The Admiration Reinstatement Drill: A Couples Therapy Intervention for Moral Contempt

Sunday, February 22, 2026.

Most couples do not begin by hating each other.

They begin by admiring each other’s competence.

You loved that she could organize a 14-person dinner party without breaking a sweat.
He loved that you could negotiate a vendor contract in under ten minutes.

You loved that he remembered your sister’s birthday without prompting.
She loved that you knew how to fix the thing that everyone else had given up on.

Admiration is how we first register someone as capable of affecting our lives in good ways.

And then, slowly—almost imperceptibly—it begins to collapse.

Not because your partner became less competent.

But because conflict reorganizes perception around threat.

The same executive functioning you once admired now feels controlling.
The same emotional sensitivity now feels volatile.
The same independence now feels withholding.

And eventually, during arguments, your partner stops appearing in your mind as an agent—

and starts appearing as a problem.

This is the moment moral contempt begins to flood the conversation.

Not irritation.

Not frustration.

Contempt.

“You always…”
“You never…”
“This is just who you are.”

Global statements.
Character indictments.
A sudden flattening of the person you once found impressive into a single, exhausting trait.

When this happens, the nervous system is no longer negotiating behavior.

It’s responding to perceived moral threat.

And moral threat produces flooding.

Heart rate climbs.
Working memory narrows.
Interpretation becomes increasingly categorical.

Your partner is no longer someone who did a thing.

They are someone who is a kind of person.

And once that shift occurs, repair becomes neurologically improbable.

For decades, relationship researcher Dr. Howard Markman urged couples to discipline their perception in a very specific way: to assume that their partner possessed what he sometimes called a clean heart—that beneath the misfire, the missed cue, the forgotten errand, was an intention that was not fundamentally hostile.

Not perfect.

But not malicious.

Markman wasn’t asking couples to be nice.

He was asking them to preserve a representation of their partner as someone acting in good faith—even when their behavior was inconvenient, clumsy, or emotionally tone-deaf.

Because once your partner’s behavior is interpreted as morally contaminated—lazy, selfish, indifferent—your nervous system stops negotiating with a person and starts defending against a threat.

And threat perception is where admiration goes to die.

Over time, I began to notice something in-session.

Couples didn’t just lose sight of good intent during conflict.

They lost access to competence memory entirely.

The partner stopped existing as someone who occasionally failed—

and became someone who was fundamentally defective.

Admiration didn’t decline.

It went offline.

Which meant that Markman’s clean-heart assumption—so clinically useful in theory—had nothing to attach itself to in practice.

If your partner no longer appears capable, their intent becomes irrelevant.

Which is why we use the Admiration Reinstatement Drill.

This is not gratitude practice.

It is not compliment exchange.

And it is definitely not a request to “say something nice” while you’re angry.

It’s a regulatory intervention designed to restore the representation of your partner as a basically well-intentioned agent before the argument continues.

When We Deploy It

You hear moral language enter the room:

“You’re just selfish.”
“This is what you do.”
“You don’t care about anyone but yourself.”

That’s your cue.

Admiration has dropped offline.

And with it, the assumption of clean intent.

The Ground Rules

For the next three minutes:

• You must generate three examples of your partner’s demonstrated competence from the last 72 hours.
• No vague, global traits allowed (no “She’s a great mom”).
• Only observable execution (what did they actually do?).
• Your partner is not allowed to interrupt or dispute.
• You must remain in the domain currently under dispute.

If you’re fighting about parenting, you cannot cite financial planning.
If you’re fighting about money, you cannot cite emotional support.

Stay local.

The Procedure

Step 1: Identify the domain of conflict.
“Division of labor around the kids.”

Step 2: Name the moral attribution aloud.
“ I’m thinking that you’re irresponsible with their schedules.”

Step 3: Suspend the attribution (therapist-enforced).

Step 4: Generate three recent domain-specific competencies.
• You packed lunches for all three kids yesterday.
• You coordinated the dentist appointment.
• You emailed the teacher about the reading issue.

Step 5: Repeat each example out loud.

Step 6: Notice what happens to your anger.

You are, in effect, being asked to argue with someone you have temporarily agreed not to villainize.

Which is a different physiological task altogether.

This is the part life partner don’t expect:

Your partner has not apologized.
The issue has not been resolved.
Nothing about the logistics has changed.

And yet your emotional intensity often drops.

Because global devaluation has been interrupted.

Competence has been reintroduced into working memory—

which allows Markman’s clean-heart assumption to become cognitively available again.

You should also know:

This drill frequently feels humiliating in minute one.

Because when you are flooded, recalling your partner’s competence feels like betrayal of your grievance.

That’s the treatment effect.

You are reintroducing agentic representation into working memory at the exact moment contempt would prefer categorical dismissal.

Relationships rarely collapse because of one failed task.

They collapse because repeated tasks are interpreted through global moral frameworks until admiration becomes neurologically unavailable—

and once admiration goes offline,

good intent becomes unbelievable.

Therapist’s Note

The Admiration Reinstatement Drill is one of several structured interventions we use during intensive couples therapy to restore partner-as-agent representation in moments of escalation.

If your arguments have begun to shift from behavior to character—from what happened to who your partner is—this is exactly the kind of work we do during our 1- and 2-day intensive couples therapy sessions.

You can learn more about how these interventions are used in real time on our Couples Therapy Now page, or reach out through the contact form to see whether an intensive might be appropriate for your situation.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Admiration Reinstatement Drill

Is this the same as pretending my partner has good intentions?
No. The Admiration Reinstatement Drill does not require you to assume that your partner’s current behavior is justified or harmless. It restores the representation of your partner as a competent agent before continuing the discussion, which makes it more neurologically possible to evaluate their intent more accurately.

What if my partner really is being selfish or irresponsible?
That may ultimately be true. This intervention does not eliminate accountability conversations. It delays moral conclusions long enough for behavioral negotiation to occur without physiological flooding.

How is this different from positive thinking?
Positive thinking replaces negative interpretations with more flattering ones. This drill reintroduces recent, observable competence into working memory so that global character judgments are less likely to form under emotional stress.

Does this mean I should excuse repeated failures?
No. Patterns still matter. The intervention is used to prevent single incidents from being interpreted through global moral frameworks before those patterns are examined more deliberately.

Can this be used after trust has been broken?
Yes—but not to reinterpret verified harm. It is used to reduce escalation during present-day conflict that is being filtered through betrayal-based assumptions.

Why does this often feel uncomfortable at first?
Because contempt depends on categorical interpretation. Recalling your partner’s competence while angry can feel like undermining your grievance, even when it increases the likelihood of a productive conversation.

Continue Exploring Structured Couples Therapy Interventions

If you found the Admiration Reinstatement Drill helpful, you may also want to explore:

• The Parallel Universe Intervention: How Couples Therapy Creates Sudden Relationship Insight.
• The Obligation Density Audit: Why Resentment Often Begins with Unchosen Roles.
• Epistemic Safety in Relationships: Why Feeling Understood Matters More Than Being Right.

Final Thoughts

Sometimes the argument isn’t about what your partner did.

It’s about whether you still experience them as someone capable of trying.

And that distinction often determines whether repair feels like collaboration—

or surrender.

Be Well. Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Markman, H. J., Stanley, S. M., & Blumberg, S. L. (2010). Fighting for your marriage (3rd ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Markman, H. J., Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M., & Peterson, K. M. (2013). A randomized clinical trial of the effectiveness of premarital intervention: Moderators of divorce outcomes. Journal of Family Psychology, 27(1), 165–172.

Salvi, C., Luchini, S. A., Pestilli, F., Hanekamp, S., Parrish, T., Beeman, M., & Grafman, J. (2025). The white matter of Aha! moments: Insight problem solving is associated with lower fractional anisotropy in left dorsal language pathways. BMC Psychology, 13(1), Article 102. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-025-02045-7