How Science can Help Save Your Marriage

What The Best Research is Telling Us:

You may have read or listened to advice from countless popular sources about how to save or strengthen your marriage. But what can the hard facts from the highest quality research tell you about strengthening or outright saving your marriage?

There are many opinions, catch-phrases and endless blogs out there, which are filled with nicely written personal impressions, while completely devoid of the critically important facts. This is the first in a multi-part series of practical, marriage saving articles designed to bring you those often missing facts.

The science is in, and the science tells us that strong marriages boil down to 2 interrelated strategies: 1) repairing your emotional connection; through, 2) shaping more effective communication. Some of these words may sound familiar, but here’s what they really mean:

Marriage, Benefits and Challenges:

Marriages are literally falling apart despite the incredible advantages and protective qualities they provide us. The evidence shows this and I've seen it first hands with hundred's of clients in my private practice working with couples. For example, a strong marriage protects and enhances our physical health.

Happily married couples actually live longer than distressed or unmarried individuals. And of course, a strong marriage is a major foundation for building a healthy family and stronger communities. Perhaps most importantly, marriage enables us to fulfill some of our central spiritual obligations.

For example, a healthy marriage is a clear expression of loving one and other as ourselves, which in turn strengthens our ability to love honor and serve our Creator.

With the economy in turmoil, skyrocketing costs of living and a high-stress popular culture bombarding us with destructive models for living every second, the assault on marital health and longevity is at an all-time high.

Over 50% of marriages lead to divorce with most of these in their first year. Half of all husbands have extra marital affairs and close to one third of wives are cheating as well, - and these numbers are only growing!

Strengthening Your Marriage Strengthens your Kids:

When parents argue and even yell in front of their younger children, due to uncontrolled martial distress, it can seriously damage the child’s emotional and psychological development. Parenting experts have shown that loudly expressing spousal hurt and anger in front of kids, can be as harmful as hitting them.

So, a strong and healthy marriage also protects and enriches your children both now and in preparation for their own marriages. In many respects effective husbands and wives are by definition, effective fathers and mothers.

Many very distressed couple’s that I’ve worked with have come into my office saying that they had fallen out of love and were only seeking counseling for the sake of their kids. This is highly commendable, and sometimes it’s the mutual love for their children that will help a couple get the skills they need to rebuild their emotional connection.

My experience working with hundreds of couple’s over the years, is that once they learn how to better understand and meet each others relationship needs, not only can they learn to love again, but they can learn to love each other even more strongly and more deeply than they did in the past.

Mental Health Benefits:

Scientific evidence has shown that healthy marriages actually shield us from and can reverse, mild to moderate and some times even sever depressive disorders. An already famous recent study shows that systematically repairing emotional bonds in couples with one depressed spouse, lifted the depression more effectively than medication and/or counseling, directly targeting the depression alone.

That’s a marital therapy intervention that cures depression by addressing the quality of the marriage relationship rather than focusing on the depression. And this is done in less than 15 counseling sessions on average!

So what does the real evidence-base from the research on marital counseling (reams of high quality studies pointing to the same strategies) say about how to strengthen or save your marriage, even or especially when things seem hopeless or finished? Well, here are the most important strategies for transforming your marriage:

Reshape your Communication:

If you want a strong marriage, there are four modes of communication that you have to learn to avoid and replace at all costs. These include criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling and contempt. I highly recommend understanding and remembering these destructive communication styles, and learning how to both express, truly listen-for and reciprocally meet each others core relationship needs. Lets start with getting rid of criticism.

Stop Criticizing Each Other ASAP:

Criticism is evident when you make a negative evaluative statement about something your spouse does or doesn’t do. In my private practice I ask couple’s to define and talk about their top 2 or 3 core marital issues or problems, so I can observe, both what is really bothering them and how they talk to each other about it.

The more intense the negative expression, the more important the disguised relationship need. I’ve often heard couples say things like: “But you never spend time with the kids!” or “you spend way too much money.”

Criticism usually takes the shape of a negative statement about your spouse’s traits or characteristics as a person. This involves statements like: “You are so selfish” or “you are really stupid sometimes”.

Can you think of a recent criticism or 2 that you may have leveled against your loved one? Did you say something hurtful about what they did or didn’t do or about who they are as a person? Marriage-harming criticisms are the ones that really hurt or frustrate you or your spouse emotionally, not the ones that easily bounce off.

Criticisms are Unstated Relationship Needs in Disguise:

As one of the most powerful examples of turning a negative into a positive, the content of your criticisms can really teach you about how to improve or save your marriage. But this is only true if you learn from and reverse this negative pattern quickly.

If you carefully think about the critical communications that have harmed your marriage, you’ll notice that they mask your core, unmet relationship-needs. In other words, criticizing the one you love is just a very destructive way of trying to ask them for what you really need from them at the time. If you didn’t need what you were asking for, you wouldn’t get so hurt or angry in the first place.

When a wife says: “you never spend time with the kids” what she may really be asking for is help managing her overloaded work schedule. Maybe it’s very important for her as a mother to see her children laughing and playing with their father more often. As you’ll start to see next, It’s much easier to understand and to meet each others needs when you hear them and express them simply and clearly.

Criticism Breeds Defensiveness (and Counter-Criticism):

The sad alternative to learning how to identify, effectively express and meet each others core relationship-needs is a vicious, marriage-eroding pattern. This is what the researchers call the “criticism-defense cycle”. This cycle often escalates into a pattern of criticism-defense-counter-criticism-counter defense- exchanges, - like a wet snowball rolling down from the top of Mount Everest during a snow storm! When the one you love showers you with scathing criticisms it can really hurt. In fact, if you didn’t love each other so much, you wouldn’t be able to hurt each other so deeply.

Criticism can also be felt as a kind of verbal attack. At first, the natural human tendencies are to get hurt, then to get angry and then to defend. "First you get sad, then you get mad." This is often done via a direct attempt to justify what you’re being criticized about.

For example, after hearing the criticism about not spending time with his kids, a father might defend himself by explaining why he hasn’t spent the desired family time. A home improvement or work related project may be offered. Although these explanations may be partially true, the most important issue for the relationship is the unexpressed relationship need.

A wife who hears that she’s "spending too much money shopping" may defend herself with a list of justifications for her spending. She may explain how she needs the extra shoes for work or say that she’s shopping so much because she can’t stand being at home arguing all the time.

She may be expressing a deeply valid insight in the second criticism, -although ineffectively. The father, who says he’s working on an important project instead of spending quality family time with the kids, may also be saying the same thing, however less directly.

The problem is that we can’t listen or think clearly when we are angry and defensive. If we can’t listen and think, we definitely can’t communicate our needs or develop and test highly rewarding needs-meeting strategies together.

Marital Contempt: "Ya, What Ever!"

The only thing that makes stonewalling even more devastating to a marriage, is when it finds full expression in contempt. Contempt is a continuous sense of chronic, low level anger and emotional frustration with the partner. There are no more highly emotional criticism and defense exchanges. Nor will you see withdrawal or short avoid and return to the partner episodes.

It’s now a highly superficial abruptness, in response to almost any kind of communication around relationship needs. One of the most common examples of marital contempt that I’ve seen in my private practice is “eye rolling”. This is when the wife (usually), will quickly roll her eyes in response to any attempt on the partner’s side to makeup or problem-solve. Another example is the cold, sharp “ya whatever!” response to similar emotional repair or reconnection attempts by either partner.

When you've reached the stage of marital-contempt, you're marriage may be in serious danger. This is when it's time for both of you to buckle down and to really learn about and implement effective communication, needs-meeting and emotional-repair strategies. It is very important that you talk to each other and directly problem solve. Don't fall into the marital mind reading expectancy trap.

It may also be time to explore working with a qualified marital counselor. This means finding a counselor with advanced, specialized training in evidence-based marital therapy. There are many counselors out there practicing many different approaches.

You want to insure that you are getting the best counseling for your marriage. This means finding a properly trained counselor who will maximize the likelihood of saving your marriage and saving you thousands of dollars in unnecessary counseling costs through associated with unnecessary extra sessions.

The Keys to Simple yet Effective Marital Communication:

In the next installment of my marriage series, I’ll present some, simple, effective and evidence-based communication solutions that you can apply in place of the all to common, but dysfunctional patterns described above. I’ll show you a very simple way to effectively ask about and listen for your partners core relationship needs, that will help your partner to open up rather than shut down or walk away.

I’ll also show you how to develop, test and improve your strategy for meeting your partner’s needs.The goal here is to establish or improve a positive and mutual needs-meeting-cycle between the two of you.

It takes a bit of work and time at first. But with lots of practice, powerfully reinforced by the corrective experience of reduced conflict and building a sense of trust and safety again with each other, eventually it will become second nature.

In time, the goal is to become very good at understanding and meeting your spouses’ needs, for the sole purpose of bringing him or her comfort and happiness. This becomes easier and more automatic for you as you progress together, - when you start to enjoy the comfort and well being that comes from having your own needs more deeply understood and met in the process.

If you take anything away from this article, I hope it’s that criticism is one of the most important things in marital verbal-communication to minimize or get rid off all together, particularly when learning your way out of a relationship crisis. For one thing, if there’s no criticism, there is usually no defensiveness. If there’s no defensiveness, you won’t likely have to deal with stonewalling very often and you certainly shouldn’t see contempt from you significant other.

Remember, the marital research evidence shows that you can reliably predict divorce based on the pervasiveness of the criticism and stonewalling cycles with up to 98% accuracy!

Further, the major sources of marital infidelity are chronically unmet core-relationship-needs. So if you meet each others' needs, and significantly reduce coercive-communication, then you are strongly reducing the likelihood of cheating, in your marriage, physically or emotionally.

As I’ll share with you next time, there are obvious differences between clearly and effectively expressing what you need and being critical because you are not getting your needs met. The simple and effective communication strategies I'll share are rooted in the same evidence-base that I've shared with you in this article so far.

Please feel free to post comments and to share your real world questions. I’d love feedback on what you think of this article and on what kind of challenges and successes you are facing in your relationship. Let me know if you have any questions about what I’ve written as well. I’ll do my best to provide clarification on what I've shared so far, and to answer your questions. I'll base the responses I provide you with on practical, evidence-based knowledge and strategies for strengthening or saving your marriage.

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