Sound House: Building A Solid Homebase
Okay, with 7 floors, maybe this is more of a Sound Mansion. Remember, this was created by Boomers 20 years ago. Over those years, the science resoundingly supports these levels of connection. This Sound House is attainable in real-life with a higher ROI if you intentionally fortify each floor together.
Floor 1: Build Love Maps
How well do you know your partner? How often do you check your assumptions and refresh your knowledge of them? The first level of the Sound Relationship House is founded on understanding your partner’s inner world. What are their likes and dislikes? Do they have any allergies? Who is their ride-or-die? What was their childhood like? How do they prefer to decompress after a long day? Building Love Maps means engaging in curiosity with your partner and sharing your own inner world. Genuinely grokking your partner is key to moving through life, invested in the home you share.
Floor 2: Share Fondness and Admiration
When’s the last time your partner praised how you handled something? Sharing fondness and admiration isn’t only complimenting your partner’s outfit, it’s also verbalizing the characteristics you appreciate. Perhaps you enjoy their sense of humor or admire their eagerness to help. Being able to name the things, big and small, you love about your partner will keep your bond strong.
Floor 3: Turn Towards
How often does your partner engage when you mention something, ask a question, make a gesture of connection? These actions are called “bids for connection.” You and your partner may choose to turn toward those bids, ignore, or even dismiss or belittle the bids or the underlying needs. Ignoring or dismissing are like termites in your house. It might imperceptible at first until the structural damage is too high and feels overwhelming. When we turn towards, we fortify our regard and resilience. This is the number one predictor of a sustainable relationship.
Floor 4: The Positive Perspective
This is what I call Positive Regard. It’s both a noun and a verb. It is the antidote to contempt. We apply this perspective in painful interactions, providing grace that negates the need for forgiveness. It’s consistently believing your partner is doing their best. This doesn’t mean you don’t get annoyed, nor is it making excuses for mistreatment. It is imagining a reason why they forgot something, said something clumsy, etc. It is assigning neutral or positive motivations for their actions because you trust their care for you. Just as you hope they trust yours. Mutually believing the best of each other reinforces your compassion.
Floor 5: Manage Conflict
Conflict is inevitable. Knowing how to navigate it with others is paramount to lessening the frequency, intensity, and fallout.
Here are three things you need to practice for conflict management:
You need to accept your partner’s influence. We’ve talked about autonomy run amok. This is the antidote. To live relationally means to consider the feelings, desires, and ideas of our partners when building a life together; welcoming and validating your partner’s point of view. You can discuss what decisions need to be made as a team and which ones the other has little investment in. This is not capitulating, it’s compromising. A lot of people struggle with this due to Avoidant Attachment or because they weren’t taught negotiation skills. This is something we specialize in at our practice.
Have the hard conversations with loving firmness. Whether problems are solvable or perpetual, be open and honest about your concerns and feelings. When we don’t do this, it leads to assumptions and resentment, both of which slowly poison connection.
When you feel yourself getting heated, what I call activated, during an argument, how do you stop it from spiraling? Self-soothing, mindfulness, or co-regulation techniques such as deep breathing, taking a break, walk, or hugging it out and breathing together without speaking, can be the remedy.
Floor 6: Make Life Dreams Come True
Partnership means having someone with whom to share visions, resources, and encouragement that helps us achieve our goals. Whether it’s going back to school, tackling debt, starting a family, building a home, or moving to a dream location, you’re there for each other and plan together. Working toward these shared goals together demonstrates you both want what’s best for the other and are willing to invest in that future.
Floor 7: Create Shared Meaning
The top floor of the Sound Relationship House is the collaborative version of Love Maps. Together, you build and understand the inner world of your couple. The Gottmans think of it as developing a culture of symbols and rituals that express who you are as a team. These can be as classic as Taco Tuesday and as elaborate as the ways you celebrate anniversaries. These co-created rituals are the landmarks of your relationship(s).
The Weight-Bearing Walls of Trust and Commitment
As important as all the floors of the Sound Relationship House are, they don’t hold together without the pillars of trust and commitment. These are the loaded-up-at-Costco supports and resources that help you weather the hurricanes. When we choose someone, we choose all of them. Wit, humor, gorgeous eyes, flaws, quirks… Trust is knowing your partner will hurt you and they’ll do their best to repair. Commitment is earned through mutual efforts and respect. It’s showing up again and again, when it’s hard and when it’s easy, and finding ways to make it easier more often, tending the love into bigger pots and plots as it grows.
My name is Sky Yeater and I am a Licensed Professional Counselor Associate at the Center for Couples Counseling. I am an LGBTQ+ person and professional passionate about helping couples and individuals find empowerment in their lives and relationships. If you’re looking to grow with new tools and humor, call (832) 827-3288 to set up your free phone consultation. Our Center serves couples and individuals in League City and Houston, Texas and all residents of Texas online!
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