Anyone NOT recommend The Gottman Books?
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Anonymous
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DH and I took a premarital workshop through the Gottman institute 12years ago. It seemed like a good idea, but really nearly exploded our relationship. We ended up bonding over a found mutual distrust of the system and in a “us against the world” method sifted through the rubble of that weekend and moved forward never to revisit their assessment of us. It has left us pretty gun shy of pursuing marital counseling. Honestly we think we’ve done a ton of work on communication on our own and have had a good relationship. Though we are on the cusp after two kids of feeling like we need “something” to keep us moving in the right direction. We are not religious, so there isn’t a sense of duty to a higher being to maintain our marriage. Just our shared goal of keeping our family together and moving forward.
Suggestions welcomed. |
Anonymous
| What are you talking about? So confused by your description of what happened after the workshop. That doesn’t sound like Gottman at all... |
Anonymous
+1 Can you explain better? |
Anonymous
| They have you take a pre-workshop relationship status test, and then give you the results at the workshop. It ranks in color all the areas of volatility in the relationship along with explanations of what different levels indicate and accounts for various responses between genders. It makes it seem like the all and end all of your relationship. Our results said we shouldn’t even get married because we were too incompatible. As you might imagine, this is not how we felt and we felt that there had to be a flaw in the administration or scaling of the quiz. We did get married, and have a really healthy loving and wonderful marriage. All that being said, in trying to be honest about where we are and self-growth and relationship growth we are human and have room for improvement. Yet imagining trying something similar or counseling or whatever now just feels like it will set a bomb off again in our relationship. |
Anonymous
| All this being said, we read the books before hand and talked a ton about our relationship goals etc before getting married and essentially have done zero reflection or work beyond the day in and day out since getting married 12y ago. Wondering if we were a fluke...etc... |
Anonymous
| I think you’re way overthinking this. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. |