The success of marital relationships and other
types of relationships whether business, community, or intimate relationships
is based on trust. Trust is what makes
the relationship work. Without trust, a
relationship will deteriorate and eventually it will die.
Trust is one’s confidence in another person that
what he or she says is true and that his or her intentions are for your best
interest and the welfare of your relationship.
Betrayal by definition is a violation or breaking
of a promise or agreement that erodes one’s confidence in the trustworthiness
of the other person in a relationship.
John Gottman, an expert in marital relationships, has
studied the science of trust and betrayal and how to build trust in our
relationship. Gottman says that trust in
another person slowly erodes any time there is a turning away from meeting the
need of ATTUNEment to a loved one.
Gottman’s colleague, Dan Yoshimoto has created an
acronym to clarify the meaning of ATTUNE:
- Awareness of your partner’s emotion
- Turning toward the emotion
- Tolerance of two different viewpoints
- trying to Understand your partner
- Non-defensive responses to your partner
- and responding with Empathy
That slow erosion of trust from turning away from a
partner's need for ATTUNEment can cause great damage over years, but individual
events of turning away from needs of ATTUNEment do not define a relationship
because everyone does it at some time or another. When we fail to attune with our spouse or the
person we love, we are allowing the basic building blocks of a strong and
healthy relationship to erode.
For Gottman, betrayal begins after you have turned
away from the need for ATTUNEment in your partner and then begin to distance yourself
from your partner by saying to yourself, “I can do better. Who needs this garbage? I am always dealing with their negativity and
I’m fed up.” This ruminating on that
idea that there is someone or something better is the initiation of
betrayal.
Many marital conflicts begin with small things such
as forgetting to wash the dishes, coming late for dinner, forgetting to
communicate, etc. The offended person
sends signals that something bothers him or her. (Gottman calls this the sliding door) These sliding doors, like a small reaction of
sadness, a sudden silence or coldness are opportunities for the other person to
ATTUNE to the person who is hurting or bothered. When we choose to ignore sliding doors
because we are tired or we don’t want to be sidetracked or distracted, we ended
up destroying the trust that we could build by simply pausing and ATTUNE-ing to our partner.
Lack of ATTUNE-ment turns to betrayal when we choose
to believe that we can do better without them which usually leads to
resentment, becoming uninterested and jaded.
Our level of commitment drops and we stop investing in and sacrificing
for the relationship. Without significant
intervention, this relationship decline will lead to the ending of the
relationship.
Gottman created
a “betrayal metric” where he defines the extent of the couples’ interaction. When a relationship interaction is
characterized by the thinking that I win when my partner loses known in game theory as “zero-sum game” trust erodes
quickly. During Gottman’s 20-year study, many couples who engaged in this type of
interaction dropped from the study. When
he started to investigate why, he discovered that many of them had died. And it was usually the male partner who had
died. Creating a high trust relationship
is very significant not only for the emotional wellbeing, but also for the physical
health of the couple.
John Gottman explains how to build trust through ATTUNE-ment in this video:
Building and
maintaining trust can be accomplished the paying attention to and investing the
time to ATTUNE to our spouse or loved one.
This has tremendous emotional and physical benefits in the long run,
both personally and relationally
Gottman’s full
article and accompanying lecture videos can be seen here:
