If you’ve never heard this name, he’s good folks; he contributed a lot to understanding how couples can get along better.But the reality of life is that we build on the greats that came before us and then add some.
That’s what Dr. Richard C. Schwartz did.
Gottman
John Gottman has literally tens of thousands of hours of tapes of thousands of couples interacting. Couples would volunteer to spend time in a suite fitted with cameras in every room except the bedroom and bathroom. Then after the weekend, each second of interaction would be coded by his research team.
He got some amazing results.
He could predict with 90 to 95% accuracy which couples, if left unhelpd by therapy, would end up divorcing.
For example, if one person never would validate or support the other person during an encounter, you could bet the marriage would go south. In fact, one or two nicey-nices would not be enough: Couples need five positives for one negative to keep a marriage going.
He also found that contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling, and criticism are deathly marriage-killers.
On the other hand, if a couple is having differences and one person makes a “bid” for friendship, it will go a long way to soothe ruffled feathers. Gottman calls these “repair attempts.”
So if you want to know how marriages should be or how they shouldn’t be, then he’s the person to check out. He knows what will doom a marriage.
But there’s a huge problem here: Just knowing what works doesn’t help when it’s not working.
I’ve talked to hundreds of people who would go away for “marriage weekends” and learn what I’ve just given you – and more – only to have everything crumble in a few short weeks.
Why couldn’t they sustain the changes in behavior?
Key word in that sentence: behavior.
Yes, behavior drives us crazy, but behavior is controlled by our emotions.
And nowhere in his entire body of research does Gottman deal with emotions. How do we take leadership over them? What will ensure success, permanently? Gottman is silent, there.
Yet, the emotions drive the behavior, so all the conclusions of how we should behave will be meaningless if we don’t understand – and heal – the hurt emotions that underlie everything.
As an example, recently I noticed a pattern in one of my couples. The husband would be mean and meaner, and the wife, thinking she was not escalating a fight, would be upbeat and pleasant, as if made of plexiglass and all the rudeness would bounce off of her.
What did that do?
What I noticed as I went over our work together is that her “lightening up the situation” made things worse and worse.
Why?
I realize he was communicating his answer threaded into his aggressive words: He didn’t feel heard. He didn’t feel understood.
And what does a child do when they don’t feel heard? – Why, of course, they yell louder.
Our anger and aggression so often hides and protects our vulnerable, hurt parts of ourselves. And that’s just what this husband did.
“So what should I do?” the wife asked me. “Tell him,” I said, “that you see he is hurt. He needs to communicate that to you directly rather than angrily.” But of course, he needs the healing for those hurt feelings. They surely go way back to before the marriage.
In this case, the wife can only respond that way if she has collected herself and doesn’t feel frightened and triggered by his anger.
The husband is 100% NOT open to hearing how he has to treat her. He is in too much pain and feeling too defensive. He doesn’t even realize he is being mean; he thinks he’s just “expressing himself.”
Note that “defensiveness” is one of the marriage-doomers that Gottman noted, but he never once gives a solution for getting past defensiveness – or the other “3 horsemen” either.
Schwartz
And that’s where Dr Schwartz’s IFS protocol comes in (Internal Family Systems).
No need to focus on behavior in IFS. The behavior follows naturally and without giving it much thought because once you’re healed you behave better.
So how does the healing take place?
Schwartz explains that when we were kids, we coped as best we could and our emotions got locked into “parts” of us that jump up to protect us when we’re triggered.
“Parts” are more than coping mechanisms. They are steady friends that have their own personalities right inside of us.
So, to take the case of the husband in the above scenario, he has an aggressive part that is triggered by not feeling heard and understood. This aggressive part takes over him and feels like it’s him.
But it’s not.
Because the real him is rational and kindly, sensitive and aware of others.
Some people have said to me over the years, “My spouse is like Jekyll and Hyde.” And that sums up nicely what Schwartz means by parts. We all have parts that respond automatically when we’re triggered, so it’s a pretty normal thing.
And the man with the Jekyll and Hyde sides of him was normal, too.
Now, here is the beautiful, amazing piece of this whole framework: The aggressive parts (or angry part, victim part, stonewalling part, critical part, etc.) are protecting the sad, misunderstood, abandoned, mistreated, abused, lonely, misjudged parts of us. And those are the parts that need the healing.
To do that, we rely on the incredible power of the imagination.
It turns out that when we remember something and alter that memory, it feels as if the altered memory was the real event.
Our brains apparently don’t bother distinguishing actual events from imagined ones.
This is why the ancient practice of hypnosis still works today. This is why many alternative healing practices work. This is why the placebo effect works.
It’s not that the practice “did” something. It’s that our minds believed it, felt it, imagined it, or bought into it somehow. And then our feelings actually DO change.
So Schwartz has a toolbox of protocols to heal the hurt parts of us. And they actually transform our feelings and reactions. Once the hurt parts are liberated from their pain, the protectors soften and become more cooperative.
Schwartz on Gottman
That is why, in going over some points made by Gottman, Schwartz says,
“Gottman prescribes a series of behavior and cognitive exercises that target each problematic aspect of the relationship. . . While I believe that such an approach can help couples become more aware of their toxic interactions and more focused on changing important patterns, it leaves their exiles [the hurt parts] unhealed. When exiles remain unhealed, it takes constant vigilance and energy to change patterns because each of you remains highly vulnerable and easily triggered. When exiles are healed, protectors naturally relax.”
So which do you want –
1. to “understand” what is going wrongOr
2. to heal what needs healing inside of you
