When people imagine couples work, they tend to picture communication skills — learning to fight fair, to use the right words, to keep the volume down. And that work matters. But the longer I sit with couples, the more I’ve come to believe that the real work is stranger and quieter than communication training. It lives underneath the fight, in two internal worlds that formed long before these two people ever met, and it asks something harder than “say it more kindly.” It asks each person to notice what they are actually hoping this other person will heal. Psychologist Lindsay Gibson has a name for that hope: the healing fantasy.
I find it useful to hold two lenses at once. The first is the Gottman Method, the approach I trained in and lean on most, which is, at its heart, a way of building a culture of fondness and respect between two people. The second is the psychodynamic understanding of how we became who we are — the roles we took on as children in order to feel seen — drawn from Lindsay Gibson’s Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. One lens shows me what is happening on the surface of the relationship. The other shows me who each person had to become to survive their own beginning. I think you need both.
Building a Culture Worth Living In: The Gottman Method
Gottman work focuses on a few key components, and one I return to constantly is what he calls love maps. A love map is the ongoing project of understanding our partner’s inner world — their hopes, their dreams, their desires and fears, the key players in their life, and the particular things they tend to perseverate on. It sounds simple, almost obvious, until you notice how many couples have quietly stopped updating the map, still navigating by a version of their partner that is years out of date.
This work relates directly to how couples communicate, because it is really an exercise in building respect and a culture of fondness and admiration. Once those are reasonably well established, they are not something you set and forget — they get continually tinkered with. What happens, as that culture takes hold, is that couples begin to listen differently. They listen with more openness, more curiosity, and more desire to understand than to prove themselves right.
The Power of the Positive Perspective
There is a Gottman principle I come back to constantly, which is that understanding must precede advice. We are simply not built to be talked out of our position by someone who hasn’t first shown us they grasp it — and yet so much of what passes for communication in a struggling relationship is two people each waiting their turn to make the case, half-listening while the other half of the brain quietly assembles a rebuttal. When the friendship and the fondness as a bedrock are strong, something shifts within the dynamic: partners begin to extend each other what Gottman calls the positive perspective — when your partner is upset, you give them the benefit of the doubt. When the friendship is starving, that very same behavior gets read in the least generous light available, also known as the negative perspective.
This is the part of the approach I resonate with most. The Gottmans teach, in effect, that this is not about one person being right and the other being wrong — it is not about asserting a position and winning it. It is about understanding one another, validating each person’s experience as real, and working toward a shared understanding in which both people can feel seen and nurtured. I want to be careful here, because “neither person is right” can be misheard: both experiences are valid and both need to be understood, and that is different from pretending no one is ever genuinely wronged. Within this frame, we work through the things that couples actually live inside — rupture and repair, previous conflict, differences in values, parenting, and much more.
But all of that rests on a condition that is easy to say and hard to do: both people have to be willing to understand how their own neuroses and their own issues tend to surface in the dynamic. Herein lies exactly where psychodynamic work becomes useful — because the same behavior can mean entirely different things depending on whose nervous system it is running through. One person turns toward a bid for connection easily; for another, reaching for closeness is genuinely frightening, because in the family they grew up in, expressing a need was dangerous, and depending on someone was the surest route to being let down. One person hears a raised voice as the ordinary friction of two people disagreeing; another hears it as the early warning of something that, long ago, meant real danger. The Gottman behaviors are observable and teachable. What they mean to each person is not, and that meaning is usually written in a much older hand.
The roles we learn in order to be seen
Gibson poses something I find genuinely moving, which is that in every family dynamic, children want to feel seen — and within that dynamic, children develop what she calls role selves in order to feel attended to. Subconsciously, a child learns that behaving in a certain way tends to yield a certain result, and over time that strategy hardens into an identity. A role self might look like someone who sits in my office as a lifelong perfectionist, forever striving to understand everyone around them, while somehow never quite feeling that their own needs have been met.
Gibson is blunt about what this costs us later. You cannot build a genuinely intimate relationship from inside a role self, because intimacy requires that you put enough of your real self on the table to give the other person something actual to respond to. Two people each performing the role that once kept them safe aren’t quite in a relationship yet — they are running two old scripts in the same room, each quietly hoping the other’s script will finally rewrite their own.
What makes this even more complicated with couples, rather than individuals, is that the richness and complexity of one person’s internal world is now doubled — and projected onto the other. The way this tends to play out is through what Gibson calls a healing fantasy. The fantasy runs something like this: if I were only loving enough, compassionate enough, attuned enough, then this other person would finally meet my needs, and that would resolve the emotional and psychological distress I carry inside.
Take, for example, a dynamic in which one person’s needs are quietly running the show. The other person usually feels as though they can never do enough — that whatever efforts they make are seen as minimal, or dismissed outright — and so they come to feel they will never be fully loved. Gibson would recognize these as two familiar coping styles. The one who can never do enough is often what she calls an internalizer: self-reflective, over-responsible, convinced things will improve if they simply try harder, and quietly resentful when trying harder never seems to earn the love they are reaching for. The one whose needs run the show often looks more like an externalizer, reaching outward for the security and stability they cannot generate within. Different strategies — but the same original deprivation underneath.
What both styles are missing is that the story started long before either of them arrived in the other’s life. One partner is relying on this person to fix something that happened long ago, at the very moment that person is actually trying to love and see them now. A healing fantasy projected onto a partner can never truly be satisfied, precisely because it is asking for something no other person can give.
So in the dynamic I’ve described, one person feels unloved while the other feels that none of their efforts are ever enough. The irony — and it is the whole point — is that both people are struggling with the same wound of not-enoughness. They are standing in the same place, wearing different costumes, pointing at each other. Casting blame, however satisfying in the moment, only serves to perpetuate the very cycle of invalidation that is hurting them both.
Here is the frustrating part, and also the hopeful one: we almost never recognize our own healing fantasy on our own. It is too close to us — too much like water is to a fish. It usually takes another person to reflect it back, which is exactly why the relationship, and the couples work built around it, becomes such fertile ground. The very dynamic causing the pain is also the clearest place that old fantasy has ever shown itself. It is not that your partner is the problem but that your partner is the first screen bright enough for you to finally see the projection playing across it.
The Way Through: From Insight to the Gottman-Rapoport Intervention
Which is why the way through is not a technique. It begins with both people being actively engaged in their own therapy — open to feedback, open to understanding themselves — and, crucially, willing to look inward at the role they played within their nuclear family, and at what their own healing fantasy might be inside this relationship. Only from that vantage point do the tools start to work as intended.
From there, something like the Gottman-Rapoport intervention becomes possible, where partners work to move through a moment of rupture by using I-statements, naming their feelings, and stating the facts of the situation as they experienced them. Each person then identifies a positive need — something specific that would be useful from their partner moving forward — as well as one thing they themselves plan to work on. Notice the symmetry: it is not a list of demands. It asks each person to hold both an ask and an offer of what they wish to improve.
What I find quietly remarkable is that Gottman’s own method already reaches toward the old wound. In the process for working through the aftermath of a fight, there is a step that asks each partner to notice which of the feelings that flared up were, in fact, ancient — feelings they carried in long before they ever met this person. Sit with that for a moment. One of the most behavioral, research-driven couples models we have builds in a step that says, in effect: some of what you just felt did not start here. That is the very truth Gibson is pointing at from the other direction. The two frameworks meet in the middle, at the wound.
Families of origin complicate all of this in ways that are easy to underestimate — from how our caregivers responded to our emotional distress, to something as apparently practical as the templates we inherited around money, to our quiet projections of what should be. These templates so often stand in the way of building a shared understanding of how two people actually intend to approach something as nuanced and complex as a life together, in all of its messiness.
The more that partners can work to understand each other’s history and upbringing, the more they can develop compassion, understanding, and perspective-taking — precisely in those moments where they feel most rooted in their own discomfort and most determined to prevail with their own perspective. Understanding where your partner came from is what makes it possible to loosen your grip on being right.
Another Gottman intervention I’m a big fan of is the practice of turning toward bids for affection — those small, often clumsy moments when one partner reaches out, asserting a bid for connection, and the other has a choice about whether to turn toward them or away. Most of intimacy, it turns out, is built or eroded in those unglamorous micro-moments, not in the big talks. And these bids naturally begin to improve as both partners maintain an openness and a willingness to see what their partner is actually aiming for, rather than defaulting to their own interpretations — interpretations so often clouded by the long history of how their own needs went unmet, or were attended to in some way other than the one they longed for.
None of this promises that two people will fix each other, and I think that promise is exactly the one worth letting go of. The goal was never for your partner to heal the wound that a parent left. The goal is for two people to see each other clearly, now — to update the map, to turn toward the bid, to own the costume they’ve been wearing — and to build something real between two flawed humans, together.
I’m Nicole Trister, LCSW, a couples therapist trained in Levels 1 and 2 of Gottman Method Couples Therapy. I draw on both the Gottman Method and psychodynamic work to help couples understand the patterns underneath their conflict. Book a consultation.