Keep Track of Your Emotional Bank Account

By Leslie Becker-Phelps, PhD

Consider your relationship: How happy are the two of you? When something goes wrong, how quickly do you turn on your partner? Relationship expert and researcher John Gottman has proposed the idea of an emotional bank account to help people think about, keep track of, and manage their happiness as a couple. Just as you can make deposits and withdrawals from your traditional bank account, you can make deposits and withdrawals from your relationship’s emotional bank account. And, just as the balance in your traditional account affects how financially safe or insecure you feel, the balance in your emotional account affects how safe or insecure you feel in your relationship.

When your emotional bank account is high, you think positively about, and feel warmly toward, your partner. So, when he or she makes a mistake, this ‘withdrawal’ from your emotional account still leaves you with plenty to feel happy about. For instance, if you are cooking together in the kitchen and your partner accidentally steps on your toe, you are likely to laugh it off if your account is even moderately high. But when your account hovers around zero, you might respond with some nasty retort. Of course, greater offenses translate to greater withdrawals. Your account needs to be a bit higher to manage well through your partner forgetting your birthday or anniversary, being snippy with you for no clear reason, or not asking about the results of an important medical test.

Being truly close and vulnerable with each other means that you will sometimes step on each other’s toes or accidentally trip each other up. So it’s important that you work to keep your emotional bank account high.
Some ways to keep your account high are:

Remember the little things count: All the little things not only count, but they are the building blocks of our daily lives. So, be courteous, show and declare your love, and be appreciative of what your partner adds to your life.
Be attentive and supportive: To feel cared about, your partner needs for you to take an interest in him or her. When they talk about their day, truly listen.  When they struggle with a problem or are excited about a new interest, be supportive.
Do something special: Going out of your way for your partner can add lots to your account. Thinking about what’s important to your partner can be a great guide. So can just paying attention to their daily habits. Depending on habits and interests, you might bring them great happiness by bringing home donuts, giving them an “I love you” card, or just picking up your dirty socks.
Remember important dates: Even if you aren’t great with remembering dates, you can always plug important ones into your calendar. You might even make a note a few days ahead to pick up a card. This can work equally well with birthdays, anniversaries of the day you met or your wedding, and when your partner has some important meeting at work.
Fight with mutual respect: Every couple argues or has disagreements. When you do, always keep your communication respectful.
Keep it positive: According to research conducted by Dr. Gottman, healthy relationships have five positive interactions to every negative one.

By thinking in terms of an emotional bank account, you can gauge the strength of your relationship. If your account is dangerously close to zero, build up that balance. But it’s not wise to wait for that to happen. The best strategy with any relationship is to make regular deposits a matter of course, ensuring that you maintain a healthy balance and a healthy relationship.

If you would like to join a general discussion about this topic on the Relationships and Coping Community, click here.

Three Sacrements of Dialogue

Presence   Directness   Immediacy

Speaking with meaning to the injured order of existence
in which we each have a part.

Presence
 “Here Am I”

Characterized by focus, intensity and attentiveness to what is happening between you and another. What  matters is the person(s) in front of you and the fragile link between you.

Directness
“When Deep Calls to Deep”

Neither understated nor brutal but committed to due consideration, requires courage, respect and fidelity to your own truths and convictions. Directness anticipates risk and reaction, and demands fortitude and endurance.

Immediacy
“This Very Moment”

Happening here, now, cannot be delayed, deferred or repeated. It cannot be duplicated, replicated or reconstructed. This very moment can be a starting place, an end point, a jump-off point or a point of no return. In and of itself, this moment is singular and unique like a snow flake that leaves it mark and melts away. This moment awaits your presence.


Beautiful Sentiments from Trustcounts.org

Freedom

We are at our core, responsible for ourselves.  Sartre said that we are the authors of ourselves.  Through the choices we make and do not make; our action and inaction; we ultimately design ourselves.  The responsibility for this design is ours alone.  We are, as Sartre stated, “condemned to freedom.”

Our freedom extends beyond our individual life design.  We are the ones who provide form and meaning not only to our internal world but the external one as well.  We come face to face with outside world only as it is processed through our senses and perception and psychological filter.  Reality is not at all as we imagined in our youth—we do not enter into and (ultimately leave) a well-structured world.  Instead we play our role; our part in constituting that world.  We assign office and function to our world as though it appears to have an independent existence.

Because of this reality, the ground beneath us is not certain.  If there is no structure, then what, pray tell is beneath us?  Existentialists call it, Das Nichts—nothingness; the chasm, the abyss of freedom.  At the river’s edge of this lake of nothing are deep currents of anxiety.

While the word freedom rarely flows in the clinical relationship between client and therapist, its derivatives—responsibility, willing, wishing, deciding—are inescapable foci of attention in the therapeutic relationship.