“Any problem, big or small, within a family always seems to start with bad communication.”                                                                                                                                          -Emma Thompson

Simple and straightforward, The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships by psychologist John Gottman, is a great practical guide to improve communication with your family and others. Gottman and his research colleagues at the University of Washington have been studying couples for over three decades, producing some of the most relevant, practical information on relationships readily available to both psychotherapists and to the general public. This particular book, (Gottman has published many others), addresses the emotional nature of our connections to others and introduces five steps to achieve this mastery and make relationships work better.

The book begins with the simple concept of “bids” which are the numerous ways each of us, with our behavior and words, says to another person,”I want to feel connected to you”. A bid can be a gesture, a funny face, a question, a touch– think of behaviors that happen in a single second or two. We make bids for connection and respond to others’ bids all the time without really thinking about it. Gottman’s research uncovered just how profoundly this bidding process affects relationships. For example, husbands moving towards divorce disregard their wives’ bids for connection 82 percent of the time, while husbands in stable relationships disregard their wives’ bids just 19 percent of the time. Similarly, wives headed for divorce ignore their husbands’ bids for attention 50 percent of the time, while happily married wives ignore their husbands’ bids just 14 percent of the time.

When researchers watched a couple in a typical dinner conversation, the happily married engaged one another as many as one hundred times in ten minutes! Clearly, if we want to improve family communication, it behooves us to figure out how to be appropriately responsive to the bids of our loved ones, whether they be our partner, our children, our parents, or our friends. The five steps that the book describes are as follows:  1.Analyze the way you bid and the way you respond to others’ bids. 2.Discover how your brain’s emotional command systems affect your bidding process. 3.Examine how your emotional heritage impacts your ability to connect with others and your style of bidding. 4.Develop your emotional communication skills. 5.Find shared meaning with others. If you want to improve your awareness of the subtle but important layers of communicating, this is an excellent resource.