appropriate. This implies that each person takes equal responsibility for awareness of the problem as it arises, awareness of their own contribution to the problem, and making some fundamental changes in thought and feeling. The next step is to adopt conscious, structural changes to the inter-personal relationships, and evaluate the effectiveness of those changes over time. Indeed, "typically for those close personal relations, there is a certain degree in 'interdependence' - which means that the partners are alternately mutually dependent on each other. As a special aspect of such relations, something contradictory is put outside: the need for intimacy and for autonomy." "The common counterbalancing satisfaction these both needs, intimacy, and autonomy, leads to alternate satisfaction in the relationship and stability. But it depends on the specific developing duties of each partner in every life phase and maturity". Basic practices Two methods of couples therapy focus primarily on the process of communicating. The most commonly used method is active listening, used by the late Carl Rogers and Virginia Satir. More recently, a method called "Cinematic Immersion" has been developed by Warren Farrell. Each helps couples learn a method of communicating designed to create a safe environment for each partner to express and hear feelings. When the Munich Marital Study discovered active listening to not be used in the long run, Warren Farrell observed that active listening did a better job creating a safe environment for the criticizer to criticize than for the listener to hear the criticism. The listener, often feeling overwhelmed by the criticism, tended to avoid future encounters. He hypothesized that we were biologically programmed to respond defensively to criticism, and therefore the listener needed to be trained in-depth with mental exercises and methods to interpret as love what might otherwise feel abusive. His method is Cinematic Immersion. After 30 years of research into marriage, John Gottman has found that healthy couples almost never listen and echo each other's feelings naturally. Whether miserable or radiantly happy, couples said what they thought about an issue, and "they got angry or sad, but their partner's response was never anything like what we were training people to do in the listener/speaker exercise, not even close." Such exchanges occurred in less than 5 percent of marital interactions and they predicted nothing about whether the marriage would do well or badly. What's more, Gottman noted, data from a 1984 Munich study demonstrated that