What Destructive Communication Styles Are You Encountering: Gottman’s Four Horsemen
What destructive communication styles are you encountering?
If you haven’t come across John and Julie Gottman’s work before, they have been studying how to increase healthy relationships for over 40 years. In 1993, John Gottman published "A Theory of Marital Dissolution and Stability," where he identified four negative acts that are more predictive than others of future relationship dissolution: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. These behaviors are known as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
When one of these horsemen appears in your interactions, you might experience emotional flooding—your body’s natural alarm system for perceived threats. This surge of emotions makes it difficult to think clearly, often leading to a return to one of the Four Horsemen in response.
Which of The Four Horsemen bothers you the most in your professional relationships? And which do you encounter frequently in your personal ones?
Criticism or Blaming: Aggressive attacks on someone’s character, bullying, and domination.
Contempt: Feeling morally superior, hostile gossip, sarcasm, undermining, disrespect, eye-rolling, rudeness, demeaning communication.
Defensiveness (often a response to criticism): Feeling unjustly accused, refusing to take responsibility, playing the victim, not being open to influence.
Stonewalling (often a response to contempt): Disengagement or withdrawal, passive or passive-aggressive patterns, avoidance, going around the chain of command.
What is your go-to response? And what would you like it to be?
As an Organization and Relationship Systems Coach (ORSC), I help teams and individuals explore strategies for improving communication by addressing common relational challenges such as criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. One key exercise is to identify where these behaviors manifest within your team or relationship dynamic. We then discuss effective antidotes, promoting healthier communication patterns.
Is there an area where you'd like to improve your team or relationship communication?
For more information on the Gottmans see:
Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict Into Connection by Julie Schwartz Gottman PhD and John Gottman PhD (Jan 2024) (I will summarize the book in a future blog).
I will also follow up with a post in the future on the antidotes to the Four Horsemen. One hint is to pause and give your body at least 20 minutes to calm down so you can think again. For example, go for a walk, stretch, breathe, and/or practice self-compassion (see earlier blog entry for an example) while focusing on something else.
