Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict into Connection by Julie Schwartz Gottman PhD & John Gottman PhD

Author:Julie Schwartz Gottman, PhD & John Gottman, PhD [Gottman, Julie Schwartz & Gottman, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Small Repairs Prevent Major Damage

In conflict, a repair attempt is any comment or action that counteracts the negativity in a fight and prevents a conversation from escalating. Imagine that your discussion is like a train traveling on tracks. If the train begins to slide off the tracks, over a cliff, and down a mountainside, your repairs can prevent a major crash and elevate the conversation back up and onto the tracks again.

A repair can really be anything that shifts the conversation toward the positive. The most basic repair is a straightforward apology: “I’m sorry,” or “I’m sorry I said that—let me try again.” It can also take the form of empathy or validation: “I understand how you feel,” or “That makes sense, when you put it that way.” It can be voiced admiration. “You know what I really appreciate about you? How much you care about our kids. We’re disagreeing over which school to pick, but I love how much it matters to you that they have a good education.”

It can also be something goofy, like pulling an exaggerated “Oops!” face after you’ve blurted out something you immediately realized was a pretty dumb thing to say; if your partner can see that for what it is (fundamentally, a humorous apology) and laugh with you, the whole tenor of the fight can be reset. A repair can even be a fleeting gesture, like nodding encouragingly or reaching out for your partner’s hand—the specific shape the repair takes ultimately doesn’t matter. It telegraphs anything from I love you to I hear you to Oops, I goofed up!

In the Love Lab, after studying over three thousand couples, we saw something interesting about repair: what determined the success or failure of a repair attempt was not how it was made. In other words, we could not predict whether a repair attempt would work based on how well it was phrased—some of the most elegantly worded apologies failed to get through, whereas many clumsy and inexpert repair attempts landed wonderfully. Why? It came down not to what the repair looked like but to how the partner received and responded to it.[5]

Friendship and connection correspond to a successful repair.[6] How strong is your connection to each other going into this fight? How much quality time have you been able to spend with each other lately? How much have you been turning toward each other’s bids for connection? Have you been able to set aside distractions and respond to your partner’s attempts to connect, or has life been getting in the way?

One of the saddest reasons we see couples split is when they never quite manage to get aligned on repairs—when one person makes an attempt, the other is closed off to it or misses it completely, and vice versa. Imagine one of those pairs of hotel rooms with a connecting door—each room has its own door that opens and closes. If you were to open your door to the neighboring room and no one was there, you’d just see a closed and locked door.

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