Gottman Four Horsemen

What would you think if you were told that four specific behaviors could be used to predict the likelihood that your relationship would end? That you could distill all of the conflict and all of the noise into four specific interactional behaviors?

John and Julie Gottman make this very claim when they describe their “four horsemen” (a play on the biblical four horsemen that predict the apocalypse).

As mentioned in previous blog posts, John and Julie Gottman are a husband and wife relationship researcher and therapist team on the west coast. They are rockstars of the relational therapy world and have dedicated their careers to collecting a prolific amount of data on couples and couple behaviors-even going so far as to build out a lab in their Seattle home where couples can spend a weekend behaving as they typically would while connected to sensors that collect data on physiological responses and coding behaviors.

One of the major conclusions of their research is the distillation of the four horsemen- or the four behaviors that can predict divorce.

In the following four weeks, we’re going to explore each of these behaviors- criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt.

I’m presenting the behaviors in this order on purpose because while all of these behaviors are not productive for relationship satisfaction, they also tend to invite one another and there are two clear pairings out of these four behaviors. I’ll explain this further in each of their individual posts, but in general, criticism and defensiveness can create their own feedback loop and stonewalling is often a response associated with contempt. The damage of these behaviors is also not created equal and there are some that are easier to ameliorate than others. The good news is that each of these behaviors also has an associated antidote. This creates a roadmap to behavior change and gives you new options for ways to respond to your partner.

Why do these matter?

If you can identify these behaviors and cycles in your relationship, then you can also apply the antidotes to each of these behaviors and you can change the path that your relationship is on from one likely barreling toward dissatisfaction to one that feels more connected, secure, and loving.

Meet me back here next week as we start with the first horseman- criticism.