Melissa Tablada summarizes Dr. John Gottman’s research identifying four harmful communication styles—criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt—that predict marital problems and divorce. She defines each style, gives concrete household examples, highlights contempt as the most serious (linked to worse physical health), and recommends repair attempts (humor, affection, taking responsibility) as ways successful couples fix conflict.
Chapters
All relationships go through hard times. Dr. John Gottman studied marriages for over 40 years and he found that there are four styles of communication that are especially harmful for marriages and actually can be predictive of divorce. Those four things are criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt. Number one is criticism. Criticism is a general negative statement about who somebody is as a person. It's pointing out a character flaw. It's using words like always and never. So for example, we can offer a complaint instead of a criticism. If somebody leaves their clothes all around the house, we can offer a complaint, hey, I don't really like it when you leave your clothes all around. Would you mind please putting them into the hamper? Versus a criticism of that person would be, you're always such a mess. You're a terrible person to live with. We don't want to offer statements like that. Number two is defensiveness. This is a person defending themselves against what they feel is an attack. So it might be a real attack or it might be a perceived attack, depending on the situation. Using the same example of the person who's never picking up their clothes off the floor, a person who's being defensive would then turn the blame onto the other person and maybe accuse them of never taking out the garbage. The problem with this defensiveness is then nobody's validating the other person's complaint and and assuming responsibility for the conversation that's being had. Number three is stonewalling. This is shutting down or withdrawing from the conversation. An example of this would be leaving the room, storming out of the house, or just using less non verbal communication within the conversation. The fourth is contempt. This is a statement or behavior that puts yourself higher than the other person. For example, it could be mocking the other person, putting them down, or correcting their grammar in the middle of an argument. In addition to being emotionally harmful for the relationship, this can also be physically harmful. Those who have contemptuous spouses are actually shown to get sick more often than others. All relationships have some degree of criticism, defensiveness and stonewalling. Yet successful relationships have no contempt within them. This is the biggest red flag. The difference between the successful and the unsuccessful relationships are that successful relationships are the ones making repair attempts. So repair can really look like anything as long as it's a reaching out of one person to the other to try to fix things. The three most common ways that people repair things are by using humor, affection, and taking responsibility. I hope this information was helpful for you and your relationships. If this is something that you want to work on more, feel free to contact me, and I'd be happy to help.
