Couples
Emotional Bank Account
The psychologist John Gottman has an interesting metaphor to explain why some couples thrive while others disintegrate. He calls it the emotional bank account. Think of positive, relationship affirming interactions as deposits that are made intermittently and stored up for a rainy day. When a bump in the road invariably comes along, the overall feelings of goodwill you have towards each other let you move past it without affecting the health of your relationship. In his longitudinal studies he found that happy, healthy couples have around five positive interactions for every one negative interaction.
His theory syncs up pretty well with cognitive behavioral theory, which says that perception has much more to do with determining the consequences of an event than the event itself. In this case there is a symbolic tipping point in a relationship where a negative interaction is perceived as having much more weight than it actually does.
For example, let’s imagine that Tim has had a stressful day at the office. He missed lunch and is feeling irritable. Traffic is a nightmare on the way home, and on top of that he is cut off several times and almost gets in a wreck. He walks through the door barely able to hold it together. Mary, his partner, asks him an innocent question about whether they are still on to meet up with friends for dinner. Tim snaps. “I just walked through the door! Can’t I have five seconds to myself?”
If the balance of their relationship is positive, Mary will view this outburst as an aberration and distinctly separate from him. She will think to herself “Yikes, Tim must have had a terrible day.” But she will probably not make a negative global judgment about who he is as a person. He’s a good guy who had a bad day. Tim will surely cool down and apologize shortly thereafter. They will go back to their happy life together without experiencing any residue from the event. They have built up enough positivity in their relationship to weather the occasional storm.
Once negativity starts to appear more often than positivity, the same event will be perceived quite differently. Instead of being distinctly separate from Tim, it will act as global proof of his bad personality in Mary’s mind. It’s important to understand that the interaction in both cases is identical from an objective point of view.
A compelling reason to treat your relationship like a delicate flower is that once this change in perception occurs, positive interactions will probably not even be noticed anymore. Even if they are they will not have the same effect. In the healthy relationship, when Tim does something positive Mary thinks “That sure was nice. Tim is a great guy.” In the negative relationship, when Tim does something positive Mary might think “I wonder why Tim did that. He must have something up his sleeve.”
If your relationship is still happy and healthy don’t become complacent. Keep making those deposits and you will both react differently when negativity shows up. If you feel like the scales are starting to tip it’s important to openly discuss the process with your partner and make a conscious effort to get back on track.
Related posts:
- Emotional Abuse is Real Pain Every child in our culture learns the refrain “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” This statement could not be more false from a psychological point of view and we will make the case that not only is the emotional pain caused from verbal abuse real, but that it […]...
- Emotional Detachment And The Love Language Of Service What we find time and time again with people who are emotionally detached and in a romantic relationship is extreme dissatisfaction emanating from their partners around the quality and depth of the intimacy and connection between them. Actually more often than not it’s the dissatisfied partners who act as the driving force for their emotionally […]...
- Emotional Detachment Is Not The Inability To Access Emotions Emotional detachment is a response, usually taken in childhood, to adverse environmental conditions. It’s a rather clever way to to lower feelings of helplessness in a world perceived as hostile. This way is simply to stop caring. No one can hurt you if you’re not emotionally invested in what they say and do. What’s important […]...
- Emotional Detachment and Approaching Conflict in Relationships Since emotional detachment as a life solution is about withdrawing from people and the world in order to reduce anxiety it shouldn’t be at all surprising that outright conflict is avoided like the plague. Where some people thrive off of conflict situations those with emotional detachment definitely do not. They want nothing to do with […]...
- Narrative Therapy For Emotional Detachment While emotional detachment is a defense mechanism taken to reduce feelings of helplessness in a hostile world, partners and other intimates of the emotionally detached are wont to consider emotional detachment to be an inherent personality trait, as more or less one and the same thing as the person struggling with it. This sets up […]...
- Helping Someone With Emotional Detachment Confront The Void Nothing Wrong With the Emotional Apparatus Most people struggling with emotional detachment don’t seek out help on their own but at the behest of their partners, who have grown deeply unhappy with the lack of felt emotional connection in the relationship. Emotional detachment as we conceptualize it does not signify that there’s anything wrong with […]...
- Burdened With Painful Emotions And Emotional Detachment Human beings are burdened, or blessed depending on the point of view, with a complicated emotional apparatus. This means taking the bad along with the good, the unwanted feelings along with the wanted feelings. It means being hurt deeply many times over the lifespan. But it’s those early childhood traumas, the early emotional distress, that […]...
- Masochism Versus Emotional Detachment We have written about how those with detached personality are likely to rationalize their compulsive emotional detachment on some grounds, like that being overly emotional is frivolous and histrionic, or that a rational, scientific outlook has proven itself to be superior, or that detachment is central to Eastern philosophies and is therefore the best path […]...
- Common Rationalizations of Emotional Detachment When we understand that longstanding patterns of maladaptive behavior usually serve vital psychological and emotional functions despite their objectively destructive consequences we can understand the unconscious propensity to frame these maladaptive patterns as adaptive patterns. This is the power of rationalization. It allows us to make a weakness seem like a strength, to supposedly make clean that […]...
- Emotional Detachment In Relationships If you’re in a relationship with someone struggling with emotional detachment you’ve probably noticed that it’s during conflict that he’s most likely to shut down, to distance himself emotionally from what’s going on, to stop taking much of an active part in the discussion. As we’ve written elsewhere detached personality can affect both males and […]...
- Increasing Physical Intimacy Increases Emotional Intimacy If you’ve started to feel emotionally distant from your partner it’s more than likely that the frequency of physical contact has gone down dramatically too, obviously in the realm of sex but also in the more commonplace realm of touching, caressing, hugging, etc., all of the various visible physical manifestations of the underlying emotional intimacy […]...
- Emotional Detachment and Ambivalence Fear of Obligation Ambivalence is the experience of having simultaneous conflicting thoughts and feelings. In the case of emotional detachment, the fundamental ambivalence is an authentic desire for greater intimacy on one hand and an extreme aversion to the potential obligations this greater intimacy will entail on the other. These ‘obligations’ are not usually well-defined […]...
- Emotional Vaccine This morning I was thinking about the book Bridges to Terabithia, which was required reading in middle school English class for many of us who grew up in the 80’s. It tells the story of a friendship between two fifth graders, a boy named Jesse and a girl named Leslie, who create a magical kingdom […]...
- Emotional Detachment And Commitment Commitment is a vital ingredient for successful outcomes in any long-term endeavor, which might sound self-evident, but what does this mean for people who associate commitment with unwanted consequences The most frequent unwanted consequence is the feeling of being trapped, tied down, imprisoned. Many equate an act of full commitment with the loss of personal […]...
- Emotional Detachment And Anxiety In emotional detachment there’s nothing wrong with the emotional apparatus per se. People with emotional detachment are capable of experiencing the full emotional spectrum just like anybody else. Actually it’s precisely because they’re emotionally sensitive that they felt compelled in childhood or adolescence to decide to stop being that way, to stop caring. They decided […]...
- Emotional Detachment and Not Caring The commonly held belief is that those with emotional detachment don’t care about much of anything, that they don’t get overly excited in the face of desirable happenings or overly upset in the face of undesirable happenings. Instances that provoke a great deal of anxiety in the general population seem to easily roll off the […]...
- Emotional Safety Net Tightrope walkers don’t just magically arrive at a state where they can traverse a space high above the ground with nothing below them to catch their fall. First they practice on a rope just a few feet above the earth. Then they graduate to the real thing, but with a safety net to catch them […]...
- Emotional Detachment And Control We can’t understand the mechanism of emotional detachment without understanding the enduring need to resist any and all forms of control. It’s safe to say that for those with emotional detachment freedom is set up as the highest virtue and the attempt to control the unforgivable vice. They often complain that they just want to […]...
- Dealing With Emotional Pain When your physical body is injured the pain you feel isn’t the injury itself. The pain is the built in alarm system alerting you to the fact that this or that part of your body is injured. It’s easy to forget this. We usually take our injuries and the pain cued off by them to […]...
- Unwanted Emotional States People usually seek professional help when they can no longer stand the way they’re feeling. In this sense emotions are the soldiers on the front lines of the war of life. They’re the parts of the human condition to which we give the most credence and that affect us most deeply. People can be surrounded […]...
