Chapter 13 Outline
(Italicized words are key words)
I. The nature of intimacy is an interaction pattern, as both your messages and your
partner’s responses make a conversation an intimate interaction.
A. There are characteristics of intimate conversations.
1. Emotional disclosures reveal sensitive, private, and personally
risky information, signaling to our partners the desire for intimacy.
2. Mutual understanding involves partners comprehending what the
other person is saying from both their own and their partner’s point
of view.
3. Warm feelings are the positive feelings you have about yourself
and your partner during and immediately after an interaction,
including happiness, excitement, yearning, peace, gratitude,
contentment, desire, and love.
4. Cohesiveness is a sense of togetherness that we develop from
sharing time, activities, and relationships with others, and creating
a shared identity.
a. Intimate relationships are characterized by partners
who share regular intimate interactions, feel affection for each
other, and trust each other, and are cohesive.
II. Families are made up of people who share their lives over long periods of time bound
by ties of marriage, blood, or commitment, legal or otherwise, who consider themselves a
family, and who share a significant history and anticipated future of functioning in a family
relationship.
A. There are two fundamental dimensions of parents’ communication
with their children.
1. Nurturing parental communication involves parental messages that
encourage a child’s physical, social, emotional, and intellectual
development.
2. Controlling parental communication involves parental messages
that attempt to influence or regulate a child’s behavior.
B. Depending on how consistently and appropriately caregivers respond to
their needs for nurturance, infants develop different working models of
attachment, mental models of whether others are trustworthy and whether
they themselves are worthy of care.
1. Secure attachment is the belief that they are worthy of care and
that others can be trusted to provide it.
2. Anxious-ambivalent attachment—the belief that they are not
worthy of care and that others cannot be trusted.
3. Avoidant attachment—the belief that they are worthy of care but
that others are untrustworthy.
4. Attachment styles are adult perceptions of self-worth and trust in
others.
a. A secure attachment style is having high self-worth
and trusting others.
