How does he do it? He has figured out that he doesn’t need to pay attention to everything that happens. I was overwhelmed by the task of counting negativity, because everywhere I looked, I saw negative emotions. Gottman is far more selective. He has found that he can find out much of what he needs to know by focusing on what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.
“You would think that criticism would be the worst,” Gottman says, “because criticism is a global condemnation of a person’s character. Yet contempt is qualitatively different from criticism. With criticism I might say to my wife, ‘You never listen, you are really selfish and insensitive.’ Well, she’s going to respond defensively to that. That’s not very good for our problem solving and interaction. But if I speak from a superior plane, that’s far more damaging, and contempt is any statement made from a higher level. A lot of the time it’s an insult: ‘You’re a bitch, you’re a scum.’ It’s trying to put that person on a lower level plane than you. It’s hierarchical.”
…”Contempt is closely related to disgust, and what disgust and contempt are about is completely rejecting and excluding someone from the community…”
Highly interesting. It is not even a book on relationship. It is about thin-slicing. Blink. The power to think without thinking. Malcolm Gladwell. Some other topics are, military strategy and rivalry between Coke and Pepsi. Saved me from the boredom of 3 consecutive no-power-nights.
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