My hope is this series of articles supports therapists in a very practical sense by sharpening assessment formulation, conceptualising couple repair through the repair continuum lens and finally exploring intervention to aid couples deepen repair and healing.
This third and final article, details the essential principles that guide comprehensive relationship repair along with the interventions identified in the Relationship Repair Continuum (refer to article 2 in this series) that are used to create healing in relationship injuries and ruptures. Specific attention is given to exploring both Restorative Dialogue and the trigger management support of TARR
Relationship repair is not just about saying sorry or forgiving the other, effective repair is fluid and contextual to the injury, from minor missteps in communication to major breaches of trust. Assisting couples to repair requires the therapist to be guided by repair principles that ensure the possibility of a comprehensive healing of the relationship rapture. The essential repair principles are as follows:
Repair as a felt experience involves the expression of hurt vulnerability, disappointment, betrayal, guilt and shame. It requires a deeper dialogue with mutual empathy, and the willingness to walk in the shoes of the other. The hurt partner describes their subjective and valid perspective with a focus on the deeper emotions, experience and meaning of the hurt for them. As much as possible the hurt partner steers away from describing the other, their motivation, intention or character.
Repair as a deep empathic understanding requires recognising and valuing each other's emotions and perspectives. It involves listening, validating feelings, and demonstrating genuine compassion, remorse and personal insight. The partner listening to their partners injury does so with the intention to understand and heal their partners’ pain. This requires the temporary bracketing of their own subjective perspective.
Repair requires a comprehensive narrative involves openly sharing and understanding each other's stories and experiences. It means unravelling the relationship rapture, creating full transparency and answering questions that help fill the gaps in the story for each other. It is often these gaps in the story, missing pieces in a narrative that can promote doubt and uncertainty and become stumbling blocks to repair.
Repair requiring responsibility-taking involves acknowledging one's own role in conflicts and actively seeking to make amends. It requires honesty, accountability and a commitment to genuinely exploring and understanding your own values, motivations and intentions in injury. Responsibly taking requires self-reflection.
Repair as a forgiveness journey involves both giving and receiving apologies with sincerity and grace. It requires the de-emphasising of resentment, embracing vulnerability, and emphasising fostering mutual understanding. Forgiveness is not necessarily a prerequisite to repair however significant reduction of bitterness, anger and resentment across time is essential.
Repair as an ongoing relapse prevention strategy involves constructively addressing any lingering feelings, memories or triggers from the hurt across time. Healing from relationship injuries doesn’t neatly fit into a concise timeline, therefore continuous efforts to acknowledge strong feeling, triggers and memories is critical for ongoing healing. Attunement to your partner and a commitment to be on a healing journey is required particularly for injuries that breached the fabric of the relationship.
A previously discussed in the second article of this series, the Relationship Repair Continuum (RRC) creates a lens for therapists to view relationship injuries offering guidance in formulating how best to process these injuries, assisting couples in making thorough repair. Not all injury and repair are the same. Relationship injuries can be a small misstep in communication with only a minor repair required to address such an issue. However, there can also be major ruptures in trust, creating deep and lasting injuries that require intensive and sustained restorative dialogue. The RRC is a tool to categorise the various types of injury and determine the intervention best used to repair.
It is useful to be able to define different types of relationship injuries in terms of being on a continuum between unilateral and bilateral. Unilateral injury is best described as those injuries that have occurred that are asymmetrical, where there is a clear transgressor and subject to the injury. Bilateral injuries are those relationship injuries that are symmetrical, where both partners have been hurt and have hurt. As with any binary construct (unilateral/bilateral), human interaction does not neatly fit into two discrete camps rather, relational interaction and injury is complex and requires a broader spectrum to be viewed from. Some relationship injuries require a more nuanced approach where the injury that has occurred it not absolutely bilateral or unilateral.
The diagram below depicts the fluidity of bilateral and unilateral injuries.
Once injury is categorised, relationship repair interventions can be implemented.
Gottman therapy offers a range of restorative dialogues and interventions to repair injuries. I have categorised these interventions into three areas
1. De-escalation of negativity
2. Restorative Dialogues and
3. Relapse and maintenance
1. De-escalation of Negativity
The escalation of negativity in couple interactions is highly predictive of disconnection, the widening of distance between the couple and therefore significantly reducing the capacity of the couple to effectively and thoroughly heal relationship injuries. Often when a relationship injury has occurred, strong emotions and psychological arousal heighten a negative interaction pattern that is counterproductive to healing.
Intervention that stabilises interaction moving negative interaction to more constructive dialogues is essential. Gottman therapy offer several important interventions.
- Identifying the four horseman and using their antidotes-the movement towards negative interaction and relationship injury is the use of the four horsemen. The use of antidotes like a gentle start up, talking responsibility, self-soothing and not describing your partner enable couples to move out of a negative slide into a conversation that can be listened to and heard
- Managing flooding and physiological arousal- When couples are physiologically flooded, they have trouble in processing incoming information, meaning their capacity to listen and understand their partner is significantly impeded. Tunnel vision increases and perception becomes distorted so that everything seems dangerous, your partner becomes the enemy, everything that is said seems like an attack. The capacity of a relationship in managing flooding, to take breaks and to self-soothe reduces relationship injuries caused by continued conflict when flooding.
- Gottman Repair Checklist- this intervention assists couples to use repair phrases that allow conversation to say on track, I call this ‘repair in motion’, using those phrases such as ‘Can we slow this down’, ‘I’m feeling defensive can you rephrase that’, that repair the conversation before it becomes a negative interaction.
2. Restorative Dialogues
The word restorative means to make right, to repair and understand impact and take responsibility for actions. Restorative Dialogues embrace the principles of repair discussed earlier in this article and include several Gottman interventions that create a pathway to healing for couples. The following is a brief description of the four main restorative dialogue interventions used in healing and repair relationship injuries.
- The Gottman Affair treatment model of Atonement, Attunement and Attachment-
is a structured approach to helping couples heal from infidelity, It is designed to guide couples through the complex emotional landscape that follows an affair, with the goal of rebuilding trust, intimacy, and commitment. The model consists of three main phases:
1. Atone: The first phase focuses on managing the immediate emotional fallout of the affair. The partner who committed the infidelity takes full responsibility and expresses genuine remorse. This phase involves honest dialogue about the details of the affair, addressing the hurt partner’s questions, and managing emotional triggers. The goal is to acknowledge the pain caused and begin the process of healing.
2. Attune: In the second phase, the couple works on rebuilding trust and re-establishing emotional intimacy. This involves open and empathetic communication, where both partners learn to understand each other’s needs, feelings, and vulnerabilities. Couples are encouraged to discuss the underlying issues that may have contributed to the affair, such as unmet needs, lack of connection, or conflict avoidance. Emphasis is on the importance of managing conflict constructively and developing a deeper emotional bond.
3. Attach: The final phase focuses on creating a new, stronger relationship foundation. The couple works on deepening their commitment to one another, setting shared goals, and fostering a sense of partnership and connection. This phase often includes creating rituals of connection, improving sexual intimacy, and building a vision for the future together. The goal is to move beyond the affair and build a resilient relationship that is prepared to handle future challenges.
The Gottman Affair Recovery emphasises patience, empathy, and a willingness from both partners to actively participate in the healing process. It is designed to help couples not only recover from infidelity but also emerge with a stronger, more connected relationship.
This intervention is very useful in working with more unilateral issues such as infidelity and betrayal
- Gottman Rapoport Conversation - Relationship conflict, when polarised, can turn into awful battles and injuries. Couples argue from an absolute position-black or white- leading to feelings of being misunderstood, not heard, unseen, unappreciated and hurt. An important assumption of this intervention is the concept of two valid subjective realities, not just one; that both positions are valid, simply that each person has a different perceptive on the same issue. This allows the couple to focus not on facts but on perceptions. The intervention aims to slow the conversation down, reducing physiological arousal levels and ensuring the listener is able to reflect understanding and validate at least part of their partner’s perspective. It is helpful to suspend problem-solving until both partners understand each other’s perspective and each other’s positive needs on the issue are fully understood. The Rapoport intervention is a conversation that starts with a gentle start up and expresses perspective and positive needs, healing misunderstandings and misconceptions. The Gottman Rapoport intervention is a useful structure that can be used for any issue and repair along the Relationship Repair Continuum.
- Dreams within Conflict Intervention - Couples can experience gridlocked perpetual conflict on the same topics over many years. Perpetual issues are normal in a relationship because we are not exactly the same and bring different values, experiences and personality to the relationship. Sometimes, these perpetual issues can be become gridlocked, like two fists in opposition, creating a sense of not being heard, understood, validated, seen and of being alone. When this occurs it often reflects a deeper symbolic meaning and need that is not being met. The Dreams within Conflict intervention invites couples to be curious about the position their partner, understanding that they are not holding a strong position on topic to be stubborn or belligerent but because there is often a deep purpose and goal or an unmet dream that exists in the position that they hold. This intervention is structured conversation that allows each person to take a deeper dive into the topic and to provide a safe space to explore the existential meaning and dreams that exist on the issue. The gridlock nature of conflict creates injury, the movement of gridlock to dialogue creates connection, understanding and healing.
This intervention is very useful in working with bilateral issues where couples are gridlocked on issues such as finances, intimacy and parenting.
- Aftermath of Fight Intervention - unfortunate incidents and fights are inevitable in a relationship, however if they are not adequately processed and healed, they leave a lingering hurt and dissatisfaction tainting the landscape of the relationship. This intervention is a 5-step structure that aims to heal and repair the couples’ specific fights and incidents, not through prosecuting the fight but through each partner understanding the each other’s, feelings, perspectives, triggers and then taking responsibility and atoning for each other’s part, finally creating a constructive plan for incidents like this not to occur again. This intervention offers a deep healing of past injuries and hurts.
This intervention is very useful in working with bilateral issues where a specific fight or event has occurred.
3. Relapse and Maintenance - TARR
The reprocessing of relationship events, incidences and issues that have created hurt, trauma, sadness and grief is a longer process and is not completed at the end of therapy regardless of how emotionally corrective the therapy may have been. Our minds and body do not simply or completely move on. Traumatic memory, pain and fear linger cognitively and somatically and will resurface. When these triggers do resurface, a re-experiencing of the event or pain can occur catapulting the partner back into strong emotions such as feeling unsafe, angry and hurt. For couples this can be a very difficult and hard to understand experience, especially if the hurt has been processed in the therapy. It is important to recognise that these experiences are an important stage of healing and how the couple responds to this trigger are also critically important.
TARR is a trigger management support that provides practical direction for couples in those painful moments of recovery. Humans are more orientated towards the avoidance of negative stimulus so when a partner is triggered it can be met in a range of non-adaptive ways such as pushing the trigger down, ignoring or dismissing it, being defensive and frustrated that we are not over it yet. However, this is a lost opportunity to deepen the repair and increase attunement and trust. Like a firefighter is trained to run into the fire, we need to train ourselves to turn towards the hurt and pain of our partner and be present for them. TARR provides 4 simple steps to support the healing of triggers from relationship injuries
T - Partner tells of the trigger and the other turns towards the pain.
A - The trigger is acknowledged and understood and accepted by the partner.
R - Responsibility is taken by the other as the creator of that pain and they atone. This can be very simply and brief, for example, I know it is my actions that created that hurt, I’m so sorry.
R - Reassurance by the other that the actions that led to the hurt will never happen again and restates commitment to the relationship.
TARR is an easy to remember and actionable exercise for couples to use as relapse prevention and trigger support. Couples appreciate the TARR structure and the support to run into the fire for each other.
The capacity to repair in relationships is not just important - it is essential. Couples come to relationship therapy for many reasons and very often it is about repair and healing of hurt, betrayal, disconnection and the escalation of negativity that builds as the lingering hurt casts a shadow in the relationship landscape. The couple’s therapist is in a position to guide the couple towards healing using the essential repair principles as the handrails to guide the therapeutic process ensuring a comprehensive and emotional corrective repair. Ruptures in relationships may be unilateral, like infidelity, or bilateral such as an awful fight and other relationship injuries sit somewhere in between. The Relationship Repair Continuum provides a lens to view and assess relationship injures and to select the best intervention tool to create healing, whether it is to de-escalate negative interaction or create a restorative dialogue to support healing. Finally, thorough repair requires time and intention, consciously turning towards each when triggers emerge. TARR is a guide to give couples a structure to build upon the repair and to give one another a clear message that when you are in pain, I’m there for you.