Gottman Couples Therapy

Kerin has completed all three core clinical trainings in the Gottman Couple’s Therapy Method.  Kerin uses the Gottman Relationship Checkup to assess areas of opportunity for client couples to grow and to highlight strengths.

What is the Gottman Method? 
Gottman Method Couple’s Therapy for healthy relationships.  “A research-based approach to strengthening your relationship.”   Combining the knowledge and wisdom of nearly forty years of studies and clinical practice, Gottman Method Couples Therapy helps couples break through barriers to achieve greater understanding, connection and intimacy in their relationships. Through research-based interventions and exercises, it is a structured, goal-oriented, scientifically-based therapy. Intervention strategies are based upon empirical data from Dr. Gottman’s study of more than 3,000 couples. This research shows what actually works to help couples achieve a long-term healthy relationship.

How was the Gottman Method discovered?

For nearly four decades Dr. John Gottman has conducted research on all facets of relationships, including parenting issues. At the Institute, in collaboration with Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, he developed an approach that not only supports and repairs troubled marriages and committed relationships, but strengthens happy ones. 

1. Build Love Maps:
   How well do you know your partner’s inner psychological world, his or her history, worries, stresses, joys, and hopes?
2. Share Fondness and Admiration:
   The antidote for contempt, this level focuses on the amount of affection and respect within a relationship. (To strengthen fondness and admiration, express appreciation and respect.)
3. Turn Towards:
   State your needs, be aware of bids for connection and respond to (turn towards) them. The small moments of everyday life are actually the building blocks of relationship.
4. The Positive Perspective:
   The presence of a positive approach to problem-solving and the success of repair attempts.
5. Manage Conflict:
   We say “manage” conflict rather than “resolve” conflict, because relationship conflict is natural and has functional, positive aspects. Understand that there is a critical difference in handling perpetual problems and solvable problems.
6. Make Life Dreams Come True:
   Create an atmosphere that encourages each person to talk honestly about his or her hopes, values, convictions and aspirations.
7. Create Shared Meaning:
   Understand important visions, narratives, myths, and metaphors about your relationship.
8. Trust:
   This is the state that occurs when a person knows that his or her partner acts and thinks to maximize that person’s best interests and benefits, not just the partner’s own interests and benefits. In other words, this means, “my partner has my back and is there for me.”

Commitment:
This means believing (and acting on the belief) that your relationship with this person is completely your lifelong journey, for better or for worse (meaning that if it gets worse you will both work to improve it). It implies cherishing your partner’s positive qualities and nurturing gratitude by comparing the partner favorably with real or imagined others, rather than trashing the partner by magnifying negative qualities, and nurturing resentment by comparing unfavorably with real or imagined others.