The Sound Relationship House
Research-Informed
Gottman's umbrella model, the theory that the Seven Principles map onto.
Gottman's umbrella model, the theory that the Seven Principles map onto. A house with seven levels and two weight-bearing walls. The levels, bottom to top: Build Love Maps, Share Fondness and Admiration, Turn Towards Instead of Away, The Positive Perspective, Manage Conflict, Make Life Dreams Come True, and Create Shared Meaning. The two walls holding it all up: Trust and Commitment. The architecture matters: the friendship levels at the bottom are the foundation, and conflict management sits in the middle, not at the base. Couples who try to fix conflict without rebuilding friendship are renovating the third floor of a house with a cracked foundation.
Evidence
Research-Informed
The Sound Relationship House, Gottman's overall model of what makes relationships work, earns Research-Informed. Its individual floors draw on genuinely peer-reviewed descriptive research (love maps, turning toward, the positive-to-negative balance), but as a complete prescriptive model tied to the Gottman Method it carries the therapy's more modest standing: real outcome studies that are small and largely non-independent, with no head-to-head trials against established couples therapies (Babcock et al., 2013). The descriptive parts are strong; the model as a whole is less tested.
Origin
John Gottman & Julie Gottman
Sources
- The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work — John Gottman, 1999