Presidential Plenary, 2000:
Couples in Today's World

A clinical presentation by Peggy A. Papp entitled "Bridging Two Worlds" was paired with a research presentation by John M. Gottman, "When Will They Divorce?" Hour-long dialogue groups followed the presentations.

Written up by Janine Roberts

Over the course of a warm, misty morning in San Diego, three distinctly different sessions were packed into three engaging hours, to produce this year's intense, at times provocative, and ultimately invigorating Presidential Plenary.

First came a presentation by Peggy Papp, a clinician working on the East coast (but born in the west), who has spent decades developing innovative ways to help clients evoke and trace the belief systems which inform their values and daily life choices and experiences. With a number of videotaped clips and her analysis, she transported us into the life of a couple (he from the Philippines, and she from New England) who met originally through the poetry they each write.

Next, we heard from John M. Gottman, a researcher who has dedicated a good part of his life - along with others at his lab at the University of Washington in Seattle, - to observing, videotaping, and coding the dynamics between people engaged in long-term relationship. He offered data from longitudinal studies, some running as long as fourteen years, that elucidated interactional patterns across numbers of couples.

With the third hour came dialogue. Conference participants from all over the world who had just heard both of the presenters speak, were ready to take advantage of the opportunity to raise challenges, ask questions, and present their evocative ideas. As one person commented, "I would have liked it if Peggy had called her talk, 'Bridging Three Worlds,' and showed us ways she was transparent with the couple in regards to her own beliefs." Another person raised the questions, "What are the political implications of Gottman's work when couples are all 'averaged' together without regard to class, gender, race, and sexual orientation? The research seems so decontextualized, how could they not be missing unique cultural patterns in the coding?"

Peggy Papp presented her work with her usual clarity and careful compassion. She described how a focus on belief systems and themes and ways they influence people's values and enactment of roles has stayed at the center of her work through years of exploring numerous techniques and models (such as experiential work, communications theory, paradoxical strategic interventions, and narrative work). She noted that she has been particularly interested in how beliefs change over time, and in the elasticity of family therapy to reflect changing values and reconsider what is viewed as "normal" and "abnormal."

In her work with couples, she is always looking to help them articulate where their beliefs, myths, and expectations are similar and different when it comes to love, intimacy, sexuality, money, having and rearing children, and commitment. As she stated, "The quality of a couple's relationship depends on how they are able to integrate and work with their differing beliefs and values."

Ms. Papp talked about the ways in which she homes in on themes to explore with couples. There are no "right" themes, only useful themes. She helps couples unpack their behaviors to look at the beliefs behind them. She listens for attitudinal statements, uses the genogram to track multigenerational messages, and scans continuously for contextual information about each client's background that may inform current thoughts and actions.

To illustrate her and Dr. Imber-Black's work, Ms. Papp showed video clips from a case of a couple who had been married for four years. The issue presented by the couple centered around differing views regarding the necessity of employment and financial support. Victor, the husband, had not worked for several years. He grew up in a wealthy Filipino family and was comfortable continuing to get money from his parents to support them. Isabel, the wife, grew up in New England and started working at the age of fourteen.

The couple described a knot in which they found themselves. Victor stated, "I'm passive. I look for demonstrative, aggressive women." He was as attracted to Isabel's active style as she was to his more relaxed one. As Isabel said, "I thought his style would help me relax." However, after four years of marriage, Victor began to see Isabel's once-cherished style as intrusive, especially regarding the issue of his employment status, while she, in turn, thought he was too "laid-back." Peggy demonstrated how she and Evan helped this couple to open up a different conversation about their dilemmas. For example, they asked Isabel and Victor to each write a poem about how they saw the other person. They read these to each other and were able to hear each other in some new ways.

Ms. Papp also tracked some of each of their familial experiences in regards to class, gender, and ethnicity. Victor talked about how he had learned to be nonchalant, to act nonplussed in order to survive in the US and not "lose face." Isabel shared what it was like growing up as the oldest child in a family with an unpredictable mother who was in and out of the hospital and a father who was passive. I did wonder exactly what the wife's ethnicity was. Being from New England can be quite different depending on if a person is Irish Catholic, Italian, French Canadian, or of Anglo background. If this is not identified, a flattening of white ethnicity occurs.

The presentation ended with some video clips of wonderfully creative masks that Isabel and Victor had each made. These were masks they could put on and off, symbolic for the ways they were unmasking each other and getting to know each other differently. And yes, Victor had gotten a job.

Dr. Gottman focused his presentation on pulling out a number of generalizations, based on his research, about what helps people stay together in long-term relationships and what predicts divorce. He stated that across longitudinal studies, they are now able to predict with 91% accuracy whether couples will stay married or not, or be in what the partners would call a happy or unhappy marriage.

Elements that the research has identified as contributing factors leading to the longevity of relationships include: a ratio of five to one of positive to negative interactions; liberal use of humor; positive affection expressed; consistent turning towards each other and responsiveness to bids for connection that each person makes; seeing each other as allies even when in conflict; and effective, quick repair after conflict.

Two interactional patterns were connected to divorce. The first, attack and defend, where people often are contemptuous of each other, predicts early divorce. The second pattern, which consists of suppression, avoidance, stonewalling and emotional disengagement, predicts later divorce. However, Dr. Gottman did not talk about how patterns of interaction might look different given varied cultural or racial backgrounds of people. Victor, for example, in the case presented by Peggy Papp, identified his nonchalance as a safety mechanism- his way of coping with the demands of living within American Society. Would this be coded as disengagement in Gottman's research?

Based on some of his most recent findings, Gottman thinks that conflict resolution work with couples may be overemphasized. He stated that sixty-nine percent of all marital conflicts are never resolved. What does make a central difference, though, is how each member of the couple responds when there are differences. People stay together when, rather than getting gridlocked around problems, they are able to be playful about them, accept varied perspectives, and gently acknowledge their differences. This is in contrast to couples who feel fundamentally criticized by the way the other partner responds to their differences. So, one way to look at it, Gottman said, is that "a marriage's success depends on the selection of perpetual problems that can be lived with."

Given the number of issues that do not get resolved, a focus for clinicians then might be on conflict regulation rather than conflict resolution. This is one of the many places where Papp and Gottman's presentations dovetailed. Peggy worked with Isabel and Victor to depersonalize some of their different positions by contextualizing them. This helped them to move out of attack/defend interchanges or stonewalling, to dialogue. Similarly, her work with themes and beliefs opened up the attributions the husband and wife had about the other, which perhaps made it easier for them to turn towards each other in new ways.

As Gottman's presentation ended, I experienced a renewed appreciation for the power that mundane, daily moments can have in either encouraging or hindering intimate connections between people. And what did I find, after the conference, when I went to Seattle to visit my 93-year-old stepfather and 82-year-old mother? A copy of Gottman's latest book on my mother's desk!

The dialogue sessions offered up myriad other perspectives to mull over and absorb. Some people asked, "How did Peggy's background influence how she picked up on some themes and not on others?" "How did Peggy decide which video clips to show of the work?" "Did she share these clips with the couple?" "What would be the impact on them of knowing what she choose to highlight from their work together?"

Other people commented on the fact that the focus in both presentations was on heterosexual couples. "How would the conversation have been different if the presenters had talked about lesbian and gay couples as well?"

Another person raised the question, "Is Gottman's research great research for ideas about how to do good therapy?" Her response, "I don't think so. It gives us such a set of prior assumptions. It is too narrow of a map for therapists."

And yet another person asked, "How can we be in conversation with clients about culture, gender, class, race, and sexual orientation, without imposing therapists' perspectives?"

Reflecting back over the dialogue session, I wondered if some of what people were reacting to was that, in the two presentations, they somehow did not recognize themselves - or somehow did not see a clear enough reflection of the complexities of our multiple identities and our couple relationships in today's world. People seemed to be relating the information shared in the sessions to their own lived experiences - experiences as part of a couple, experience with the lives of clients, or with couples in their extended families. Did the descriptions of couple interaction, particularly in the research presentation, breathe enough? Was enough information given about the backgrounds and lives of those being researched? These questions raise at least two questions more for me. One, how can we embed enough attention to context and nuance in the design of research and presentations of clinical work so that they reflect the intricacies of our daily lives in these times? And two, how can we keep bringing the vibrancy of participants at the conference to the somewhat archaic plenary format? Should we have more reflecting teams at the end of presentations? More dialogue sessions? Fewer plenaries?

Whatever the answers to these questions, our plates were full on that San Diego morning. In three short hours we experienced the up-close, deeply-considered clinical view offered by Ms. Papp, dropped back to view things from the longer perspective made available by years of Dr. Gottman's detailed and carefully thought through research, and, finally, spread out to encompass the many informed opinions and insightful critiques of others in dialogue. As one participant said, "I can't imagine having this level of conversation in AFTA ten years ago, or even five years ago."

For me, these three hours were a repast - AFTA at its savory best, and the sort of offering that keeps me coming back to the conference year after year.