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