Practical Application of Intimate Relationship Skills (PAIRS): a communication tool Table 1

PAIRS Competencies: Emotional Literacy

1. Comfortable with the names and manifestations of the five basic emotions, i.e.,

pain, fear, anger, love, and joy. Identifies and expresses these emotions and can listen

empathically to them.

2. Recognizes defensive overreactions as emotional allergies based on painful

memories. Takes responsibility to reduce, control, and change inappropriate

responses.

3. Recognizes being emotionally open vs. emotionally closed. When feeling attacked,

threatened, or denied, evaluates reality by checking out speaker ’s meaning and intent,

rather than assuming and reacting defensively via rationalizing-explainingjustifying,

withdrawing, avoiding, or fighting back.

4. Expresses pain, fear, and anger without attacking or blaming.

5. Listens without interjecting self-concerns. Creates and maintains emotional safety

for others.

6. Uses anger constructively to assert self, set limits, define boundaries, and

effectively solve problems. Expresses anger appropriately and safely to release

suppressed emotions.

7. Believes in one’s own value. Feels lovable and good enough without having to be

perfect. Accepts having healthy needs and actively pursues getting them met,

including the biological needs for physical closeness and emotional openness in an

intimate relationship.

8. Experiences and expresses emotions of a type and at an intensity that appropriately

fits and that sustains action in accord with one’s purpose, intention, and circumstances

(emotional efficacy).

Table 2

PAIRS Competencies: Conjoint Couple Skills to Create and Maintain Intimacy

1. Confide in one another regularly with emotional openness and empathic listening.

2. Complain to one another regularly (without attacking) including requests for

change. Can listen to complaints without defensiveness.

3. Resolve differences and conflicts by seeking to learn rather than to prevail. Use fair

fighting that involves confiding, empathic listening, complaining with requests for

change, and contracting, effective win-win solutions, all without manipulation and

dirty fighting.

4. Agree on areas of autonomy, areas of consultation, and areas of mutually shared

ownership and decision making.

5. Clarify hidden assumptions and unspoken expectations to minimize misperception

and misunderstanding.

6. Help one another heal pains and disappointments, resolve emotional allergies, and

clarify hidden assumptions. Conjointly heal and resolve emotional allergy infinity

loops.

7. Meet basic needs for sensuality, appropriate sexuality, physical closeness, bonding,

and intellectual and emotional sharing with one another.

8. Follow clear, equal, negotiated boundaries regarding what is private and not shared

with others outside the relationship.

9. Initiate change when the status quo (division of roles, responsibilities, and

privileges) is not satisfactory. Follow through on negotiated changes

Table 3 PAIRS Competencies: Attitudes and Strategies forbSuccessful Long-Term

Relationships

1. Affirm the essential role of regular bonding with an abundance of physical

closenessband emotional openness to sustain intimacy. Satisfactorily blend sensuality,

sexuality, and bonding in marriage.

2. Choose play, pleasure, recreation, creativity, and humor for the relationship to

balance the necessary duties and hard work required to maintain the relationship,

home, family, and economic security.

3. Express important hurt, fear, or irritation directly to each other in words, asking to

be heard and understood with empathy. Recognize that what is left unsaid in a

relationship is of ten more harmful than what is said.

4. Seek forgiveness for hurts inflicted in the relationship by taking responsibility for

transgressions, repairing and restoring damages, and expressing regret for pain

experienced by partner. Partner, in believing the pain is understood, feels assured that

transgressions will not easily reoccur, restores trust and forgives. Let go of grudges

and choose to forgive.

5. Give up being right. Invite and express diversity. Welcome differences as sources

of vigor, perspective, and healthy growth of a relationship. Choose to learn from each

other.

6. Choose trust, truth, mutual respect, and fidelity as the foundation of a lasting,

loving relationship.

7. Extend goodwill and positive intent. Do what is pleasing and satisfying to partner.

Choose to engage in caring behaviors. Be a good leader or a good follower as

each fits.

8. Know each other ’s pleasure and pain buttons. Refrain from triggering negative

reactions.

9. Develop a strong sense of “we.” Have intentional rituals, customs, and styles that

create a unique relationship and family identity.

10. Encourage connecting to friends and community to assure each has adequate

autonomy, independence, and breathing room. Balance the intense closeness and

needful interdependence that is at the center of a permanent passionate relationship.

11. Maintain active connections with extended family and other couples and families

to provide community, perspective, and support for the relationship and family.

12. Regularly express gratitude, appreciations, blessings, wishes, hopes, and dreams.

Positive expressions focus couple and family on desire, fulfillment, and happiness,

rather than on victimization, deprivation, scarcity, outrage, or despair

THE PAIRS PREMARITAL ASSESSMENT

1. a two-hour joint interview with couples to explore their history together,

establish the context of their relationship, and set initial goals and plans for the

assessment Build the trust, connectedness, and collaboration needed.

2. two-hour individual interviews with each partner: an opportunity to discuss

what might be uncomfortable.gather the individual social and emotional

histories—family conditioning, early beginnings, models from the parental

marriage, sibling relationships, decisions and experiences regarding love, trust,

caring, criticism, competition, power, communication styles, and marital role

expectations, including their hopes for the future as well as fears. Beliefs,

expectations, experiences. generate an attitude of openness and growing

curiosity on the part of eac participant about unique histories, and the

conditioning each has brought to the relationship including how differing

styles and expectations may mesh or clash. These individual sessions open

windows to new understandings.

3. a two-hour joint interview for feedback: the PAIRS Dialogue Guide, a

communication tool for complaining without blaming. Hidden expectations,

listening skills, exercise designed to uncover mind reading, The PTP relabels

and reframes many past behaviors and intentions, pointing out how blame is

often not the issue

4. In this joint session and, if needed, in one additional joint session, the PTP

provides possible explanations of issues that have become tangled or difficult

in the relationship. suggestions may also include books to read, specific

exercises to practice, and brief workshops to attend that have proven to be

effective