The Magic Number- Making deposits into your relationships

John Gottman, PhD, and leading expert in the field of couple’s therapy, has discovered over his extensive years of research with couples, that there exists a “magic relationship ratio.” He states that in relationships that stay together there are 5 times more positive things that work versus negativity.

This 5 to 1 ratio is a powerful concept to understand and could be the answer you have been looking for because this ratio can also be applied to all other relationships across the board. Dr. Gottman further elaborates that if you do something negative to hurt your partner’s, friend’s, co-worker, children’s or parent’s feelings you have to be able to make up for it with 5 positive things for every negative thing said or done. Clearly, this ratio is not balanced and exposes the hard core truth about negative behavior. Negative actions such as, stonewalling (refusing to cooperate or communicate), name calling, yelling, throwing objects, disrespecting boundaries getting defensive, etc. has a greater ability to inflict pain and damage within the relationship . The strongest evidence he found for this theory was that in couples who eventually ended in divorce their ration was 0.8 to 1.

How does one become “masters” vs. “disasters” in relationship? Dr. Gottman states that in order to become more successful at our relationships we have to focus more so on the quality of the relationship. If we were to equate a relationship to a saving account, the question then becomes how many emotional deposits has one done to improve the relationship. If a partner has been consistently nice, respectful, loving, doing nice things for the other than that relationship has a wealth of emotional savings. Furthermore what happens next is that the person doing the receiving of the repairs will then be very receptive to them and thus improve the state of that relationship. If however, the emotional savings account is starving for nice things to be done, has no emotional deposits of kindness, or respect and instead is treated poorly, and disrespected, then any emotional repair will not be received with the same amount of value as compared to those who have had a strong savings of emotional well being. Therefore, those that have become masters have learned to use emotional deposits of good times together to help strengthen the value of their repair attempts to improve the quality of their marriage or relationship. Repair attempts are what an individual can learn while in anger management therapy. Anger management groups provide a useful arena to practice making positive emotional deposits within a relationship.

Examples of repair attempts could be, saying “I’m sorry”, saying to a the other, “I need a time out, I am getting to upset now, can we talk about this in 20 minutes when I am not so angry” or It can even be as simple as trying to make the other person laugh or a nice gesture of a bouquet of flowers or cooking his or her favorite meal. Those that end in disaster, have not made any attempts to repair the damage, they are in desperate need of anger management therapy and to learn techniques to calm them down so that they can be better communicators. Their repair attempts however, will be useless if their emotional savings account is in a deficit of positive emotional deposits.

So, start now! Go and do something nice for your husband, wife, mother, father, sibling, children, co-worker or boss and soon you will be rich in emotional well being and as a result your conflict resolutions will be much more effective, meaningful and well received.

By: Diana I. Bonilla, M.A.
Daybreak Counseling Service
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