The Four Toxic Relationship Habits: Gottmans Four Horsemen

Most couples who come to us do not have an unusual problem. They have an ordinary problem that has developed a particular shape, and once you have seen that shape a few hundred times it becomes recognisable within about ten minutes of a first conversation.

At the Energetics Institute we have run a couples practice in Perth since 2005. The four horsemen are the most useful shorthand we know for that shape. This page covers what the four horsemen are, the corresponding antidote to each, and what happens when the antidotes stop working.

We are also going to be straight with you about the research, because almost every page on this subject repeats a claim that does not hold up. That matters more than it sounds, and we will come to it.

What Are Gottman’s Four Horsemen?

The four horsemen are four negative communication patterns that John Gottman identified while watching couples argue on video and coding what they did. Much of that work was done in an apartment style laboratory at the University of Washington, known as the love lab, where couples were filmed and monitored while they talked.

The name comes from Revelation, where four riders herald the apocalypse. Gottman borrowed the horsemen of the apocalypse as a label for four behaviours he found clustered in couples whose marriages later ended. He used it in a peer reviewed paper in 1993 and popularised it in a trade book the following year, and it has been the most quoted idea in couples work ever since.

The four are criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling. Gottman calls them a cascade, meaning they tend to arrive in order, each one making the next more likely. What makes the framework useful is not that these are bad things to do, which everyone already knows. It is that they are specific enough to catch yourself doing.

What Gottman’s Research Actually Shows

Here is the claim you will read everywhere, including on pages written by people who should check. Gottman’s research can predict divorce with over ninety per cent accuracy.

That figure comes from studies where a statistical model was built using couples whose outcomes were already known, then scored against those same couples. That is a measure of how well the model describes the data it was made from, not a prediction. When independent researchers built a comparable model and then tested it on a fresh sample of 528 people in 2001, accuracy on the original sample was ninety per cent, and on the new sample the rate of correct divorce calls fell to twenty nine per cent. A separate attempt to replicate the Gottman models in an independent sample of 85 couples in 2007 concluded that the major findings failed to replicate.

The Gottman Institute concedes the point on its own research FAQ, where it says what can be claimed is that a couple is behaving like the couples in the group that later divorced. That is a fair statement and a much smaller one.

Do The Four Horsemen Matter At All?

Yes, and the honest version is more useful than the inflated one.

A 2022 meta analysis pooled 64 studies of couples and found negative communication predicted later relationship quality and later relationship breakdown. The effects were real and consistently in the expected direction, and they were small. Withdrawal inside a demand and withdraw cycle is one of the better replicated findings in the field, with a 2014 meta analysis of 74 studies covering more than 14,000 people linking the pattern to poorer outcomes across the board.

So the four horsemen are a good description of how couples get stuck. They are not a diagnosis and they are not a verdict. Plenty of relationships carry all four for years and recover. The point of naming them is that named patterns can be interrupted, which is most of what couples therapy is.

The First Horseman: Criticism

Criticism attacks a partner’s character rather than a specific behaviour, and that distinction is the whole thing.

A complaint is about an event. You said you would be home by seven and it is nine and nobody rang. Criticism converts the event into evidence about the person. You are selfish, you never think about anyone but yourself, this is who you are. The giveaway words are always and never, because they turn one instance into a permanent trait.

The reason criticism does damage is not that it is unkind. It is that there is nothing to do with it. A partner’s complaint can be answered, apologised for or negotiated. A verdict on your character can only be accepted or fought, which is why criticism reliably produces the second and third horsemen rather than a resolution.

The Antidote To Criticism: A Gentle Start Up

The antidote to criticism is a gentle start up, which means opening a conflict conversation with what you feel and what you need rather than what is wrong with the other person.

The structure is simple and awkward at first. Describe the situation neutrally, say how it landed for you, then make a positive request for something specific. When you did not call, the evening felt like it did not matter to you, and it would help to hear from you if you are running late.

Gottman’s own claim, that the first three minutes determine how a discussion ends almost every time, comes from a trade book rather than a published study, so treat it as a clinical observation rather than a finding. The underlying principle holds up in our rooms every week. Conversations rarely recover the tone they start with.

The Second Horseman: Contempt

Contempt is criticism delivered from a position of superiority, and it is the one couples find hardest to hear described.

It shows up as eye rolling, mockery, sarcasm, hostile humour, name calling and the particular tone that says you are beneath discussing this with. Where criticism says you did something wrong, contempt says there is something wrong with you and everyone can see it. Partners who express contempt are usually not aware of doing it, because from the inside it feels like being right.

You will read that contempt is the single greatest predictor of divorce. We have not been able to find a peer reviewed analysis establishing that, and in the primary 1992 study most often cited for it contempt was not a statistically significant discriminator at all. What we can say from our own caseload is that contempt is the horseman couples find hardest to come back from, because it corrodes respect, and respect is not something you can decide to reinstate. If you want the fuller picture we cover it in contempt in relationships (/articles/what-causes-contempt-in-relationships/).

The Antidote To Contempt: Building A Culture Of Appreciation

The antidote to contempt is a culture of appreciation, built deliberately and daily rather than felt spontaneously.

This is where the famous ratio comes in. Watching couples discuss an area of ongoing disagreement, Gottman found stable relationships ran at roughly five positive interactions to every negative one during conflict, while unstable ones ran closer to one to one. It is worth knowing what that number is and is not. It describes what stable couples did in a small laboratory sample. It has never been tested as a target couples were assigned to hit.

Used as a direction rather than a quota it is genuinely useful. Say the thing you noticed and appreciated out loud instead of thinking it. Contempt grows in the gap between how much you value someone and how much of that you actually say.

The Third Horseman: Defensiveness

Defensiveness is self protection in a conversation that feels like a perceived attack, and it is the most understandable of the four.

It takes two forms. The first is making excuses, which is denying responsibility while sounding reasonable. The second is the counterattack, where a complaint about the dishes is answered with a complaint about the car. Underneath both sits the same position, the innocent victim, sometimes with a layer of righteous indignation on top. What drives it is feeling attacked, and the reflex arrives before any decision to blame does.

The problem is that defensiveness is almost always accurate and almost never helpful. You probably did have a reason. But defending yourself communicates that your partner’s complaint is not going to be taken seriously, which guarantees they will raise it louder next time. That is how a negative cycle establishes itself, and neither person is choosing it.

The Antidote To Defensiveness: Taking Responsibility

The antidote is to take responsibility for your part, even when your part is small and the rest of the account is unfair.

You do not have to accept the whole charge. Find the portion that is fair, say it plainly, and say it first. You are right that the calls have been getting missed, that is on me, and here is what will change. Taking responsibility for one accurate piece does more to de escalate a conflict than a complete and correct defence of the other ninety per cent.

Couples resist this because it feels like conceding ground in an argument about fault. In practice it ends the argument about fault, which is the point. Nobody has ever been persuaded out of a grievance by being proved wrong about it.

The Fourth Horseman: Stonewalling

The fourth horseman is stonewalling, which Gottman defined as the moment the listener withdraws from interaction.

A stonewalling partner stops responding. No eye contact, no acknowledgement, monosyllables, looking at a phone, or physically leaving the room. From the outside it reads as indifference or punishment. It is almost never either. It is what happens after emotional flooding, when someone is so emotionally overwhelmed that the social machinery has gone offline. Feeling overwhelmed to that degree is a physical event, not a choice, and the person on the receiving end almost never reads it that way.

You will often read that eighty five per cent of stonewallers are men. We cannot find a published source for that figure, and it does not appear in the primary studies. What the wider research does support is a modest tendency for men to be the withdrawing partner more often, and one finding worth more than the statistic. When the pattern was studied across 74 studies and more than 14,000 people, it did no less damage when the woman was the one withdrawing. It is the pattern that harms the relationship, not who is doing which half of it.

The Antidote To Stonewalling: Physiological Self Soothing

The antidote to stonewalling is physiological self soothing, which means leaving the conversation properly rather than leaving it while still in the room.

The convention is to name what is happening, agree a time to return, and take at least twenty minutes, on the reasoning that the body needs about half an hour to settle. Walk, sit outside, use slow deep breathing, do something with your hands. What does not work is rehearsing the argument, which keeps the arousal exactly where it was.

Two honest notes. The twenty minute figure is a clinical rule of thumb rather than a tested one, and we have found no trial showing that timed breaks improve outcomes. And a break only works if you come back. A break announced and then abandoned is stonewalling with better manners, which is worse, because now there is a broken agreement as well.

How The Four Horsemen Feed Each Other

The reason these four are grouped together is that they are one process, not four problems.

It usually runs like this. A complaint arrives as criticism. Criticism produces defensiveness, because being told who you are leaves nothing else to do. Defensiveness reads as not being heard, which escalates the criticism, and somewhere in the repetition it acquires the tone that makes it contempt. Contempt floods the other partner, and the flooded person stonewalls. The stonewalling is then experienced as the ultimate proof of not mattering, and the cycle restarts with more force.

This is why working on one horseman rarely helps much. Couples who only fix their start up still hit the same wall, because the negative cycle has three other entry points. The work is on the loop.

Why The Antidotes Fail When You Are Flooded

Here is the part most articles leave out, and it is the reason couples decide the antidotes do not work for them.

Every antidote on this page is a skill requiring access to language, perspective and impulse control. Those are precisely the capacities that go offline when you are flooded. Telling a nervous system in a defensive state to produce a gentle start up is like asking someone to do mental arithmetic while sprinting. The technique is fine. The conditions for using it are absent.

This is why our work is somatic as well as conversational. Before you can use any of this, you need to be able to notice the shift in your body a few seconds before it takes you, and you need enough regulation to stay in the room while it happens. Learning what your own escalation feels like from the inside, the jaw, the chest, the moment the room narrows, is the part that makes the scripts usable. Without it couples end up with a vocabulary for their negative interactions and no more ability to change them, and the connection they were trying to protect keeps thinning.

What Not To Say In Marriage Counselling

Couples often ask what they should avoid saying in the room. The answer is the horsemen, in their most common phrasings.

You always and you never are criticism. Whatever, and any version of that is just how you are, are contempt. That is not what happened and what about when you are defensiveness. Silence, or being fine when plainly not fine, is stonewalling. The other one worth naming is bringing a prepared case, because a session spent proving a point is a session nobody uses.

The useful reframe is that the subject matter of your arguments matters much less than people expect. Couples usually nominate money, sex and parenting as their top three marriage problems, and the research is that the topic barely predicts anything. The process does. It is not what you fight about, it is what happens while you fight about it. We cover the content side in common relationship issues (/articles/common-relationship-issues-brought-to-couples-counselling-sessions/).

When The Four Horsemen Signal Something More Serious

There is a line between destructive communication patterns and abuse, and it is worth stating because no other page on this topic does.

The four horsemen describe a pattern two people are caught in, where both contribute and either can interrupt it. That is different from a relationship where one partner is controlling, frightening or monitoring the other, where contempt is sustained and one directional, or where withdrawal is used deliberately as punishment. Couples work is not the right setting for that, and joint sessions can make it less safe rather than more.

If any of that is familiar, 1800RESPECT is available on 1800 737 732, and in Western Australia the Women’s Domestic Violence Helpline is on 1800 007 339 and the Men’s Domestic Violence Helpline is on 1800 000 599. Please speak to someone individually first.

What This Looks Like In Practice

These are composite examples drawn from our couples work, with identifying details changed.

A couple in their forties arrived describing a stonewalling husband. He was not withdrawing to punish her. He had learned by nine that raised voices preceded something worse, and his system shut down before he had a say in it. Naming the flooding changed how she read the silence, and that alone took the heat out of it.

A couple in their thirties had no shouting at all and a great deal of eye rolling. Both described the relationship as low conflict. What had actually happened was that criticism had been driven underground and had come back as hostile humour, which is harder to name and harder to answer.

A couple in their fifties could both recite the four horsemen and neither could use the antidotes. They had the language and no capacity to apply it once the conversation was moving. Six sessions on regulation did more than three years of technique had.

Frequently Asked Questions

The questions we are asked most often about the four horsemen.

Which Of The Four Horsemen Is The Worst?

The usual answer is contempt, and we would put it slightly differently. The most reliable evidence suggests the behaviours that quietly end a conversation, sarcasm, avoidance, withdrawal, cause more consistent damage than blunt confrontation does. One study of 207 couples found direct criticism actually predicted stable satisfaction in couples facing genuinely serious problems, because it got the problem addressed. The horsemen worth fearing most are the ones that stop the discussion, not the ones that start it badly.

Can A Relationship Survive The Four Horsemen?

Routinely, and most of the couples we work with are doing exactly that. The presence of all four means the pattern is entrenched, not that the relationship is over. What predicts recovery in our experience is whether repair attempts still land. If one of you can reach for the other mid argument and the other can accept it, even clumsily, there is a great deal to work with.

Is Stonewalling The Same As The Silent Treatment?

No, and the difference matters. Stonewalling is involuntary shutdown under emotional flooding, and the person is usually distressed rather than calm. The silent treatment is deliberate, sustained withdrawal used to make a point or exert control. The first responds well to self soothing and better timing. The second is a different problem and sometimes a more serious one.

Can One Partner Stop The Four Horsemen Alone?

Partly, and it is worth doing. If one partner reliably changes how they start conversations and stops defending reflexively, the cycle loses most of its fuel, because these patterns are interactional. What one person cannot do alone is repair contempt or rebuild respect, since both require the other partner to participate.

Are The Four Horsemen The Same As The Gottman Method?

Not quite. The four horsemen are one part of a larger clinical framework called the sound relationship house, which also includes ideas like love maps, the practice of knowing your partner’s inner world in detail. The Gottman method is the therapy built on that framework. The horsemen are the most portable piece, which is why they travel so well on their own.

Getting Help With Destructive Communication Patterns

If you recognised your relationship in this page, that is worth something on its own. Most couples living inside these destructive patterns cannot see them from the inside, and talk about the situation as their partner being difficult rather than as a cycle both of them are maintaining. Helping couples see the loop rather than the blame is most of what the early sessions of relationship counselling do.

What we would leave you with is this. The four horsemen are a good map and a poor prophecy. The research behind them is more modest than the marketing suggests, and it has never shown that these patterns decide anything about a particular relationship. What it does show is that emotional distance is built out of ordinary, repeated interactions, which means it can be dismantled the same way. Couples do not usually need better arguments. They need to be able to stay in the room, and that is a capacity you can build.

We work with couples on exactly this at our Inglewood rooms and online across Western Australia, evenings and Saturday mornings included, with no referral needed. Call us on 1300 956 227, book a session, or read more about our couples counselling (/couples-counselling/) and the questions we ask in a first session.