Couples Need More Than Tools: A Couples Therapist’s Beef With the Gottman Method
December 19, 2023
The Gottman Method appeals to couples’ fantasies that every relationship can be repaired with the right tools
With its catchy phrases (“Improve your relationship in 30 days!”) and easy-to-digest concepts (“Restore your love!” “Learn to manage conflict!”), the Gottman Method appeals to both patients and therapists alike. Gottman promotes itself as a type of couples therapy “based on research,” the foundation of which is a coding and categorizing of interactions researchers have observed between partners. The therapy approach they offer is designed to change behavior that researchers found is correlated with breakups. It uses skills and behavioral interventions to tackle problems between partners.
To be clear, I spend many hours a week thinking and talking with couples therapy patients about how to engage in conflict in healthier and kinder ways. However, the Gottman Method capitalizes on couples’ fantasies that every relationship can be repaired with the right tools. This simply isn’t true.
The Gottman Method skips the first biggest question of couples therapy: Does this relationship actually work?
Couples usually come to therapy in distress, feeling like their relationship is on the line (or trying to avert that becoming the case). This creates a ripe opportunity to engage with the scariest—but most important—question of all: Does this relationship actually work? This question needs to be looked at before any repair can be done.
With emphasis on strengthening bonds and solving problems, the Gottman Method skips the steps of assessing whether a relationship is actually worth trying to save. This is one of couples therapy's first and most essential tasks—to learn enough about the relationship, yourself, and your partner to evaluate whether your relationship is viable.
When couples therapy acts to shore up a relationship that isn’t viable or is causing active injury to one or both partners, that therapy is doing a harm. By skipping the question of whether or not the relationship is fundamentally workable, we’re making an assumption that it is and potentially helping patients tolerate something they should not be able to tolerate. For some couples, the healthiest course of action is to break up.
Most couples don’t lack skills: They’re grappling with complicated emotional pain
Everyone has things to learn about how to show up in relationships. In my experience, though, the vast majority of patients I see in couples therapy aren’t struggling with a skill deficit. They’re grappling with complicated pain and anger, fear of losing the relationship, and resentment about feeling trapped and stagnated. These aren’t issues that can be unwound and solved in a two-day workshop. They need to be investigated and fully felt.
Offering couples skills and techniques instead of helping them understand and feel deeply is teaching them to “act as if” rather than being firmly rooted in the reality of their experience. For instance, teaching a couple to focus on their gratitude in moments of anger is an explicit invitation to deny their actual feelings and replace them with feelings that are more palatable and “positive.” It’s teaching partners to lie to each other and themselves.
Couples therapy can be agonizingly hard: Making it seem easier doesn’t honor the complexity of relationships
We love making hard things seem easier. This is especially the case in deflecting from how intimidating and overwhelming the issues that often come up in couples therapy are. Couples therapy requires a strong stomach and a strong backbone for everyone involved. It is messy, sometimes agonizingly hard and exposing. That’s the point. Sometimes when all the cards have been laid on the table, real growth can begin. And other times, the tough decision needs to be made to let go of a relationship. Both possibilities need to be fully welcomed into couples therapy in order to do the work that honors the significance, impact, and complexity of human relationships.
