When Protection Becomes Poison: The Four Horsemen

This week in the Dance of the Protectors series I’ve brought in Gottmans “Four Horsemen”. They take the Purser Distancer on and raise it! James (another IFS practitioner, kindly agreeing to representing my partner!) and I walk through the somatic and experienced feelings inside the stories we tell ourselves. Also on the inside. Which one of the Four Horsemen we do on the outside which then invites in the next Horsemen in the other ..

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In the 1970s, psychologist John Gottman and his colleagues filmed couples arguing and tracked, in forensic detail, which patterns predicted divource. What they found gave us: The Four Horsemen of the Relationship Apocalypse.

The four patterns: Criticism, Defensiveness, Contempt, and Stonewalling reliably damage connection over time. Gottman’s longitudinal research found that contempt alone could predict separation with striking accuracy.

When we bring Internal Family Systems (IFS) into the conversation we add in a new depth. Gottman mapped behaviourally and IFS helps us understand the dance internally as the movement of parts. Protective parts. Frightened parts. Parts doing their absolute best with what they have 🧡.

This isn’t about letting harmful behaviour off the hook. It’s about understanding it deeply enough to actually change it. As Terry Real writes in Relational Life Therapy (RLT), we cannot transform what we cannot first see with compassion.

Meet the Four Horsemen and the Parts Behind Them

Horseman One: Criticism

“What is wrong with you.”

Gottman draws a crucial distinction between a complaint and criticism. A complaint addresses a specific behaviour: “I felt hurt when you didn’t call.” Criticism attacks the person: “You never think about anyone but yourself, you’re so selfish.”

It’s the difference between “this action” and “this is who you are.”which makes a hugedifference to a nervous system trying to decide if it’s safe.

In IFS a critical voice is likely to be a protective manager (check inside what’s yours?). A part that learned, usually early in life, that going on the offensive was safer than being vulnerable. Or a shadow part modelled on a parent or caregiver. Underneath it? Often maybe an exile carrying shame, fear of abandonment, or a deep belief that their needs won’t be met unless they force the issue. The criticism is armour. It’s trying its best to protect

Horseman Two: Defensiveness

“It’s not my fault, it’s yours.” Or “I was only 5 minutes late”

Defensiveness is what happens when we receive a complaint or criticism and our system hears it as an attack on our worth. We counter-attack, make excuses, or turn it back around: “Well, you’re not exactly easy to live with either.”

The problem is that defensiveness says to our partner: your concern doesn’t matter; my protection does. It effectively ends the possibility of repair before it begins which is sooo painful

In IFS terms thus is a firefighter response mobilising fast to protect from the lightening fast nervous system response - an exile may have awoken, a feeling of hurt or shame. It tries to push down the exile’s deep shame or a terror of being “found out” as not enough. Defensiveness says: I cannot let that accusation land, because if it does, I’ll feel it and get overwhelmed as it might be true and that’ll hurt so bad.

Horseman Three: Contempt

“I am above you. You are beneath me.”

Gottman calls contempt the single most corrosive force in relationships and his research bears this out. Contempt includes eye-rolling, sneering, mockery, sarcasm used as a weapon and name-calling. It’s also an attitude. A tone of voice . It communicates moral superiority. It treats your partner as less than.

Unlike criticism, which attacks a behaviour, contempt attacks a person’s fundamental dignitY.

Contempt often

emerges from a part carrying long-accumulated, unprocessed resentment grievances that were never voiced, needs that were chronically unmet. Maybe here (again check for you?) the inner critic has now turned outward: a part that has learned to protect with harshness through superiority, because inferiority felt too dangerous. In RLT terms, this is grandiosity as a defence against shame.

Horseman Four: Stonewalling

“I am shutting the door. I am gone.”

Stonewalling is withdrawal ie the person goes quiet, looks away, gives one-word answers or simply leaves the room. It often looks like indifference. It almost never is. Gottman’s research shows that stonewallers typically have elevated heart rates as their systems are flooded, overwhelmed, and have gone into shut-down.

In men particularly, though not exclusively, stonewalling develops as a response to feeling physiologically overwhelmed in conflict.

This is the polyvagal shutdown made visible: the dorsal vagal “play dead” response, understood through the body. In IFS language, a part has decided that engagement is too dangerous, exiles are too close and has thrown the breaker switch. (Though it may also be a manager who learned that silence was the only safe response in their original family system.. check what’s right for you). It is likely not coldness, it is maybe more a frightened system protecting an overwhelmed set of exiles.

Relational Life Therapy

Relational Life Therapy adds another dimension here. RLT names these behaviours what it calls the adaptive child - the part of us that learned how to survive our early environment, and now runs our adult relationships using strategies that made sense then but create havoc now. The Four Horsemen are, in many ways, adaptive child strategies brilliant survival moves that have outlived their original context.

RLT also speaks to the role of patriarchal culture in shaping how these patterns play out differently across genders.. not because of inherent difference, but because of what our young people are conditioned to do with vulnerability. Stonewalling is not weakness. Criticism is not cruelty. They are learned behaviours. These aren’t character flaws. They’re protector dances.

Conclusion

Every one of the Four Horsemen started as a solution. A part of you or your partner learned that going on the offensive, pulling away, shutting down, or counter-attacking was the best available option at the time.

The work isn’t to shame these parts into silence. It’s to notice, take a pause. Spot the dance. Invitation to get curious. Befriend them. To slow down enough to ask: what is this part of me afraid of? What does it need me to know?

You are not your protectors and neither is your partner.

References

Gottman, J.M. (1994). Why Marriages Succeed or Fail: And How You Can Make Yours Last. Simon & Schuster.

Schwartz, R.C. (1995). Internal Family Systems Therapy. Guilford Press.

Schwartz, R.C. & Sweezy, M. (2019). Internal Family Systems Therapy (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Real, T. (2007). The New Rules of Marriage. Ballantine Books.

Real, T. (1997). I Don’t Want to Talk About It. Scribner.

Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. W.W. Norton & Company.

The Gottman Institute (2024). The Four Horsemen. gottman.com/blog/the-four-horsemen-recognizing-criticism-contempt-defensiveness-and-stonewalling