It’s the Pattern

If you’ve been having the same fight over and over again, you might be surprised to learn that it’s not about the dishes. Or the phones. Or the kids.

Decades of research from Dr. John Gottman suggest that the topic is usually not the real issue. What matters much more is the pattern couples can fall into during conflict.

What trips us up?

Gottman identified the four communication patterns (known as The Four Horsemen) that tend to repeat themselves and derail arguments:

Criticism – attacking your partner’s character (“You never help around here

Defensiveness – protecting yourself instead of listening (“That’s not true, I did it yesterday”)

Contempt – sarcasm, eye-rolling, or disrespect (“Wow, you’re unbelievable”)

Stonewalling – shutting down or withdrawing (silence, leaving the room, checking out)

Once couples fall into this pattern, conversations tend to escalate quickly. One partner criticizes, the other gets defensive, the tension rises, one or both withdraw. One client described it as “a feeling like we’re on a runaway train, and we cant use the brakes”. Usually the pattern takes us far down the tracks before we can even recognize it. It doesn’t seem to matter what the issue is, we argue in the same way, with the same inevitable negative outcomes.

Why do we behave this way ?

When something important feels at stake to us – like feeling disrespected, taken for granted, or not listened to, we each tend to default to what couples therapist Terry Real describes as our “losing strategies.”
These include:
 trying to be right (“I’ve read the parenting books, you haven’t”)
 controlling your partner (“just do it like I’ve told you”)
 unbridled self expression (“I’m just saying how I feel”)
 retaliating (“fine, I wont talk to you either”)
 withdrawing (“yeah, whatever”)

Most of us can recognize at least one of these strategies within ourselves, for example one partner is more likely to escalate (being right) and the other is more likely to pull away (withdrawing). Over time we get stuck in these roles.

We develop these strategies over the course of our lives as ways to protect ourselves, but while any of the strategies may protect us personally in the moment, ultimately they damage connection because they lead to the Four Horsemen, which we know from the Gottman research to be the biggest predictors of relationship demise.

A Way to Think About Conflict

As I talked about in last week’s email, conflict in relationships is inevitable, and a way to help you have productive conflict is to begin paying attention to what your losing strategy might be and how this contributes to the pattern between you and your partner.

Once you can see the pattern, you’re no longer doomed to repeat it.