Psychologist John Gottman famously identified “ The Four Horsemen,” behaviors that, if persistent, spell doom for any relationship.
They are: Criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling. I have experienced and perpetrated all four of these, sometimes with devastating consequences.
The most heinous of the four, Gottman tells us, is contempt. It mixes criticism with meanness, disgust and arrogance. In contempt, we dehumanize both ourselves and the other person, opening the door for abuse. A person on the receiving end of abuse may shut down or self-harm in some way.
Behavior that is this toxic in a romantic partnership must be just as toxic on a larger scale.
When we consume media, we consume contempt. In a citizenship context, shutting down means we stop voting and we stop speaking out. We believe our voice doesn’t matter. If we do speak out, we speak only to people who won’t challenge us. Because we fail to listen, we fail to acknowledge problems until they explode.
Contempt is not leadership. My liberal friends and I may be quick to spot contempt from President Donald Trump and his followers, but we often fail to hold ourselves accountable when our reactions to it are also toxic. Often we either stonewall or attack our neighbors and relatives. We self-righteously mock and dehumanize the other side with condescending labels, stereotyping, and humor (see “ basket of deplorables,” or virtually anything said on late night TV or on “ Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”). Or we look the other way or celebrate when others do the same. We wrap ourselves a blanket of self-justification. They started it, of course.
Then we wonder why they don’t trust us when we tout science.
We think they are being manipulated by slanted media. We liberals are above that, right? Ha!
The media, both social and journalistic, both left and right, amplify contempt because they feature the world’s most extreme and scary behaviors. When we regard this content as representative of reality, we forget that our “news feed” has been contrived to rope us into a cycle of fear (exaggerated enemy activities) and re-comforting (my tribe is still here). Lulled into this pattern, we have little incentive to rediscover our humanity. No one is immune from confirmation bias.
When we consume media we must remember that reality, by definition, consists almost entirely of ordinary, mundane stuff. The media must eschew the mundane (and thus, most of reality) in order to attract the attention it needs. A headline reading “Commuter arrives home safely” will not attract many clicks. Shocking stories and images do. Increased media saturation and specialization in the past 20 years amplifies the downside of this system: centrism disappears and anxiety flourishes.
The upside is that we are more aware of the world’s problems and can take them more seriously. But this requires action. Absorbing information without agency fuels anxiety. Thankfully we can find agency in activism, creativity, or self-improvement.
Let’s start by curbing our own acts of treachery. Couples can fight The Four Horsemen with a four-part prescription: Humility (“maybe I’m not so easy to live with, either”); accountability (“I need to repair and correct my own harmful actions”); nonviolent communication (see Marshall Rosenberg’s book by that name), in which we take responsibility for our own needs and emotions with assertiveness rather than aggression or passive-aggression; and frequently celebrating what is good about the other person.
All of the above practices require a willingness to be vulnerable, to take some risks toward building trust. Less obviously, but even more crucially, they require us to hear the vulnerability in the other person, even when they are not equipped to express themselves well. Leadership equals listening.
In an unhealthy relationship or society, we defend ourselves against anger, then use our own anger for retribution and power grabs. When healthy, we treat anger as a sign of a systemic flaw that requires teamwork to address.
Let’s stop criticizing “those people” and become leaders in our relationships and communities.
Chuck McKay of Orono is a mental health counselor and former media literacy educator.