Common Patterns That Push Couples Towards Divorce — and How to Break Them

Most relationships don’t end in a single dramatic moment. They end through accumulation — the slow deposit of unresolved conflict, unmet needs, and widening distance that builds over months and years until one or both people reaches a point where they’re not sure there’s anything left worth saving.

What makes this particularly difficult is that the patterns driving that accumulation are often invisible from inside the relationship. They feel like the natural consequence of the problems — of course things are distant when there’s this much conflict, of course communication breaks down when the same issues keep coming up. But the patterns themselves are often the primary driver, and understanding them is the first step toward actually changing the trajectory.

The Research That Named the Patterns

Before getting into specific patterns, it’s worth knowing that much of what we understand about what pushes couples toward separation comes from decades of rigorous research rather than clinical intuition alone.

Psychologist John Gottman and his colleagues spent decades studying couples in what became known as the “Love Lab” — observing interactions, measuring physiological responses, and tracking relationships over years. From that research emerged a set of specific communication and conflict patterns that, when present consistently, predicted relationship breakdown with a level of accuracy that was remarkable.

Gottman named the four most destructive patterns the Four Horsemen — criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Understanding these four isn’t just academically interesting. It’s practically useful, because each one has a specific antidote, and recognizing which patterns are present in your relationship points directly toward what needs to change.

The Four Horsemen

Criticism

Criticism in Gottman’s framework isn’t the same as raising a concern or expressing a grievance. The distinction is important. Expressing a complaint is about a specific behaviour: “I was frustrated when you didn’t call to say you’d be late.” Criticism attacks the person rather than the behaviour: “You never think about how your actions affect anyone else.” The first is about something that happened. The second is a character indictment delivered as feedback.

Criticism is particularly damaging because it activates the defensive response in the recipient before any productive conversation is possible. When someone feels attacked rather than heard, their first move is to protect themselves — not to engage genuinely with what’s being raised. The original concern gets completely lost.

The antidote to criticism is what Gottman calls the gentle startup — expressing the same underlying concern as a specific complaint about behaviour, accompanied by a positive need rather than a negative judgment. What you want instead of what your partner did wrong.

Contempt

Contempt is the most destructive of the four, and Gottman’s research found it to be the single strongest predictor of relationship breakdown. It goes beyond criticism in a specific way: it communicates not just dissatisfaction with something your partner did, but a fundamental disrespect for who they are. Eye-rolling, mockery, dismissiveness, sarcasm that cuts rather than connects — these are contempt’s primary expressions.

What makes contempt so particularly damaging is that it treats the other person as beneath consideration rather than as an equal whose perspective deserves engagement. It’s corrosive to trust and to the basic sense of goodwill that relationships require. Nobody can feel genuinely connected to someone who communicates that they find them contemptible.

The antidote is building and maintaining a culture of appreciation — the deliberate, regular expression of genuine admiration, respect, and positive regard. This isn’t forced positivity layered over contempt. It’s the cultivation of a perspective toward the partner that sees what’s genuinely valuable and says so.

Defensiveness

Defensiveness is the natural response to feeling attacked — and since criticism and contempt are attacking, defensiveness tends to follow them. The problem is that defensiveness, however understandable, is the equivalent of a counterattack. It sends the message: the problem isn’t me, it’s you. The original concern remains entirely unaddressed and the conflict escalates.

Defensiveness often looks like self-justification, counter-complaints, or the careful marshaling of evidence for why the partner is wrong to be upset. None of this leads anywhere useful. It keeps both people in opposition rather than moving toward understanding.

The antidote is taking responsibility — even partial, even imperfect. Acknowledging the part of what the partner is saying that is true, or valid, or understandable, even while other parts feel unfair, breaks the defensive escalation in a way that nothing else reliably does.

Stonewalling

Stonewalling — the withdrawal from interaction, the shutting down, the going silent or going through the motions of listening without being present — tends to develop late in the Four Horsemen sequence. By the time someone is stonewalling consistently, they’ve usually been flooded — physiologically overwhelmed by the emotional activation of repeated difficult conversations — often enough that they’ve learned to exit rather than stay present.

Stonewalling communicates something devastating to the partner who is still trying to engage: you don’t matter enough for me to stay in this with you. Whether or not that’s the intended message, it’s what lands. And the person stonewalling is often doing so not from indifference but from having reached a state of emotional flooding where genuine engagement has become impossible.

The antidote is physiological self-soothing — taking a genuine break of at least twenty minutes (the time required for the stress hormones activated by flooding to metabolize) before returning to the conversation. Not a break that’s a statement, and not a permanent exit — a real pause that creates the conditions for actually coming back.

The Pattern Underneath the Patterns

Understanding the Four Horsemen is useful, and it’s also incomplete — because it describes what the conflict looks like from the outside without fully addressing what’s driving it from the inside.

Lindsay Tsang, Registered Psychotherapist and founder of Reset Counselling & Psychotherapy, frames effective conflict management in a way that goes to the heart of what actually needs to change: “Good conflict management is about knowing that you can disagree well and work out solutions.”

That phrase — disagree well — contains something that most couples in distress have lost access to: the belief that conflict can be navigated. That disagreement doesn’t have to end in damage. That two people can have genuinely different perspectives, needs, and feelings and still find their way to something that works for both of them.

When that belief is present, conflict serves a function. It surfaces information about what each person needs, what isn’t working, what needs to change. When it’s absent — when conflict has become something to be won or survived rather than something to be worked through together — the Four Horsemen tend to fill the vacuum.

The Demand-Withdraw Pattern

Beyond the Four Horsemen, another pattern that Gottman’s research and subsequent couples research consistently identifies as damaging is the demand-withdraw dynamic — where one partner pursues, presses, and escalates while the other retreats, goes silent, or becomes emotionally unavailable.

This pattern is self-reinforcing in a particularly frustrating way. The pursuing partner escalates because the withdrawal feels like abandonment or indifference, which increases the urgency of the pursuit. The withdrawing partner withdraws further because the escalation feels like attack, which makes engagement feel less safe. Each person’s behaviour produces more of what they’re trying to escape.

The demand-withdraw pattern tends to be particularly entrenched because both people are doing the reasonable thing given the other person’s behaviour — just not the thing that breaks the cycle. Breaking it requires both people to understand their own role in the pattern and to make different choices simultaneously, which is why it tends to be particularly well-suited to addressing in couples therapy where both patterns can be seen and addressed at once.

The Four Horsemen Applied to Real Life

These patterns rarely appear in isolation or in their most extreme forms. They’re usually more subtle than the clinical descriptions suggest, and they’re often present in relationships that both people would describe as fundamentally caring and committed.

A couple who loves each other and intends to stay together can still have enough criticism in their communication that conversations about problems consistently go sideways. A couple with genuine affection for each other can still have enough stonewalling that the important conversations never actually happen. The presence of these patterns doesn’t indicate a failed relationship. It indicates a relationship that has developed some communication habits that are working against it — and habits, unlike character, can change.

That’s the core of what Gottman’s research offers. Not a diagnosis of hopelessness, but a specific, actionable map of what’s going wrong and what would help. Each horseman has an antidote. The demand-withdraw pattern has a specific disruption. These aren’t vague aspirations. They’re learnable skills.

What Couples Therapy Does With These Patterns

Couples therapy addresses these patterns in ways that most couples can’t fully reach on their own, for a structural reason: both people are inside the pattern when it’s activated, which makes seeing it clearly from the inside genuinely difficult. A skilled therapist can observe the pattern from outside it, name it in real time, and help both people understand what’s happening before the activation has gone too far to redirect.

In Emotionally Focused Therapy — one of the approaches used at Reset — the work goes beneath the patterns to the attachment needs and fears that are driving them. Most recurring conflict isn’t really about the dishes or the finances. It’s about needing to feel safe, valued, and connected, and about the fear that those needs won’t be met. When both people can articulate what they’re actually afraid of and what they actually need — rather than expressing those things through criticism, contempt, or withdrawal — the conversations become genuinely different.

Gottman Method therapy works more directly with the specific skills: learning the antidotes to each horseman, building conflict management practices that produce resolution rather than escalation, and cultivating the friendship and appreciation that provides the emotional buffer making conflict navigable.

Both approaches address something that the patterns tend to erode: the fundamental belief that this is a relationship worth fighting for, with someone who is fundamentally on your side even when you’re in disagreement. Rebuilding that belief, while simultaneously changing the patterns that undermined it, is the work.

Couples Therapy in Barrie

At Reset Counselling & Psychotherapy, Lindsay Tsang and members of our team offer couples therapy grounded in Emotionally Focused Therapy, the Gottman Method, CBT, and trauma-informed approaches. We work with couples navigating conflict, distance, the Four Horsemen, and the patterns that have been building long enough that neither person is sure how to change them.

In person at our Barrie location and virtually across Ontario. No referral needed.

Book a session with our Barrie couples therapy team →



Reset Counselling & Psychotherapy is located at Unit 201-151 Essa Road, Barrie, ON. We offer couples therapy, individual counselling, and a full range of mental health services, in person and virtually across Ontario.