Behind the Gottman Method with Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman

Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (00:00):

I would love the Gottman Method to become like Velcro where everybody's using it. Nobody can remember who invented it. It would just be great if it was widely dispersed, taught in high schools, taught in college, whatever. In terms of people creating relationships that are successful, that's one thing.

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Michael Fulwiler (00:25):

This is Heard Business School, where we sit down with private practice owners and industry experts to learn about the business of therapy together. I'm your host, Michael Fulwiler. Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, welcome to the show.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (00:43):

Thank you so much, Mike. It's wonderful to see you.

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Michael Fulwiler (00:47):

It's such an honor to have you on. I wanted to start just by expressing gratitude to you. I have talked about this on the show, but I worked at the Gottman Institute from 2011 to 2020, and it really changed my life, and I really owe that to you. I wouldn't be hosting a podcast for therapists if it wasn't for the Gottman Institute and working with you for all of those years.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (01:12):

Oh, that's so wonderful. Thank you so much, Mike. You were such a welcome, wonderful addition to the Institute and really helped build it. So we love that you're doing well.

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Michael Fulwiler (01:26):

Thank you. Well, we have so much to talk about. I'd love to start with your origin story. So you were born in Portland, Oregon into a family of generational trauma. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (01:40):

My grandparents immigrated from the Ukraine on all sides. My grandfather walked across Russia between the ages of 14 and 16, chased by Cossacks and moved it to the US, a very strong guy. And on the other side, my grandmother smuggled into a sailor's duffle bag and sat in the duffle bag for three weeks on a boat getting out once a day at night, and they came to the United States to be free of the pogroms, the horrible riots that massacred Jews that were occurring at that time, turn of the century of the 19th to the 20th century. And then my mother was born. Where was she born? Ohio. And her father, my grandfather unfortunately incested her, and that occurred for quite a long time. And also he was very violent towards my mother's mother. So lots of trauma on that side. On the other side, not so much.

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(02:54):

It was pretty good. Five kids, my dad was the oldest. He was the only one that went to college, also went to medical school. And basically when they married after medical school, they looked for an apartment. But at that time, which was during the time of Henry Ford II and World War II, no apartment would rent to Jews in Detroit. Henry Ford II was a famous antisemite, and he dropped leaflets all over Detroit saying, don't rent to Jews. So with the last name of Schwartz, that wasn't going to fly. So they got a lot of doors slammed in their faces and finally decided to move to Portland, which I'm eternally grateful for. And so I grew up there and it was a wonderful place to grow up, though difficult.

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Michael Fulwiler (03:51):

When did you first become interested in psychology?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (03:54):

As soon as I was born, I think, golly, I wouldn't have called it psychology, but my mom was a very, very disturbed person, as you can imagine with that background. And so she started confiding in me when I was about seven maybe. And at eight she tried to commit suicide, and after that she was massively depressed. And around the time that that suicide occurred when I was eight years old, I realized people really needed help. Obviously she needed help, and I didn't know anything about psychology. My dad, who was a cardiologist, didn't believe in it, but I didn't have any friends. Instead, I had a caseload. So I had kids who were coming to me all the way through high school wanting to talk about this and that. And it was a nice way to hide out, not feel myself, but at the same time be connected to other people in a caring way. So I would say probably around 10 was the age that I really locked into becoming a psychologist.

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Michael Fulwiler (05:05):

I read that you were, when you were 18, your parents sent you on a trip to Europe where you visited the concentration camps. What impact did that have on you at the time?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (05:15):

Well, 18 is pretty young, but at the same time, I'd already been exposed to pictures, stories, all of the history of the Holocaust. And in fact, in World War II, I knew that many of my Russian relatives who had so far survived the pogroms and so on, many of them were killed by the Nazis. As the Nazis invaded the Ukraine and Russia sent everybody to Poland. That trip really brought home the reality of the Holocaust, going to Auschwitz, going to Dachau, going to Mauthausen, seeing the scratch marks on the walls of the gas chambers, seeing the ovens, it made me realize why the Jews in this country have always tried desperately to assimilate and keep a low profile. And when somebody wishes you merry Christmas, you say, thank you very much. Though I stopped doing that when I was about 20 saying, thank you, but I'm Jewish, I celebrate Hanukkah. I kind of rebelled against that low profile instruction. So it had a huge impact, and I've never forgotten it. I can bring the images back in a heartbeat, and it's an incredible legacy, but it's not our only legacy as Jews. So it's there in a big way.

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Michael Fulwiler (06:46):

You end up at undergraduate school in Colorado. How did you end up there?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (06:52):

Skiing. So I wanted to be, and I was a ski racer and really, really, really loved Alpine, giant Slalom was my event. And Colorado College had a great ski team, and I had heard they were very good scientifically and had a good psychology department. So I got admitted there early and it was very different than I thought it would be. I mean, I loved the skiing, of course, in the first year. And it turned out though, that psychology was all about rats. And pigeons in those days we're talking late sixties, early seventies. There were no humans that were studied. It's like, okay, clean the cages. Alright. So I did as a psycho assistant, but I created 11 independent studies, found a really wonderful closeted humanistic professor who let me do that. And so I got to study humans only on my own. And in those days, what psychopathology meant, and during college helped to create one of the first jobs I had, which was creating a hotline counseling center and drop-in center for Colorado Springs. Because in those days, Vietnam vets were coming back and really needing help as drug addicts and so on. And people were trying to escape the draft and people were taking LSD that was contaminated and having horrible trips. And there were lots of pretty difficult things, particularly for young people at that time. This hotline that we created was a very positive experience in serving not just a few individuals, but the community at large.

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Michael Fulwiler (08:55):

That's amazing. Is that the counseling center?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (08:58):

It was called Terros, and it still exists. I think actually.

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Michael Fulwiler (09:01):

That's also so interesting about psychology, because when you think about psychology today, I think about clinical psychology. But it sounds like at the time it was more about research on animals.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (09:12):

That's correct. It was all about behaviorism. B.F. Skinner was a big deal, and he studied animal behavior and created a lot of theory around reinforcement and positive, negative reinforcement and so on, and proved to be wrong about a lot of stuff. But anyway, at that time he was popular, and so were rats and pigeons.

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Michael Fulwiler (09:38):

You go to Northeastern in Boston for graduate school, did you go right after undergrad or was there a time in between?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (09:45):

No, no, no. I worked for a couple of years, and that work consisted of working in halfway houses with people who were schizophrenic, working in the Roxbury black and Puerto Rican ghetto with a drop in counseling center. And also working with Massachusetts General Hospital in their outpatient heroin treatment day treatment program. So worked a lot with heroin addicts at that time, and they taught me a tremendous amount actually. So has typically working four jobs at a time, which I've always done for some odd reason, and making money as a secretary, which my mom always wanted me to be. And so I was a secretary for a cancer research center.

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Michael Fulwiler (10:38):

Did you do that job for your mom or because you needed the money?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (10:41):

Oh, to pay my rent, yes. Paying my rent.

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Michael Fulwiler (10:44):

I read, yeah. When you were in Boston, something we've talked about as you worked in the combat zone, what is that and what was that experience like?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (10:51):

Well, the combat zone is part of Roxbury, and it's one of the poorest areas, and the reason they called it the combat zone, where there were gangs there, the gangs were fighting each other and so on. And that was the drop in counseling center I worked in. And Mike, at that time, it was the era of busing when they first started busing kids from their native school where they lived to a white school or a black school, depending on the opposite your skin color was, and it was God, it was horrible. There were buses that would come into the combat zone, heading back home, bringing kids back home, and there were windows broken out in the school buses. White people had been throwing rocks at them through the windows. We had to patch up the kids on the way home. It was really horrendous. It was a very difficult time.

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Michael Fulwiler (11:54):

Why do you think you were so drawn to work in these conditions that were really challenging and with clients that were really struggling?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (12:02):

I never was interested in the worried, well, as some folks are called out there, I guess I saw so much suffering in my home. It felt familiar, and I don't know, I've always been drawn to helping with extreme poverty, and it could be just the fact that I grew up with so much privilege. My dad died when I was young, but up until then at 21, I'd had school, I'd had piano lessons, I'd had nice clothing, a nice house, everything that any person could want. But it always felt to me like Disneyland. I was always conscious. I was following the news and so on as a young person that there were, most of the world was far worse off than we were. And I got kind of a, I don't know, I guess I'd call it a mystical message because I slept in the forest all the time as a kid instead of at home.

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(13:09):

And the trees said to me, someday, you'll use this pain to help others. And I think I was about 10 when that happened. And getting polio at 11, I think, and having that for a couple of years and all the stuff that went with that, all the bullying sensitized me even more to people who were struggling and in pain. It was pretty easy to relate to those people after some of the experiences I'd had. And I wanted to do whatever I could. I was just a kid. I didn't really know much, but I just always felt more comfortable with those folks. And especially for some reason, I always felt more comfortable in black neighborhoods than white ones. So that's what I ended up doing.

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Michael Fulwiler (13:59):

It makes sense when you grow up around so much trauma and you are born into a family of generational trauma, like we talked about, you can't help but be influenced by it. And so it makes sense to me why you would be drawn to working with those populations, even though you say that you grew up also with a lot of privilege.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (14:18):

Yeah, yeah. That seems to be true.

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Michael Fulwiler (14:20):

So is that why you went to India and Nepal?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (14:24):

Yeah. So here's how that came down. So I had gone to Boston right out of college. My dad had died. A lot of things had changed dramatically at that time I, for my life. So took a big chance. I'd met my first husband the summer after my dad died. He invited me to move in with him in Boston. And I thought, well, what the heck? What else have I got to do? So I did. But at the end of college, I had gone into a Buddhist monastery. I'd had a lot of kind of mystical things happen to me without drugs that had been happening since I was a young kid. So I was looking for a community of people that could relate and identify with some of the stuff I had experienced. So I went into a Buddhist monastery in Denver, and that influenced me profoundly.

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(15:21):

But behind those four walls where we meditated, we had three week long silent vigils. There was a lot of prayer. That was one way to help people that I could experience, but it wasn't enough. And again, that feeling came back of wanting to really see how the rest of the world lived. And I had returned with my first husband from Boston to Portland again, and I had worked in a psychiatric locked ward for about two and a half, three years. And we saved up our money. And then I told him, well, listen, I've got to go to India as people do. And I was very certain that needed to happen. And so he was okay with that. So we had saved up $3,000, and the tickets, the airplane tickets were about $1,500 flying through Moscow. That's not Idaho, that's Russia. And to get to India, and I lived in India, we traveled for quite a long time, and then I settled in Calcutta.

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(16:41):

He went home. I settled in Calcutta and fed kids on the streets. And we're talking, when was this? 19 77, 78. So there was no technology, there was no middle class. And the poverty was everything nightmarish that Americans thought of as the worst cases of life outside of Africa. And I had to adjust a lot to living in India. And we spent whatever, $1,500 for a year of living. So lived extremely cheaply, stayed in Indian hotels, but the mountains. I had learned how to rock climb and mountain climb in Colorado and really were, I was so strongly called to the Himalayas, I just had to go. And so eventually after Calcutta, we moved up north to Nepal, and I did some trekking and some climbing in Nepal and lived in Kathmandu for a while and had a crazy story of getting into my program where I'd gotten a telegram that I had been admitted to the school I really wanted to go to, which was the California School of Professional Psychology.

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(18:00):

It had several campuses. And so I called the campus, I'd applied to first, and they said, you idiot, we sent you a telegram a month ago. Where have you been? We filled up our spaces and try going to San Diego. I've heard one opening. So I called them and they had one opening, and they were interviewing for it in 36 hours. So I had to get from Nepal to San Diego in 36 hours. So I take a bus down to Calcutta. I take a plane from Calcutta to Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh. The air conditioning, of course, was broken in the airport there. So I slept on the floor. It was 108 degrees along with everybody else, and then got on a plane to la, which was a million hours, and then rented a car. Now, mind you, I hadn't driven in a year because I'd been in India and drove from LA to San Diego, stopped at a gas station, washed up, changed my clothes, and walked into the interview. And I was kind of half crazy. I mean, I hadn't slept for 48 hours. I actually got in. But later on, I read my file and it said, high potential, but high risk.

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Michael Fulwiler (19:32):

High risk of what?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (19:34):

Insanity or fatigue, one of the two.

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Michael Fulwiler (19:39):

Did you then accept a place in that program, or did you end up somewhere else? Okay.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (19:43):

Yeah, I did. That's where I wanted to go. And it was a great program because it was one of the three places in the country, the whole country that extensively taught psychotherapy as well as doing a PhD in research. So you were getting both sides, and most other programs only focused on research with almost no psychotherapy training. And I didn't want that. So that's what I did.

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Michael Fulwiler (20:13):

So you get your PhD, and then did you work continue in the community or did you at that point start your own practice?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (20:20):

Well, at that time, I had no idea of where I was going to wind up after I defended my dissertation. But after that, I just packed up my car, didn't have much, and drove north and had some mishaps with my car being broken into, and my Walkman was stolen, all kinds of crazy stuff in San Francisco where I really wanted to live because my brother lived there, but San Francisco either didn't like my car or didn't like me. So I kept driving north and ended up in Seattle. And within three days, I got a job working at what was called then the Seattle Mental Health Institute. And that was a huge community-based center that really helped the chronically mentally ill. It helps lots of people. And at that point, they tried an experiment where they set up a private practice in a wealthier area. That's where they put me, and that's where I worked doing actually private practice, but under the auspice of Seattle Mental Health Institute. And I got a salary, pretty low salary, and took all the practice money, turned it back to SMHI, the institute, so that could help pay for the programs that they were also funded. And I did that. Let's see, I did that for about two years or so and got licensed. You had to have postdoc hours to get licensed. So I completed those, got licensed, and then started my own private practice. And incidentally, six months after I moved to Seattle, I met John. Wonderful John Gottman.

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Michael Fulwiler (22:15):

Sure, you've told it a million times. But for folks who haven't heard.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (22:18):

I walked into a coffee shop one day and John was sitting there, and I guess he had just come from outside, and he had those sunglasses that turned dark outside, and then they lighten up when you go inside.

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Michael Fulwiler (22:34):

It's really cool sunglasses.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (22:35):

I know. I mean, he looked, I mean, and he was wearing a leather jacket, black leather jacket. He looked really cool. He looked like my ideal type, a New York urban Jewish intellectual. What could be better for a nice Portland girl? Only the opposite. But anyway, I was going to a party and he asked me to have coffee with him. And I said, okay. And the reality here, there's another story I don't tell many people, but you're my friend, so I'll tell you. And that is that I'd had a vision of who I was going to end up marrying after I divorced my first husband. I'd already done that years earlier. And the vision was like a photograph from the back where I could see every stitch of the clothing. I mean just like a closeup focus detail, the hat, the hair, the shape, everything. And so I sat down across from John and talked to him, and we had a really great conversation.

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(23:40):

And then he got up to pay the bill, and I turned around and I looked at the back of him and I went, oh my God, that's it. That's the photograph I saw in my mind. And I immediately became terrified. It's like, uhoh, now what? What's going to happen? So long story short, he proposed five months later in a Chinese restaurant, but Mike, you have to hear the story of their proposal. This is what he said. He said, Julie, what do you think about the idea of marriage? And we're eating General Tso's chicken at the moment? And I say, the idea of marriage, you mean like the institution of marriage? What do I think about the institution of marriage? I figured it was an intellectual question. And he said, no, no, no, no, no, you, me, marriage. I said, oh, are you talking about married? And he said, yes. I said, oh, well, let me think about it. And I thought about it for about 45 seconds, and I said, okay. And then we kept eating our General Tso's chicken.

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Michael Fulwiler (24:52):

So no ring, no down on one knee?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (24:54):

No, no, no, no ring, no knee. He wasn't athletic enough to get down on.

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Michael Fulwiler (25:02):

Okay, well, that stuff doesn't matter anyway.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (25:04):

No, it really doesn't.

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Michael Fulwiler (25:06):

So were you working together at the time?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (25:08):

No. No, not at all. No. I was in private practice and I was working primarily with PTSD, lots and lots of trauma clients, folks who suffered from personality disorders, borderline problems, severe depression. That, of course went along with PTSD, sometimes addiction problems as well. So I was kind of putting all that background work in Boston to use also in Seattle when I worked for the institute first. And I did that for quite a long time after we married, let's see, must have been, I don't know, about six, seven years, something like that. But meanwhile, John and I had married, and eventually we had our daughter, Mariah. I was almost 40 when I had her, and I'm still in private practice. But every night John would come home. He was doing some fabulous cool research, and I got really intrigued by it. We'd talk about his research over dinner, Mariah, our daughter, would be incredibly bored, and she'd say, can I be excused?

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(26:19):

Yes. And so we'd talk research and eventually, it was just so fascinating. It was just so cool. I really got fell in love with that whole field and thought, gosh, if I can help one person to live a better life, how much better it be if I could help two people live a better life? And by then, I certainly knew that good relationships were very fundamentally important in not only psychological health, but physical health and longevity, and made a huge difference for people. John and I were in a canoe canoeing one day off the shore of Orcas Island, and I said to him, honey, have you ever thought about taking this stuff out of the ivory tower and building some theory and maybe some interventions around it? I think that would just be so cool, we could really help people. And he said, well, gee, I've never done that before.

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(27:24):

Well, let's do it. We could do it together. And so we did. And a couple of years later, so we're now up to where are we, 95 or so. John got a fantastic job offer from Northwestern University to work with their family therapy and research center. And he had a very dear friend, a couple of friends actually who worked there, and he got this fantastic research position there where he'd get his research funded and he'd have a decent salary. And by then we had moved John's mother from the east coast to Seattle. And so she'd been there for I guess about four years maybe. And she and I ganged up against John, poor John. She was very strong woman, incredible woman. I adored her. And I said to John, honey, you can go, but I can't go. I just can't go. I can't live in the flat lands. Chicago was flat. That was my reason.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (28:41):

And I lived part-time in Nepal, and I had mountains, and I grew up with mountains, and I grew up with skiing, and I grew up with climbing and la, la, la. So I had to have mountains. I cannot survive without wilderness and mountains. I have to have them. We can have a long distance relationship. And his mother said, well, I'm not moving either. Poor Johnny was outnumbered, and Mariah didn't want to move. She had some friends already. And so we all stayed in Seattle, and we decided to begin the duplication of what that family center in Chicago had been doing, which is therapy and research. And so John was still at University of Washington then doing research, but we started the Gottman Institute with one other person. We knew about a business, starting a business, nothing absolutely ignorant. But I heard about this woman named Etana at that time. Her name was, and I'd heard she was a fabulous program developer and director, and all of that takes some business acumen too. And I reached out to her and it just so happened that she really wanted to leave the Jewish Community Center where she was working and wanted something even more meaningful. And so when I told her what we wanted to do, she was really excited and happy, and she joined us. And the three of us sitting around our little dining room table invented Gottman Institute, and it started full-time in 96.

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Michael Fulwiler (30:38):

I love the story. John likes to say that he was making a good living watching couples deteriorate. He didn't actually want to help people. So let's put this.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (30:47):

It's true.

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Michael Fulwiler (30:48):

Yeah. Let's put this on the record. There's no Gottman Institute. There's no Gottman Method without Julie Gottman.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (30:56):

Oh, well, Mike, thanks. Thank you. Thank you, thank you.

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Michael Fulwiler (31:00):

So how did the development of Gottman Method to couples therapy start? Did it start as a training? Did it start as a manual? What was that process like?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (31:09):

Oh, God, it was really funny, Mike. Well, first John and I had been working on the theory, and we created what we call the sound relationship house. And we also created a lot of the interventions that now we keep teaching though they've been refined somewhat since then. So we decided the first thing we would do is we would have a couples workshop and test out these interventions. And so we had a workshop at Seattle Center, and I think there were, I don't know, 30 couples, maybe 40 couples. And we were very excited that we had 40 couples, and they seemed to like it. And we got evaluations afterwards, and we kept doing that for a little while, and then we decided we really wanted to train clinicians. Okay, well, John had been a professor, so he'd been teaching, actually since he was 17 years old, he started teaching mathematics when he was in college, advanced math.

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(32:19):

Gosh. And so what he did, we passed the word around amongst private practitioners that we were doing a training in this method, and John had already been pretty well known, at least in because the research was so frontier bound and with pretty remarkable results. And it had been advertised, not advertised, but spoken about, reported in New York Times and things like that. So some people, especially clinicians, had heard a little bit about this research. So we gathered together a group in Seattle of about, I think there were about 15, 16 therapists, and here was our first training. Oh my God. So John put together a manual. It was 550 pages long and about 450 pages of it were research papers. They're all research papers. Now, mind you, a lot of people don't know how to read research. Even therapists don't know how to read research. Master's level folks get a little bit of that, but not a whole lot.

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(33:36):

This was pretty advanced stats, this and that. So we sat around and we talked, and John gave this training, and we created a two day workshop that was based on that manual, and people were excited, but they walked out glazed. Then we started an advanced training, and the advanced training, we all sat around a big table. John brought more research papers and everybody was reading research papers. And we'd spend the last, I don't know, 20 minutes talking about cases, couples cases, and finally Etana said, I'm not sure this is really working. Julie, would you take a crack at rewriting the manual? And so I did. One summer, I turned 550 pages into, I don't know, 200 pages or something, and focused in on the assessment techniques and the interventions only with, there were references for the research papers.

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(34:44):

And God, I remember it so well that summer, my daughter was taking some, she was doing a little horseback riding lessons on Orcas Island where we'd go every summer. And I sat outside this dusty hot corral with my yellow notepads writing, just riding this manual because the computers back then were not very good, and they didn't have battery life and all kinds of stuff. So I was writing everything in longhand and finished it by that summer. And then the trainings changed dramatically, and then we started filming the trainings, and more and more people heard about them, and it was pretty cool.

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Michael Fulwiler (35:31):

I'm curious, as you're building the Gottman Institute, as you're developing these trainings, is it pulling you away from your work, or are you still able to do the clinical work? I imagine there has to be some level of sacrifice where you're spending time building the business and it's time that you aren't able to work with clients. And I'm just curious how you navigated and thought about that and if that was difficult.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (35:53):

That's a wonderful question, Mike. Really good question. Nobody's asked me that. Remember that I've always worked four jobs.

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Michael Fulwiler (35:59):

You have a hundred hours a day.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (36:01):

Oh God, that's just about right. I did everything at once, but before I really started working with the Gottman Institute, I was doing 42 clinical hours a week between 42 and 45. And that's insane, but I love the work, so I did it. And so after we started the institute, I guess I probably went down to, I don't know, maybe 30 hours a week, something like that, which was closer to normal. The average is about 25 hours a week and was working every weekend, so almost every week. So it was kind of six, seven days a week around that time. And raising our daughter at the same time.

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Michael Fulwiler (36:53):

Were you seeing clients in person in your private practice in an office? Because imagine this is before the days of virtual therapy.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (37:01):

Oh yeah, sure. This is 90, 96, 7, 8, 9, all the way through.

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Michael Fulwiler (37:09):

You living in Seattle at the time, or are you on Orcas Island at that point?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (37:13):

So we were living in Seattle at the time, and we didn't have offices for the institute. Everybody worked out of their home, but we didn't have Zoom meetings. We had nothing like that. So we all kept meeting. As the staff began to grow a little bit, we kept moving to have our meetings at people's houses who had a bigger dining room table than we did, and we just meet around the table and keep making wonderful decisions. And atna was really helpful in kind of fine tuning the presentation of our materials for people and putting together systems that registered people wanting to come to the couples workshops. We were still doing those and we were, oh, they were growing fast, really fast. We did little tiny bit of advertising, but very little. It was mostly word of mouth. And I think we did a few little radio announcements here and there, and we were generating email lists of people who were interested, and we kept sending printed materials, snail mail of course, to people announcing whatever workshops we were doing. There were no websites at that time, so everything was printed, materials early on, but the numbers kept growing and growing and growing and growing, and eventually there were so many things that were happening. So that was pretty much how we function through the 1990s, let's say.

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Michael Fulwiler (39:02):

As you're building the institute as a for-profit company, how are you thinking about the balance between making money and doing good and giving back in the world?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (39:15):

You are asking the best questions, really. So that always from the very beginning felt like a very narrow, tight rope that I had to work and to walk. John was not active at all in the business stuff. I mean, he was still doing research. Lemme see, he left University of Washington in 2002, but up until then, he was doing a lot of research. He was doing teaching at the university and so on, and he would teach for our institute. But Etana and I and other staff people were handling everything else. I was a clinical director. We hired other people to support the couples workshops and so on. And when John left the university, he started his own nonprofit research institute called the Relationship Research Institute. And so he was still doing research, and so he was really very hands-off everything that was happening in the inner workings of the institute.

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(40:30):

I was really all about mission. I didn't really care about what money we were making, and I was making decent money with private practice. John was making decent money from research grants and the professor's salary, and then later just grants. And we started doing what we call marathon therapy. And Marathon therapy is a three day, five to six hour a day intensive therapy for couples that moves people with tremendous momentum from where they walk in the door to where they leave in a hopefully very different state. And so that brought in decent money as well. So we were doing this whole thing to support ourselves. And John sold his first book. That was the other thing he sold, not his first book, actually, he'd written a whole bunch before that, but they were typically research books. He sold his first book for the public, which was the Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, that first version of it.

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(41:42):

And that happened around 99, maybe must have been around 92, 93. So yeah, Etana and the other folks that were involved in the business clearly wanted to generate profit and money, and most of the money that we brought in for all the workshops we were doing went to pay the staff. So I was getting, I don't know, 600 bucks a month. John was getting nothing. So we had to do all this other stuff to support ourselves. Every now and then we'd give a talk, we'd get paid for that. I was just always wanting to keep focused on the mission. Other people wanted business, and it was sometimes a big struggle. Sometimes it was a big fight, not between John and I, but between me and a couple of other people who were excited about doing things that hopefully would bring in more revenue. So it's difficult. It still is actually.

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Michael Fulwiler (42:51):

Yeah. I was going to say, I remember you and I having a disagreement related to the Gottman Referral Network at one point, because in order to be listed on the Gottman Referral Network, you have to complete at least level two of Gottman Method couples therapy training. And from a marketing perspective, if we reduce that to just level one, there'd be so many other therapists who could be listed. So from a business perspective, it would make sense to lower the requirement. But I remember you saying, no, we can't list these people on our referral network unless they've completed a certain level of training. And so that role that you played over the years as that clinical voice of reason, I think has been super important. And looking back, you were absolutely right.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (43:40):

Yeah, I was though not right enough. 

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Michael Fulwiler (45:33):

I'm curious, throughout the years, you mentioned you and John weren't necessarily fighting and arguing, but I imagine there's got to be certain points where you disagree about something as it relates to the clinical training. So you don't have to get too specific, but I am curious how you two have been able to navigate that intersection of partnership and business, and if you have advice for our listeners who work with a spouse or who are in business together.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (45:58):

Yeah, so we fought like cats and dogs not using the Gottman Method because it hadn't been fully developed yet.

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(46:09):

But when we first started, John wanted a prescribed 14 sessions. You do this session one something else, session two. It was all pre-prescribed, and I was adamantly opposed to that, not how therapy works at all. And people are coming in with their own individual issues and they had their own defenses and so on. We fought and fought for a long time, and as I recall, I won most of those. I won most of those fights, but I really won when John started doing marathon therapy, which I described a few minutes ago. So he was in the therapy office for maybe the first time since doing a little bit of that in during his own educational internship, he got that therapy was not something to prescribe, so he began to give me more respect, I think, and he asked for consultation from me and so on.

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(48:20):

This is a huge thing, especially when husbands and wives are working together, heterosexual couples because it's still a very, very, very, very, very sexist world. And to have, if the husband is getting most of the attention in the business world, to have a husband who says, well, actually, she already answered the question, so I don't need to answer that.

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(49:42):

To do things like that was incredible. Really reinforcing for me. I didn't have much faith in myself either back then and swallowed a lot of that dissing, but eventually I came to realize, no, I think I do deserve a little more attention. Maybe just a little. Yeah. I remember going to a big meeting of all kinds of business, very high level business people in South Korea and about, I'd say 95% of them were men all dressed in black suits. And I and somebody from Yale and a couple of other places, a couple of other women were there out of 200. And the men never addressed me, never talked to me, turned their backs and formed circles with their backs to me, things like that. So as a woman, I mean at first I was a little stunned by all that, then got angry about it, then got used to it, then got more angry about it, and then had the For all you women out there in the business world, it was a really kind of a strange state of being that I had to be in where I would try during interviews to say what I had done.

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(51:12):

Actually, I contributed to this too. I would say things like that, but I always felt like I was bragging, and it felt terrible to do that. And I thought, oh, these people are going to think I'm the B word, not brag, but I don't know. I had to do it anyway, and I finally reached a point where now and then I have to do it, but rarely I don't. Most of the time I don't.

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Michael Fulwiler (51:39):

I remember being in Chicago and we were at this big event, and you were on stage with John, and it was during q and a at the end, and someone came up to the microphone and said, this question is for Dr. Gottman. And without missing a beat, you said, which one? And everyone started cheering, and it was just like amazing moment.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (51:57):

Right.

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Michael Fulwiler (51:58):

I observed it. I saw it happen, and I hated that that happened.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (52:03):

Oh God.

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Michael Fulwiler (52:04):

It didn't feel fair.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (52:05):

No, it wasn't fair. Sexism is not fair, but it existed and you have to deal with it and try to either conquer it or transcend it.

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Michael Fulwiler (52:17):

And it sounds like John was supportive of you, and that was really helpful for your working relationship, but also for your personal relationship.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (52:25):

Yeah, most of the time. Yeah.

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Michael Fulwiler (52:28):

Julie, we could talk for hours. I would love to, I want to be respectful of your time, so I'd love to wrap this up here with a few rapid-fire questions, if you're open to that.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (52:37):

These are always fun.

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Michael Fulwiler (52:39):

Okay, first question, this is a light one. What do you want your legacy to be?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (52:45):

God, what do I want my legacy to be? I would love the Gottman Method to become like Velcro where everybody's using it. Nobody can remember who invented it. It would just be great if it was widely dispersed, taught in high schools, taught in college, whatever. In terms of people creating relationships that are successful, that's one thing. And of course, my daughter and now a grandchild, multiple generation legacy. I'm very proud of her. She's doing her residency in medicine and she's going to give back to the world too, and that's always important.

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Michael Fulwiler (53:31):

What's something that people misunderstand about you?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (53:34):

They misunderstand that I'm actually a total introvert, and I have taught myself through rigorous hard work from going to a party and finding out where the back door is, sneaking out the back door, walking around the neighborhood outside, and then coming back two hours later and going home. Two, actually being at a gathering of people and being able to talk with them fairly comfortable, so people think I'm extroverted. I am the opposite.

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Michael Fulwiler (54:10):

What's something that brings you joy?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (54:13):

Skiing. That's easy. Skiing, my daughter, my grandson, my husband, mountain climbing, hiking, being in nature. Mountain climbing is probably the biggest, along with the people I love.

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Michael Fulwiler (54:29):

With so much political and economic uncertainty right now, what message do you want to send to therapists?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (54:36):

Have faith, have hope. I think there are many people coming into therapy now that are full of despair, full of despair, loss and fear, terrible fear and anxiety, and people are also coming in as couples sitting on opposite sides of a polarized debate. I want therapists to have the tools really to be able to totally empathize and have compassion for folks who are having all those feelings about our political, environmental, immigrant climate today. And whatever side you're on, it doesn't matter. Have compassion for these couples and help them find each other and listen, listen, listen to each other. That's the most important lesson people need right now.

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Michael Fulwiler (55:34):

Finally, what's one thing that you want therapists to take away from this conversation?

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (55:39):

How great you are. I want them to hear these wonderful questions and to really, you speak softly, Mike, but your questions are always deep. They have profound meaning. Some of them, they're personal and respectful all at the same time, and I think your podcast is wonderful and I want people to listen to it. So there.

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Michael Fulwiler (56:07):

Thank you so much.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (56:09):

You're welcome.

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Michael Fulwiler (56:11):

I appreciate you. People don't know this, but you actually married my wife and I, you're the officiant at our wedding. You've had such an impact on me, and I'm just so grateful for you. So thank you for coming on the show.

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Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman (56:23):

Thank you so much for having me, Mike. It was a real pleasure.

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Michael Fulwiler (56:28):

Thanks for listening to this episode of Heard Business School, brought to you by Heard, the financial management platform for therapists. To get the class notes for this week's episode, go to joinheard.com/podcast. And don't forget to subscribe on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll see you in the next class.