Dr. Julie Gottman

Sometimes sarcasm is contempt.

And contempt is not only the best predictor of relationship demise, but as John was saying, and I'll fine-tune it a little bit, the number of times a listener hears contempt is

in a conflict for 15 minutes predicts how many infectious illnesses they're going to have in the next four years because it is sulfuric acid for the immune system.

Yeah, it's a big deal.

The third horseman is defensiveness.

We all love defensiveness.

Everybody's defensive unless they have an ego of a rock.

I haven't met a rock lately.

So defensiveness, defensiveness.

gets manifested as either counterattack, as we described, or whining.

Innocent victim.

Oh, I did too clean the kitchen.

What do you mean?

Okay.

I love whining.

It's great.

And then there's stonewalling.

And stonewalling is completely shutting down.

But it's not shutting down for just a few seconds, you know, to come up with the right phrase.

It's shutting down completely for minutes, minutes, minutes, long minutes, maybe hours at a time.