February is upon us, bringing with it the familiar pink-and-red depictions of romantic love. However, many of us know that romantic love is (thankfully) far more complicated than the romcoms might have us think. For decades, professionals have been using therapeutic modalities to work with couples to strengthen their relationships. One of the most widely practiced relationship modalities, Gottman Therapy, is a goal-oriented therapy that helps couples work on different aspects of their relationship such as building love maps, sharing fondness and admiration, turning toward instead of away, managing conflict, and creating shared meaning. Gottman’s therapy has been utilized since 1996 with an over 90% success rate (Claney, 2024). Some of the benefits of Gottman Couples Therapy are improved communication, strengthened emotional connection, effective conflict resolution, increased resilience, renewed commitment, and shared goals (Thompson, 2024). After starting Gottman Therapy, couples are more adept at expressing their needs and emotions, working on demonstrating one another’s love language, actively listening, using emotional regulation before continuing an escalated conversation, showing validation and understanding, as well as working toward compromises.
At Marwil & Associates, therapist Fawn Cooney, LCPC uses Gottman’s framework with couples to help them notice and transform negative behavioral patterns. As in all of her sessions, Fawn brings compassion, friendliness, and calm to her work with couples, prioritizing empathy and non-judgement to create a safe, emotional, and comfortable space for her clients. Fawn’s couples sessions include a focus on The Four Horsemen (Gottman) which are identified as Defensiveness, Contempt, Criticism and Stonewalling. The goal of this framework is to help couples become more aware of when they are engaging in these behaviors.
Couples then work together to identify when their emotions are beginning to escalate and use effective strategies to de-escalate before continuing. Additionally, Fawn encourages couples to open up about their emotions by using “I feel” statements and validating one another, even if there are different perspectives present. Focus is also paid to love languages and helping couples to communicate in these preferred ways with each other. Through Gottman Therapy, couples have reported living happier and healthier lives with improved and effective communication styles and an increase in emotional connection overall.
To schedule an appointment with Fawn, request an appointment today!