 So we had talked about Dr. Gottman identified these four problem behaviors that come up in relationships and essentially it's criticism, defensiveness, uh, stonewalling and contempt. And within the very first session of therapy, I want for people to identify what their weapon of choice is, which essentially means I don't want you. It's really easy to say, well, my partner's constantly criticizing me. My constant, but they're constantly putting me down. But I don't want to hear about that because I want them to first develop the skill of being able to own what's going on for them. So what is your weapon of choice of those four? Which do you use most often? Because we'll notice that in relationships, it's just one big cycle. So if you're critical, most likely your partner's going to be defending themselves a lot. So that's probably one of the first things that I do is an exercise in taking a look at yourself. What are you doing and owning it? When we talk about these four horsemen, you know, I think a big part of this show is trying to help our audience raise their own self-awareness. And I know myself in understanding emotional bids, becoming a better listener, I had to take a look at myself. So for our audience who, you know, obviously, this is the first time they may be encountering this idea of the four horsemen, how do they identify their weapon of choice? What are some ways that we can go about understanding, okay, you know, I tend to stonewall when I'm in these situations, how do we find that out about ourselves? Criticism would be one of the four horsemen. And essentially, you see something that is not right in your relationship. You see something that you have a problem with. I always use the example, not that my husband would do this, because I would never throw him under the bus. But he just robes next to the bed every single night. And so at the, at the end of the week, there's a pile of clothes next to the bed, because the man doesn't hang anything back up and he doesn't put it in a hamper. So rather than looking at that as a problem and wanting to try and solve the problem, I would come to him and I would say, why are you such a freaking slob? What did your mom do to teach you, raise you up like a man? So now I'm attacking him and I'm criticizing his character by calling him a slob. And I'm taking something that's external, it's a problem, but it's outside of him and his character. And I'm actually attacking his character. So that would be a criticism is complaining about a situation. And rather than complaining, I'm criticizing him. So that would be one is criticism and criticism and defensiveness go hand in hand. So the second one would be defensiveness and defensiveness is essentially feeling as if you're being personally attacked, attacked by your partner. And it could be if I had come to my partner and said, why are you such a slob? He might want to defend himself and he would say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, why are you coming at me with all of this? Have you seen the kitchen right now? You just got done cooking yesterday and all of the dishes are crusted over. So now he's counter attacking by defending himself. So that would be number two is one of the other four horsemen. The third one is stonewalling. And we see stonewalling often in men. Dr. Gottman said that of the ones that he had studied of people who use stonewalling, 80% of them are men. It doesn't mean that women don't stonewall, but it tends to show up more often in men. And stonewalling is when you're physically present with your partner and you're having a conversation. But at some point you check out and you do everything we've talked about body language, your body language is essentially showing I'm disengaged. I'm not interested. I'm not listening to you. And you're putting up a stonewall. So you cross your arms, your eyes are facing down. You're giving your partner zero attention, zero nodding. Right now you're nodding along. That would not be stonewalling. Okay. So stonewalling is a way to self soothe, but it's not a healthy way because if you were stonewalling me right now, I would probably raise, I would raise my voice. I would counter attack. I would do whatever I could to try and pull you out. And it's a nasty cycle that couples get into. That's where I think a lot of times conversations start to escalate. And the person who's stonewalling is really trying to do everything they can, not to escalate the conversation. They're trying to keep it at this level that feels safe. So they're retreating inward. But the listener, the person on the other end of the conversation just continues to escalate, try to break that stonewall down. I've been known to stonewall from time to time. I hadn't noticed that in our 12 years together. No, it's funny. We're both stonewallers. Now obviously contempt, that one is a bad one. That one sounds really awful in terms of trying to relate together in a relationship and stay a couple. And how does contempt come up? Yeah. So contempt is what Dr. Gottman would refer to as sulfuric acid on the relationship. It's the most deadly of all four of these behaviors. And these are all four behaviors that what he says is are predictive of divorce. And that means that if these are showing up in your relationship and you're doing nothing to contain them and you just let them run rampant, of course it's going to deteriorate and start to erode at the health of the relationship. But contempt is particularly difficult because it tends to show up later on in relationships, typically not seen early in relationships with pre-marital or puppy dog love. But over time, you start to think that you're better than your partner and you use language and you're putting your partner down in ways that raises you up and puts them down. Sarcasm, which is unfortunate because I love sarcasm, shows up a lot. But it's basically what you would consider emotional abuse. Your name calling, you're calling your partner a loser. You are telling them that you're smarter than them, funnier than them. And it's not just blatantly calling them out and saying, I'm smarter than you, but it's all of those snide comments that come out on the side that may essentially portrays that you are scum and I'm better than you. And that happens. I believe it was the contempt part where I first had run into Dr. Gottman's work. And I believe it was in Blink. It was in Malcolm Gladwell's book where they were talking about relationships. And that contempt was the thing that they were being able to pick out that would lead to those relationships not being able to be repaired. And of course, when you get to that point, it's pretty difficult for the other partner to feel secure, happy, healthy in that relationship, right? Some of the first, the criticism and defensiveness, that will happen, of course, as a relationship is blooming. But as we get into stonewalling and contempt, we're talking about exactly that sulfuric acid on that relationship. Yeah. What I think is pretty interesting is when you have a relationship and one partner is the recipient of contempt. So if you're incredibly contemptuous of your partner, the recipient of contempt, it actually erodes and wears down your immune system functioning. So it makes you more susceptible to communicable diseases. You're more likely to get sick. And if you think about it, there are some people that you know in this world that are in these nasty relationships where their partners are incredibly contemptuous of them. And they're just not healthy. They call in sick a lot to work. They look worn down. And it makes perfect sense because we know that the health of the relationship determines the health of your life. So Dr. Rotman has mentioned, if you're going to spend money on a gym membership, you might as well be spending money on a couple's therapist instead. That is brilliant. And it's something that we see this a lot when there'll be some older gentlemen who will come through our program and their body language will, it will look as if they've been hit over the head with a, over the back of head with a shovel or they're just carrying the world on their shoulders because they've been so beat down. And it's, when they see that through video work, it's, it's quite a shock to them. And they're like, wow, no wonder everyone is greeting me and reacting to me in such a certain way when I'm projecting this without even saying anything. Yeah. Yeah. Now that we've identified these behaviors, let's work through actually overcoming these destructive patterns. And, and first off, how do we work around criticism? Because I feel like that one is, is pretty easy for all of us to encounter. We recognize it from time to time. And sometimes it's coming from ourselves and sometimes it's coming from our partner. How do we deal with that? Yeah. Yeah. So I think, I think first of all, with all of these patterns, the first step is simply taking the ownership. You have to be able to recognize when they're showing up for yourself and just taking a really honest picture and saying, look, we all do this, even healthy, satisfying happy relationships from time to time, we'll have some of these patterns present. But the difference between what Dr. Gottman calls a master of relationship and a disaster of relationship is that the masters actually notice when these are present and they try to bring in the antidote, which is what we're going to talk about.