The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
A vibe check for your relationships, using Gottman theory understood through a narrative and IFS lens
A very faded heart etched onto the ceiling of a prison cell that I was touring in the states last year. Love in a hopeless place.
John and Julie Gottman are kind of the king and queen of couples therapy. They take an old school approach to therapy, frequently identifying where and how their methods are “research backed” and “proven in a lab,” even though they had their own researchers review their own work and the lab they’re referring to was a lab they constructed and designed for their own purposes. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why “evidence based practice” isn’t necessarily the same thing as actual “best practices,” but we live in a neoliberal world where quantifying the subjective realm of therapy is a way to grasp on to expertise (and, therefore, money) so here we are. John and Julie are extremely popular, and very wealthy. Their clinicians are printing worksheets for couples and following a formula for each session, client disposition, tension or desire be damned.
I took their training because the couples I work with kind of expect it or think they want it, and also because it’s best to really understand the dominant or mainstream methods so that you can go rogue and refute them with methods that are more flexible, assume greater intelligence and capability from the part of the people receiving the service (aka the client) and expect nimbleness from the practitioner versus that removed, expert stance. We walk the same paths our clients do. Don’t give your money to or ask for help from anyone who pretends differently.
If you’re in the biz and clutching on to notions of expertise in order to market yourself or feel good in sessions, find someone to help you understand why you need that cloak of pretending in order to meet people where they’re at.
The above is the metaphorical grain of salt that I had to mention before we get down to business actually exploring one of the most famous, and actually quite useful theories they came up with: the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Riffing on the New Testament notions of the horsemen that predict the end of times, the Gottmans came up with four traits of relationships that predict collapse:
-criticism
-contempt
-defensiveness
-stonewalling
I’m going to go through each one of the horsemen, starting with the Gottman definition but then reframing that through narrative therapy (which, remember, is based on poststructural theory) and Internal Family Systems theory. I’ll explain each one using examples from pop culture to keep my clients and my own fraught relationships out of it. The four horsemen are present in relationships of all kinds: intimate partners, friends, coworkers, parents and kids, siblings, roommates, any kind of connection. For ease of the discussion, I’ll be focusing on intimate connections but feel free to locate these examples in whatever relationships come to your mind.