Latest / The Conscious Divorce / The Four Horsemen of Relationships
Transcript
- Justin: Picture this, you're sitting across from someone you once loved, maybe still love, and they say something. It's not a threat, it's not a slur, it's just a look. A slight roll of the eyes, a barely there smirk, and in that moment, something in you goes cold. Not angry, but cold. because that look didn't just dismiss what you said, it dismissed you, your intelligence. ⁓ your worth, your place in that room. That moment, that tiny, almost invisible moment is one of the most well-documented predictors of relationship destruction in the history of psychology. And here's the thing that most people don't know. It doesn't only happen in marriages. It happens between partners and children. between colleagues, between you and your co-parent standing in a school parking lot, between you and yourself at 2 a.m. when you can't sleep and your inner critic is running the show. Today we're talking about the four horsemen of the apocalypse, not the biblical kind, the relational kind, the ones Dr. John Gottman identified after decades of research, the pattern so predictive, a breakthrough, that his team could watch a couple interact for a few minutes and forecast with startling accuracy whether they'd eventually divorce. But this episode isn't just about marriage, it's about every relationship in your life, because once you learn to see these patterns, you will see them everywhere. you'll finally be able to stop them. But before we jump in, a quick note. I'm not an attorney, I'm not a therapist, or a financial advisor. Everything you hear on the show is coaching perspective, evidence informed insights, and the real talk that comes from working with so many clients in the middle of one of the hardest seasons of their lives. Please consult the appropriate professional for legal, financial and clinical guidance. All right, let's go. Welcome to the Conscious Divorce Podcast. I'm Justin Milrad. And whether you're in the middle of divorce, trying to build something better on the other side of one, navigating co-parenting, re-entering the dating world, or just trying to understand why certain relationships keep blowing up in your face, this episode is for you. Here's what I want you to understand before we dive in. The four horsemen are not a verdict. They're a warning system. They showed up in every relationship to some degree. the question is whether they're occasional visitors or permissive. When they move in permanently, relationships don't just get worse, they collapse. And the research is clear on this. It's not conflict that destroys relationships, it's how we conflict. It's the habitual patterns we fall into when things get hard. It's what we reach for when we feel threatened, unheard, or overwhelmed. It's not conflict that destroys relationships, it's how we conflict. It's the habitual patterns we fall into when things get hard. It's what we reach for when we feel threatened, unheard, or overwhelmed. Dr. John Gottman spent over four decades studying couples at what became known as the Love Lab at the University of Washington. He didn't ask people to describe their relationships. He watched them. He measured psychological responses. He coded every micro expression, every verbal exchange. And from that research, four specific communication patterns emerged as the clearest predictors of relational collapse. He called them the Four Horsemen. Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Today I'm going to break down each one. what it is, what it sounds like, how it shows up, not just in marriage and divorce, but in co-parenting, friendships, family systems, and the workplace. And I'm gonna give you the anecdotes because Gottman didn't just identify what kills relationships, he identified what saves them. By the end of this episode, you're gonna recognize patterns you've been living inside of, possibly for years, without a name for them. And you're gonna have a roadmap for doing something different. That's the whole game. Criticism. Let's start with the first horseman. And I wanna be precise here because this is the one people most often misunderstand. Criticism is not the same as a complaint. A complaint is specific. I'm frustrated that you didn't call the kids back last night. That's a complaint. It's about a behavior. It's about an event. Criticism attacks the person. You never think about anyone but yourself. You're completely irresponsible as a parent. That's a criticism. It goes after character. It goes after identity. It turns a moment into a verdict. See the difference? says something went wrong. The other says something is wrong with you. Criticism in marriage often starts small. It starts as frustration that hasn't found a clean outlet. Over time, it becomes a habit of framing. The partner who stops being someone who did something you didn't like and starts becoming someone who is something you don't like. Selfish, lazy, inconsiderate, incompetent. And here's what the research shows. When criticism becomes the default mode of raising concerns, it creates a relationship climate of chronic low grade danger. The person on the receiving end learns that bringing up the problem means being attacked. stop bringing things up, or they bring them up defensively, or they start criticizing back and the cycle compounds. In divorce, criticism doesn't disappear when the marriage ends. Sometimes it intensifies. Now it migrates into co-parenting conversations, into the way you talk about your ex to your kids, ⁓ into legal communication. He's always been unreliable. manipulative. The marriage is over, but the pattern keeps running. This is one of the reasons high conflict divorces stay high conflict long after the paperwork is signed. The horsemen don't get filed away, they follow you. And criticism doesn't only live between partners. Think about the parent who responds to their child's report card, not with curiosity, but with a catalog of everything the kid is doing wrong. Think about the manager who responds to every team update with what's missing, what's wrong, what should have been done differently. Think about the friend who, whenever you share something you're proud of, finds the angle you haven't considered or the risk you're overlooking. Over time, you stop sharing. protecting yourself and the relationship quietly hollows out. What does criticism sound like in practice? You always do this. You never follow through. Why can't you just be a normal person about this? I don't know why I expected anything different from you. The words always and never are two of the biggest red flags in the English language when it comes to relational communication. They are not descriptions. They're verdicts. And once someone feels like they've been tried and convicted, good luck getting them to stay open, collaborative, or emotionally present. The anecdote to criticism is the complaint. Specific, direct, and behaviorally focused. I need you to respond to my messages about the kids within 24 hours. It's very different from you're impossible to communicate with. One opens a conversation, the other starts a war. Gottman also talks about using what he calls a soft startup, approaching a difficult conversation with curiosity and specificity instead of blame. It sounds like, I've been feeling disconnected and I want to talk about it, rather than you're always checked out and I'm sick of it. The shift isn't just tonal, it's structural and structurally it changes everything. Horseman two, contempt. research genuinely alarming. Contempt is the single strongest predictor of divorce he identified. not conflict frequency, not incompatibility, not even infidelity in some studies, contempt. So what is it? Contempt is treating your partner or anyone as beneath you. It's communicating from a place of moral superiority, disgust or dismissal. It shows up as sarcasm, eye rolling, mocking, name calling, sneering, and a particular brand of cold humor that's designed not to connect but to diminish. Here's what makes your contempt different from criticism. Criticism says, you did something wrong. Contempt says, you are beneath me. It is contempt that creates the feeling that being in the relationship is not just painful, but humiliating. the psychological data backs this up. People on the receiving end of contempt show measurable increases in stress hormones. Gottman's research found that couples who express high levels of contempt reported more frequent infectious illness ⁓ than those who did it, meaning this pattern doesn't just hurt relationships, it literally affects immune system. Let that land for a second. Contempt sounds like, oh, that's brilliant, really brilliant. The sarcasm says what the words don't. It sounds like rolling your eyes while your partner tries to explain something. It sounds like typical. It sounds like the kind of laughter that's not warm but sharp that tells the other person they're being laughed at, not with. In marriages heading towards divorce, contempt often represents a long accumulation of unresolved grievances. People don't wake up one day and decide to be contemptuous. They accumulate resentment over months or years and contempt becomes People don't wake up one day and decide to be contemptuous. They accumulate resentment over months or years and contempt becomes the way that resentment looks out. It's corrosive and cumulative. contempt is particularly destructive, not just between the two parents, but for the children caught in between. When a parent communicates contempt for the other parent, whether explicitly or through tone, body language, or off-hand comments, children absorb it. the way that resentment looks out. It's corrosive and cumulative. in post-divorce co-parenting, contempt is particularly destructive, not just between the two parents, but for the children caught in between. When a parent communicates contempt for the other parent, whether explicitly or through tone, body language, or off-hand comments, children absorb it. They don't just hear that mom or dad is a bad co-parent. they hear that half of who they are comes from someone unworthy of respect. That's not a relationship message, that's an identity message, and it sticks. Contempt also shows up in workplaces in ways we've normalized to an alarming degree. The leader who publicly humiliates team members, the senior employee who rolls to the rise of the junior person's idea, the meeting culture where certain voices are subtly but consistently treated as less than. Over time, those cultures don't just lose good people. They produce disengagement, fear, and paralysis. Nobody takes risks in an environment where being wrong means being publicly diminished. In friendships and family systems, contempt often masquerades as humor. ⁓ you know how she is, she said with that tone, that slight smile. The whole room knows what it means. The person being discussed knows what it means. But because it's technically a joke, it gets a pass. It shouldn't. The anecdote to contempt is not forced positivity, it's genuine appreciation and what Gottman calls a culture of fondness and admiration. Research shows that couples who regularly express admiration and gratitude, not in grand gestures but in everyday acknowledgement, are significantly more resilient through conflict because the baseline is, I see you, I value you, I respect you, and from that foundation, disagreement doesn't have to become degradation. practical terms, This means building what Gottman calls the positive sentiment override, a reservoir of goodwill that keeps you from interpreting ambiguous moments as threats. When the baseline is respect, you give people the benefit of the doubt. When the baseline is contempt, everything looks like confirmation of what you already believe about them. Building that culture of appreciation is not soft. It's one of the most strategically important things you can do in any relationship that matters to you. Let's talk about the third horseman. And I wanna be honest with you about this one. This is probably the horseman most of us are guilty of most often, including me, including you, including people who read every relationship book ever written. Defensiveness is a natural response to feeling attacked. That's important to say because defensiveness isn't a character flaw. It's a nervous system response. When we feel criticized or blamed, our brain reads it as a threat. And that default response to a threat is to protect ourselves. The problem is, in relationships, protecting yourself often means the other person feels unheard. And when they feel unheard, they push harder. And when they push harder, you defend more. And suddenly, you're in a loop that has nothing to do with the original issue. Defensiveness sounds like, that's not true, I always help with the kids. Well, what about what you did? I was just trying to help. I can't do anything right, can I? Notice what's happening in each of those responses. The complaint that was raised disappears. The conversation shifts. Instead of engaging with the concern, you counter-attack, deflect, or reverse victim. And the person who brought up the original issue is left holding it, unacknowledged, often more frustrated than before. In divorce, defensiveness is fuel for high conflict dynamics. It's why negotiations stall. It's why mediation sessions blow up. because the moment either person feels even slightly blamed, the defensiveness reflex kicks in. And now you're not solving the problem anymore. You're fighting about who's responsible for the problem. Defensiveness in parenting is worth examining too. When your child comes to you with a grievance, maybe about a rule they think is unfair or something you said that hurt them, the defensive response shuts the conversation down. work hard to give you everything you have is not an engagement with what your child just said. It's a defense and kids that learn that bringing concerns to their parents result in their parents defending themselves eventually stop bringing concerns to their parents. You your kids talking to you when things get hard. That requires the ability to receive a complaint without armoring up. In professional settings, defensiveness is a leadership killer. Leaders who can't take feedback without deflecting it become surrounded by people who stop giving them feedback. And that's how leaders get blindsided. Not because problems didn't exist, but because a culture made it too costly to raise them. And Gottman is very specific about this. Take responsibility, even if only partial. You don't have to accept the criticism wholesale to acknowledge the grain of truth in it. You know what? You're right that I've been less present this week. I've been overwhelmed and I haven't communicated that well. That response doesn't require you to compituate. It requires you to actually hear what was said and to respond to it. This is what differentiated emotional maturity looks like in practice, not absorbing every complaint without discernment, not rolling over and agreeing with everything, but staying with the discomfort long enough to actually engage with what the other person is trying to communicate. And here's the thing nobody tells you. Taking responsibility is not weakness. It's one of the most powerful moves available in a difficult conversation. It deescalates immediately. It signals safety. It shifts the dynamic from combat to collaboration. If the other person is operating in good faith, responsibility invites reciprocity. If they're not, it at least gets you out of the spiral. Horseman four, stonewalling. The fourth horseman is the quietest one, and in some ways the most dangerous. Stonewalling is withdrawal. the wall that goes up when the emotional system gets overwhelmed. It looks like silence. Checked out body language, giving one word answers, leaving the room, refusing to engage. Go into your phone, your work, your anything, just not this conversation. Here's what Kotman's research tells us about why stonewalling happens. Because this is important. It's almost always psychologically driven. When heart rates climb above a certain threshold, roughly 100 beats per minute in sustained conflict, the thinking part of the brain starts going offline. The prefrontal cortex, that part responsible for language, empathy, nuance, and problem solving becomes less accessible. What takes over is pure survival response. When people stonewall, they're not usually being strategic. flooded. literally cannot process a conversation in a way that would be constructive. So they shut down or they leave or they go silent and stare at the floor. The problem is from the outside, stonewalling looks like indifference. It looks like contempt. It looks like I don't care enough to engage with you. And that perception triggers the other person escalating the conflict, pushing harder, getting louder, trying to get a response, which floods the stonewall further, which deepens the withdrawal. It's a brutal loop. In marriage, chronic stonewalling communicates to the partner your emotions, your needs, your concerns are not things I'm willing to engage with. Over time, that partner either down to or becomes chronically hyper activated. Always trying to break through, always waiting for the wall to come down. Neither outcome is good for the relationship. In co-parenting after divorce, stonewalling creates operational paralysis. Kids need information to flow between households. minimum a functional communication exchange about logistics, health, activities. When one parent stonewalls, the system breaks down and the kids absorb the friction even when they can't name it. In professional settings, stonewalling by leaders or colleagues create cultures of suppressed conflict. gets resolved, things build up and eventually they explode in ways that damage far more than the original issue ever would have. in our own internal words, ⁓ want to take a moment here because this one tends to get overlooked. Many of us stonewall ourselves. We go numb to our own emotional experience. We stay so busy that we never have to feel the things that are sitting there waiting to be felt. ⁓ drink or scroll ⁓ work or hit the gym obsessively. Anything to avoid being present to our own inner landscape. That internal stonewalling has a cost. It shows up as a disconnection, as emotional flatness, as relationships that feel shallow even when you want them to be deep. The anecdote is not to push through and engage when you're flooded. That's actually counterproductive. The anecdote is what Gottman calls a psychological self-soothing break. You call a timeout, not as an escape, but as a genuine de-escalation. You say, I need 20 minutes. I'm not walking away from this conversation. I'm going to come back. and then you actually do something that lowers your nervous system activation. Not ruminating on the argument, not rehearsing your points, but genuinely down regulating. 20 minutes is not arbitrary. That's roughly how long it takes for the stress hormones to metabolize enough to reenter a difficult conversation productively. key is the reentry. The timeout only works if you come back. And when you do, you bring the willingness to actually engage, not just to wait for the conversation to be over. the bigger picture. Now I want to zoom out. because I want you to see that the four horsemen are not just marriage problems, they're life patterns. Here's what I mean. The criticism you developed as a survival strategy in childhood, scanning for what's wrong, staying ahead of attack, finding the weakness before someone finds yours, that pattern doesn't stop at your relationship. It shows up in how you manage your team and how you parent your kids commentary you maintain about yourself. The contempt that developed from years of accumulated resentment in a marriage doesn't dissolve in the divorce. It looks for new targets. Sometimes it turns inward. I can't believe I wasted all those years. What was I thinking? Self-contempt is one of the most corrosive forces in positive divorce recovery. And almost nobody names it as contempt. They just call it regret or self-awareness. But when it becomes a posture, when you relate to your past self with disgust and dismissiveness, it's the same horseman just directed inward. Defensiveness Defensiveness in your romantic relationship often mirrors defensiveness in your family of origin. If you grew up a household where love felt conditional, criticism came without warning, you learned to armor up. you learned that lowering your defenses was dangerous. And that learned response became the default in every relationship where you feel vulnerable. Stonewalling, especially for men who are statistically more likely to be the stonewaller in heterosexual relationships, though it goes across gender lines, often develops as a coping strategy for environments where emotional expression was discouraged or unsafe. Boys who were told to toughen up, to not be so sensitive, to handle it, they learn to seal off. And when they bring that sealed off version of themselves into adult relationships and wonder why emotional intimacy feels impossible. These patterns ripple through every domain. They affect how you show up as a parent. Children who grew up in homes where contempt is the ambient language learn to relate to themselves and others with that same quality of dismissal. Children who grew up watching stonewalling as a default response to conflict learn to suppress their own emotional needs. These are not destiny. They are tendencies. But tendencies that go unnamed stay in the driver's seat. They affect how you lead. who are chronically create cultures of compliance, not candor. leaders who are contemptuous create cultures of fear. Leaders who stonewall create cultures of suppressed frustration and even mass disentanglement. They affect your friendships. How many relationships in your life have quietly gone cold, not because of a blow up, but because of a slow accumulation of not being heard or not feeling safe enough to bring something real to the table. And they affect your relationship with yourself. How you process setbacks, how you respond to your own failures, how you talk to yourself in the car on the way home. home after a four horsemen their level are about relational safety. When they're present, safety goes down. When safety goes down, everything gets harder. Communication, trust, ⁓ creativity, intimacy, repair, and Building the anecdotes isn't just relationship maintenance, it's the foundation of a well-functioning life. Let's talk about the anecdotes now because Gottman didn't just give us the problem. He also gave us a solution criticism. The anecdote is a gentle startup of the complaint. When something needs to be addressed, address the behavior, not the person. Be specific, own your experience rather than rendering a verdict on theirs. I feel worried when I don't hear back about the kids. Land is completely different then. You never think about how your silence affects everyone else. For contempt, the anecdote is a culture of genuine appreciation. This is not performative gratitude. This is the ongoing practice of actually noticing what you value most about the people in your life and expressing it. Verbally, directly, and specifically. It means building what Gottman calls the magic ratio. Five positive interactions for every negative one. that ratio is the point, but because it builds a relational bank account that makes the conflict survivable. It also means working on your own unresolved resentments because contempt doesn't emerge from nowhere. It's built from grievances that were never addressed, never acknowledged, never repaired. The path to getting contempt out of a relationship is not learning to fake warmth. It's doing the work of actually clearing the backlog. For defensiveness, the anecdote is accepting responsibility, even partial. You might have a point is a sentence that deescalates almost anything. It doesn't require you to agree with everything the other person says. It requires you to actually listen to what they're saying and find the part that has its merit. The ability to do this under pressure when you feel attacked, when your instinct is to counter is one of the most advanced relationship skills there is. and it can be developed. For stonewalling, the anecdote is psychological self-soothing with commitment to re-engagement. Recognizing your flooded signals early. The racing heart, the narrowing focus, the overwhelming urge to leave. Call a timeout before you're fully flooded. Communicate clearly. I'm hitting a wall. I need a break, but I'm coming back. Do something genuinely regulating, walk, breathe, distract yourself with something neutral, and then come back. The last part is a non-negotiable. also meta anecdote that runs through all four. Repair. Gottman's research shows that the master of relationships, the couples and individuals who maintain strong bonds through difficulty are not the people who avoid the horseman entirely. ⁓ of the people who repair quickly when the horsemen show up. Repair is not a sign that the relationship is fragile. Repair is a sign that the relationship is resilient. I to give you something to sit with and a challenge and a reflection, of course. Not a 10 step program, not a quiz, just one question. Which of the four horsemen is your default? Not the one you use the most in conflict, your default. The one you reach for first when you feel threatened, overwhelmed, or dismissed. The one that's been with you long enough that it doesn't feel like a choice anymore. It just feels like how you are. Most of us have a primary and secondary. Criticism and defensiveness often travel together. Content and stonewalling form a particularly toxic bond. One person diminishes, the other disappears. Here's what I want you to notice. These patterns almost certainly predate your marriage. They predate your divorce. They were probably already part of your relational operating system before you ever had your first adult relationship. They came from somewhere. From how conflict was handled in your home growing up. early experiences of emotional safety or the absence of it, from the relationships that shaped your understanding of what's normal. That doesn't make them permanent, it does make them worth looking at honestly. The challenge I'm giving you this week is simple. For the next seven days, notice when one of the horsemen shows up in your interactions. Don't judge it. Don't try to white knuckle your way through it. Just notice. Where did it show up? What triggered it? What did it feel like from the inside? What happened next? Awareness is the first move. You cannot change a pattern you haven't named, and you can't change a pattern you won't look at. The fact that you're here listening to this, that you're already doing the looking. That counts for a lot. I want to leave you with something Gottman said that has stayed with me. He found that the difference between couples who stayed together and those who didn't was not the absence of conflict or the absence of difficult patterns. that the master never criticized or never got defensive. what they did after. The master repaired, they took ownership, they came back to the table, they built slowly and imperfectly a culture inside their relationship where safety was the baseline and rupture was something to be addressed, not ignored. That's a skill, not perfection repair. And here's the thing, that skill doesn't expire when a marriage ends. It's transferable to your co-parenting relationship, to your next relationship, to how you parent, to how you lead, to how you relate to yourself. If you take nothing else from this episode, take this. The patterns you bring into this relationship will follow you out of it unless you do the work of changing them. The most important relationship work you can do, maybe the most important work of your life, is the work of understanding your own patterns and choosing different ones. Not because your ex deserves it, because you do, and your kids do, and every relationship you'll ever be in from this moment forward does. You are not condemned to repeat the patterns you were handed, but you have to see them first. I'm Justin Milrad, and this is the Conscious Divorce Podcast. If today's episode landed for you, I'd be grateful if you shared it with someone who could use it. Also, please follow me wherever you get your podcasts. My book, You 2.0, Divorce a Better Way Forward, and the You 2.0 Workbook are available now on Amazon. and if you're navigating divorce or rebuilding after one and want to talk strategy, you can book a free 30 minute consultation at www.reclaimandreboot.me. Take care of yourself, do the work, and I'll see you next week.