on intercultural communication. I will do my best to send you a synopsis of a related book when I send out the Zoom link. Ever mindful of our theme for February (and maybe for March as well), we can steadily enhance our skills for creative healing in our interactions with others. A synopsis you’ve seen previously, on how to make marital relationships work, is apropos and I’ll append it below.

Keep on moving!

Arthur

Book: The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country’s Foremost Relationship Expert (John Gottman and Nan Silver; 1999, 2015)

I think this book is useful for improving any type of relationship – whether for strangers or for old friends, for teachers with their students, for parents with their children, whatever. Marital relationships tend to be the most complex and challenging. This book is packed with details on how to make marriage successful, and so I would emphasize (as always) not to rely just on this synopsis. Get the book and start practicing. (I may eventually do a synopsis of one or more individual chapters, but this one will provide a glimpse of the book.)

John Gottman, Ph.D., is director of the Gottman Institute and a professor of psychology at the University of Washington; Nan Silver is a writer and editor. For the past forty years, Gottman has studied marriages that succeed long-term, comparing them with marriages that end in divorce. The couples who agree to participate in the studies are asked to spend a few days in the “Seattle Love Lab” and to discuss issues important to them, often issues that they find contentious. Their heart rates, adrenaline levels, and other parameters are monitored during the studies.

The studies have provided the basis for workshops that reliably enhance marital relationships; but the same studies have also enabled Gottman to predict with about 90% accuracy whether a couple will divorce. A marriage approaching apocalypse is characterized by the arrival of one or more of the “four horsemen.” The first horseman is criticism, which is quite different from a complaint. The second horseman is contempt. The third is defensiveness. On the defensive, the spouse subjected to criticism and contempt is losing capacity to contribute to a way out. The fourth horseman is stonewalling. Communication from one of the partners comes to an end.

So what are the seven principles for success in marriage?

Principle 1 is “Enhance Your Love Maps.” Gottman uses the term “love map” for what you know of “all the relevant information about your partner’s life.” This means empathy: his or her interests, emotions and vulnerabilities, dreams, fondest memories, deepest regrets, and so on. The birth of a couple’s first baby is “one of the major causes of marital dissatisfaction and divorce,” and 67% of couples in one of their studies underwent a precipitous fall in marital satisfaction after the birth of their first child. The other 33% did not experience that setback and about half of them experienced an improvement in their marriages. A distinguishing characteristic of the 33% was that those couples had detailed love maps from the time they were first married. “Because husband and wife were already in the habit of keeping up to date and were intently aware of what each other was feeling and thinking, they weren’t thrown off course [by the experience].” Gottman provides a questionnaire to determine how rich or impoverished your love map of your partner is; and then a series of exercises to help you enhance your love-maps and your awareness of this principle.

Principle 2: “Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration.” The authors cite a case of a workaholic pediatrician, Rory, who usually slept at the hospital and had a surprisingly sparse “love map” for his wife, Lisa. One Christmas day, she decided to surprise him by bringing their children for a Christmas picnic at the hospital. Rory became angry, she soon began going out in the evenings without him, and he eventually asked her for a divorce. Surprisingly, the marriage survived after marital counseling. They had agreed to be taped for a TV interview in Gottman’s lab. The interviewer asked them to share their memories of when they had first dated. Rory became openly enthusiastic, recalling how fond he was of Lisa, yet thinking that it would take time and effort to make it work. He even had a plan. Lisa was pleasantly surprised. They were holding hands during the interview. Not long after the interview, Rory rearranged his schedule and trained a resident to take over much of the work he’d been doing himself. He began to eat dinner every night with Lisa and the children, they began going out together in the evenings. They had revisited their memories of fondness and admiration, and then rebuilt their marriage following the blueprint of those memories. This chapter in the book has a “Fondness and Admiration Questionnaire” and four exercises, including “a seven-week course in fondness and admiration.”

Principle 3: Turn Toward Each Other Instead of Away.” Couples who tend to spend time together, tend to remain happy. One sign that helps predict divorce is a tendency of the couple to avoid interaction. Even “small moments of connection” (eye contact with smiles, or “Let’s go for a walk this evening” or whatever) are relatively rare in the “Love Lab” tapes of couples who later divorce. Two obstacles to turning toward each other are 1) “’missing’ a bid because it’s wrapped in anger or other negative emotion” and 2) being distracted by the Internet and “devices” that take the attention away from the partner. Again, this chapter of the book provides a series of exercises to use in developing that “turning toward” pattern of behaviour.

Principle 4: “Let Your Partner Influence You.” “Jeremy has made his wife a partner in his decision making. He respects and honors his wife and her opinions and feelings.” Gottman gives the example of Jeremy’s decision on whether to buy a particular car, a process in which his wife’s advice to have the car inspected saved him costly repairs he would have had to make had he made the purchase. “Statistically speaking, when a man is not willing to share power with his partner, there is an 81 percent chance that his marriage will self-destruct.” Wives often get angry with their husbands but in their decision-making are much less inclined to dismiss their husbands’ opinions and feelings. The husband who fails to respect his wife’s opinions tends to do so because he “fears any further loss of power. And because he will not accept influence, he will not have very much influence. The consequence is that no one will much care about him while he lives nor mourn him when he dies.” If you would like to escape that trap, exercises that can help are in this chapter.

Principle 5: “Solve Your Solvable Problems.” Even when a couple have respect for each other, they can get lost in discussing an issue on which they disagree; it can even descend into a shouting match. A popular approach to conflict resolution is “to attempt to put yourself in your partner’s shoes, while listening intently to what he or she says, and then to communicate, with empathy, that you see the dilemma from his or her perspective.” However, based on studies of couples who did not quite follow those rules but were able to resolve their conflicts, Gottman came up with five steps: 1) Soften your start up. (Open your discussion of the issue with language that makes it easy for the other person to respond positively.) 2) Learn to make and receive repair attempts. 3) Soothe yourself and each other. 4) Compromise. 5) Process any grievances so that they don’t linger. The chapter on Principle 5 includes an explanation for each step, and exercises for practice; and is followed by a separate chapter, “Coping with Typical Solvable Problems.”

Principle 6. “Overcome Gridlock.” Gridlock refers to a situation in which a “dream” that means a lot to one partner is not being respected by the other. Here are four signs of gridlock: 1) The same argument comes up over and over with no resolution; 2) Neither partner can discuss the issue in a relaxed way; 3) The issue is becoming more and more divisive as time passes; and 4) “Compromise seems impossible because it would mean…giving up on something [essential] to your beliefs, values, or sense of self.” There can be gridlock over an issue that would seem trivial to an outsider, usually because the trivial issue is connected with something deeper that is more obviously at the core of one or both partners’ sense of self. The chapter provides a 4-step approach to overcoming gridlock: Step 1) Explore the dream(s). Step 2) Soothe. Step 3) Reach a temporary compromise (the two-circle method). Step 4) Say “Thank you.”

Principle 7: “Create shared meaning.” To create shared meaning is to build an “inner life together,” for example by developing a shared joy of cooking and then preparing meals together. Gottman names “four pillars of shared meaning,” namely rituals of connection (even something as simple as eating dinner together regularly); support for each other’s roles (expectations of yourself and your spouse are in accord, one with the other); shared goals (perhaps the goal of excellent parenting so that your children will flourish); and shared values and symbols.

Relationships are a domain of life in which mastery will pay incalculable rewards. Reading the book and practicing its principles may well be worth your time.