Are you denying your partner’s bid for connection?
“Turning towards” your partner’s bids for connection is a term used in Gottman Method Couples Therapy. “Turning towards” means that when your partner makes a bid for connection, you respond in a loving, kind, and positive way.
Examples of bids include friendly text messages mid-day, reaching out to hold your hand, asking you to watch a show, read an article they read, or look at something interesting out the window.
It also includes invitations for sex, cuddling, or just a smile and glance across the room. According to John Gottman’s research, couples experience thousands of bids between each other every month, and couples who are the happiest turn towards each other 75-80% of the time.
Turning towards builds your emotional bank account and creates long-lasting love, commitment, and trust. Here at Ray Family Therapy, we are trained in Gottman Method Couples Therapy, and we specialize in helping couples reignite passion and romance. We use targeted interventions that help IGNITE the spark in your relationship. Repeated fights and miscommunication can lead to distancing, anger, hurt, and a feeling of distrust and lack of appreciation.
Unmanaged conflict leads to emotional disengagement. Let me break this down for you:
Fights that escalate to yelling, screaming, name-calling, sarcastic comments, throwing words back in someone’s face, throwing things at each other, slapping, hitting, or shoving, and ignoring each other after the blowup destroys relationships.
Over time, this repeated pattern leads to distrust, anger, dislike of each other, and even feelings of hatred.
To cope, partners disengage and create their own parallel lives.
Partners triangulate friends and family members and call them to complain about their partner. These calls are a covert attempt to stabilize the relationship. It backfires and creates alliances and further deterioration of the partnership.
Under all the surface anger, there is often a deep love, hurt, pain, and desire for connection in both partners.
What is your “story of us?” Is it positive or negative? If you think back over the years, and you remember happy times in the beginning that became stressed after kids and work stress, then you are like many couples and need a little help getting your relationship back on track.
We conduct a thorough assessment of your relationship, help you identify past trauma and triggers that escalate fights, and help you learn ways to calm and soothe your nervous system, and how to take breaks during conflict discussions.