Gottman the diagnostician

Last year I posted a noxious article* on Gottman and his statistical and descriptive, not etiological and depth, approach to marital problems. I later realized, with ambiguous guilt, that I had condemned him for lacking a résumé he had never claimed to have. In a presentation video, Gottman stated that he was not a “relationship guru” but rather “an expert on how to do research on relationships.” That is, it has not been his purpose to plumb the depths, but simply to declare what behaviors distinguish the “masters” from the “disasters.” I would nevertheless insist, in my defense, that to provide such information is to imply that it can be successfully used; is to imply that troubled couples are essentially doing wrong, not that they are being wrong in their character and psyche. But that would not be true. Most failing couples fail not because it didn’t occur to them to avoid criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling,** but because of faults in the core of their individual psyche.

Nevertheless, I’d say there is a very reliable value to Gottman’s work, a diagnostic value. A hundred therapists will teach the Four Horsemen and their antidote virtues to their clients, but most will find that as time passes nothing has changed, or the relationship has continued to deteriorate. Why is this couple still criticizing and being defensive toward each other when they have it on powerfully researched authority that these actions are harmful? Why does this husband continue to spray his contempt, having learned that this feature is statistically the main death knell for marriages? Why don’t they change after being given the good news of happier couples with their “bids” for emotional connection, their “love maps,” their “fondness and admiration” for each other? In perplexity, the therapist looks at the individual. The husband is “old school.” He can’t enter a new school because the old one is the emptiness and rage inside him: his father’s contempt, his mother’s vacuity of love. He has become the paradox of desperate need grown calluses that distance his wife and children.

And his wife is still a child. She felt “secure” under his harsh and controlling protection, as she had felt with her father, until he became abusive one shove too many one time too many. Now they try to work it out in your office. But this can only mean she re-acquiesces to his control as he pulls a cheap straitjacket around his anger – palliatives to put it mildly. If she actually grew self-esteem, he would feel abandoned again. If he softened his calluses and found his child-deep love and empathy, she would be “bored,” a misidentification of the fear that her walled-off child’s heart would be touched – too painful. At best, the couple would be dissolved to two separate people, two regressed people, unmade to conceivably be remade.

I recommend using Gottman as icing on a successful cake, or as a diagnostic tool: If the horsemen continue to ride high despite your efforts, go deep.

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2018/05/little-rant-1-enough-of-gottman.html.

** Gottman’s “Four horsemen of the (marital) apocalypse.”