{"id":585,"date":"2011-09-01T14:17:28","date_gmt":"2011-09-01T21:17:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/?p=585"},"modified":"2014-04-07T16:33:37","modified_gmt":"2014-04-07T23:33:37","slug":"the-four-horsemen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/the-four-horsemen\/","title":{"rendered":"The Four Horsemen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Relationship conflict isn’t a bad thing\u00a0– \u00a0to be avoided whenever possible.\u00a0 \u00a0Ask any couple who’s been together for years and years and they will tell you that their time together has not<\/em> been without conflict.\u00a0 As U.W.’s John Gottman assures us, the problem isn’t conflict, it’s the way we deal with conflict.\u00a0 According to Gottman 69%<\/em>\u00a0 of marital disagreements are durable.\u00a0 We’ll never get them to agree with our view and we’ll certainly<\/em> never agree with theirs.\u00a0 Think of it….69%.\u00a0 <\/strong>If we really think that the way to end this particular conflict is for one of us to come over to the other’s side, that’s a heck of a lot of frustration we’ll be dealing with.\u00a0 So what happens when we are grinding <\/em>on each other without a sense of resolution?\u00a0 Well, the risk to our relationships, again, isn’t the fact of those perpetual disagreements.\u00a0 It’s our tendency to slip into one, or more, of the negative relationship habits that Gottman terms The Four Horsemen<\/em> of relationship apocalypse.\u00a0 These are Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness <\/em>and Stonewalling<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 Criticism:\u00a0 <\/em>When you don’t just have a complaint about something your partner did or didn’t do, but you criticize their character.\u00a0 It’s not, “I’m really angry that you promised to take out the garbage but didn’t and it didn’t get picked up.”\u00a0 It’s, “You always do this.\u00a0 You are unreliable (or lazy or uncaring or selfish, etc.).\u00a0 Contempt:\u00a0 <\/em>When you begin to nurture an attitude that you are superior to your partner.\u00a0\u00a0 Gottman observes that contempt is incredibly toxic for a relationship and if it is allowed free rein inside a person’s psyche, he can almost guarantee divorce.\u00a0 Stonewalling<\/em>:\u00a0 When one partner shuts down and refuses to engage.\u00a0 It may be the result of emotional flooding that feels overwhelming, but the period for that is fairly limited and the stonewaller<\/em> shuts down and doesn’t re-engage.\u00a0 It leaves the other person hanging out there, exposed.\u00a0 The\u00a0 stonewaller<\/em> thinks their behavior is passive and doesn’t understand that it is experienced, usually, as much more painful and aggressive by their partner.\u00a0 Finally, Defensiveness<\/em>:\u00a0 No matter what I say to you about my concerns, you have a reason, defense or counterattack.\u00a0 I feel unheard and unacknowledged.\u00a0 It is a terribly frustrating and painful experience and will cause me to withdraw to protect myself from feeling so invisible.\u00a0 There are definitely ways to manage perpetual conflict, or conflict on topics that forever seem to defy solution, and these will be brought up in a later post.\u00a0 For now, however, the point is that we need to be ever vigilant for the introduction of any of\u00a0 The Four Horsemen into our relationship when we experience the emotional fatigue and discouragement of disagreements that seem not to have ready solutions.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Relationship conflict isn’t a bad thing\u00a0– \u00a0to be avoided whenever possible.\u00a0 \u00a0Ask any couple who’s been together for years and years and they will tell you that their time together has not been without conflict.\u00a0 As U.W.’s John Gottman assures us, the problem isn’t conflict, it’s the way we deal with conflict.\u00a0 According to Gottman Continue reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[25,21],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":587,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions\/587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}