A couples therapist recommends books about relationships

There are a small number of relationship self-help books I recommend to clients on occasion, when it feels like a text might be helpful. The ones I like are the ones that do, in written form, a version of what good therapists do in the room with clients, which is to iteratively experiment with language to see which formulations resonate best. The idea is to frame and reframe the same basic ideas in different ways, expecting that most will fail to penetrate but a few will lever someone open, an inch or two at a time, creating the space for positive change.

This kind of experimentation is necessary, because the human brain is brilliant at erecting defenses and then holding on to them for dear life. A strong relationship with a good therapist can be the best predictor of therapeutic success, but even with that, we all have a tendency to make the same self-sabotaging mistakes again and again (and again). And even our therapeutic successes are typically subtle and not particularly gratifying. Real change is extraordinarily hard, particularly when the distressed equilibrium is between two imperfect people, as it is in couples therapy. It’s impossible for anyone trying to help us to know in advance what insight, story, analogy or phrase might sneak through to help us grow.

For this reason, there’s not a right relationship book, full stop, for everyone. What can sometimes be the case, however, is that there is a right one for you right now. It might be in the form of a chapter here and there. It might be nothing you can use right now, but a single phrase that lodges in your brain and then silently germinates for months or years before finally blooming when the conditions are right. None are the answer to all your problems, but the best offer ideas, language, metaphors and stories that may be of use.

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I wish I could give you a simple algorithm for which book or author is most likely to prove helpful to you but I can’t. I don’t know you like I know my clients, and these books don’t know you either. The following books, however, are ones that I have found helpful in my practice:

Psychologist Sue Johnson’s “Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love” is oriented around two ideas. One is that most of us have the same fights, over and over again, and most of those fights follow a few basic universal patterns. The second idea is that beneath the explicit content of these fights — money, sex, in-laws, jealousy, failing to put down the toilet seat — are dances of wounded or failed attachment. We’re fighting because we’re deeply dependent on our partner for safety, reassurance and nurturing, and we’re terrible at admitting that to ourselves and at lovingly seeking it out.

Gary Chapman’s premise in “The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts” is that while most of us are trying, most of the time, to give and receive love from each other, too often we’re broadcasting and receiving on fundamentally different frequencies. “Your emotional love language and the language of your spouse may be as different as Chinese from English,” he writes. “No matter how hard you try to express love in English, if your spouse understands only Chinese, you will never understand how to love each other.” We will never be native speakers of our partner’s language, but with hard work and compassion we can achieve enough proficiency to make a marriage flourish.

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For therapist Terrence Real, author of “Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship,” we flourish in relationships only when we operate relationally, as an interdependent “us.” When there is conflict, and there will always be conflict, the question in a high-functioning relationship can’t be who is right or wrong, or what is true. It is: What is best for the relationship? Almost everything else, including notions of truth and objective reality, is irrelevant and dispensable. “Functional actions in a relationship are moves that empower your partner to come through for you,” he writes. “Dysfunctional actions are those that render your partner paralyzed.”

This is easier said than done, of course, and much of the advice in these books is intended to incrementally diminish and dislodge the reactive tendencies that take over, in most of us, when we are in conflict with our partner. Real, for instance, spends a great deal of time in both “Us” and his prior book, “The New Rules of Marriage,” trying to help readers envision how they might constructively raise issues with their partner. He recommends the use of the “feedback wheel,” which is a highly structured series of steps for converting what could be the destructive venting of a complaint into a loving and pragmatic request for present or future action.

John Gottman, the godfather of modern couples therapy research, tends to focus more on draining conflict of its destructive energy by altering the context in which it occurs, in particular by building up our reservoirs of love and positive affection. The more we can make deposits in our “emotional bank account,” he argues, the less our relationships will be ruled by how we (inevitably) disappoint each other. To this end, Gottman writes in “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work,” it is essential that we enrich our “love maps,” our detailed and intimate knowledge of our partners — their hopes, dreams, fears, favorite foods, most potent childhood memories, feelings about friends and families, favorite movies, etc. “Without such a love map,” Gottman writes, “you can’t really know your spouse. And if you don’t really know someone, how can you truly love them?”

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In books like “Wired for Love” and “In Each Other’s Care,” psychologist Stan Tatkin is particularly good at evoking the frightening intensity of what it feels like to be triggered by our partners, the sudden neuronal cascades of fear, anger and hurt that can suddenly take us out of our mature selves and deposit our psyches somewhere between early childhood and primeval animality. The goal when it comes to couples, for Tatkin, is that we nudge our brains to the point where we can share a healthy “couple bubble … the mutually constructed membrane, cocoon, or womb that holds a couple together and protects each partner from outside elements.” Many of the exercises he prescribes — like developing a customized “bubble trouble meter” to help identify when your bubble is starting to fray — are aimed at better aligning our bodies and brains to each other, bringing them into a neurobiological harmony that reinforces the couple bubble.

Two things are simultaneously true of all these relationships books. They are humane texts, full of wisdom and insight into contemporary relationships. And they are very hard to integrate, because (as mentioned) it’s really hard to change. If you spent the next year closely reading each of these relationship books, and practicing in good faith the exercises they recommend, it would have an enormously positive impact on your relationship. But let’s be honest. In all likelihood you wouldn’t be able to follow the full program for one of these books, much less all of them. My husband and I have failed to do it ourselves, and I’m an experienced couples therapist. We’re even writing a book together on relationships and couples therapy.

The very act of reading one of these books, however, and attempting to implement the changes it recommends, is a way of prioritizing your relationship, taking responsibility for caring better for your partner, and committing to your own emotional growth in a way that isn’t selfish. There are no guarantees that this will save or even improve your relationship. But it is an honorable endeavor. And what else is there to do?

Jessica Grogan is a couples therapist in Austin, and the author of “Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self.”

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