Your Inbox Intensive

Turning towards

You hear a knock on the door. You open it and find your dearest friend making a surprise visit. Do you offer a “gleam beam”? Do you enthusiastically welcome them in? Does the fact that they gave you no notice or you had to stop a project you were working on fade in importance?

Now imagine someone you dislike is behind that door. What are your emotional reactions?  Notice how all your resentments at the disturbance and lack of notice come to the fore.

Every day we decide whether to welcome intrusions or feel hostile toward them when it comes to our intimate partners. Imagine that you’re driving and your partner notices an interesting landscape detail and points it out.

You will either welcome it (“That is cool!”) or snarl at the disruption. (“Can’t you see I’m driving! I can’t take my eyes off the road to look at every little thing!”)

Gottman calls your partner’s efforts to engage you “bids for attention” and your response to these bids will lead over time to either an emotionally satisfying marriage or a lonely one.

You have three choices with every attempt your partner makes to engage you:

• Say nothing and Gottman refers to it as “turning away.”

• Snarl angrily and Gottman calls that “turning against.”

• Comment positively and Gottman calls that “turning toward.”

Not every effort to engage your partner is likely to be successful. Sometimes your spouse won’t even realize you were trying to connect.  Or maybe they were too engrossed in what they were doing or too stressed to respond.

But when most bids for connection are “turning toward” bids, you’re more likely to report feeling happy and satisfied in your relationship. When it becomes impossible to get a friendly smile when you walk into a room or make a casual comment, these failed bids, whether turning away or turning against, lead to much bigger problems.

You may notice how your disappointments and resentments are underlying your bad attitudes toward your partner’s efforts to engage you. Go back to Module Two and focus on making effective complaints using Soften Start-ups. 

You may also notice how little energy you have to either respond to your partner’s efforts or to offer spontaneous efforts on your own. This is a negative downward spiral you’ll have to break together. The less you respond to each other, the lonelier and more disconnected. The more disconnected, the less likely you are to respond to each other’s efforts to connect.

Learning how to manage the inevitable “failed bids” is an important skill to master. If you haven’t focused on this particular skill during your intensive, this may be the time to perfect it.