Author Archives: Nathen

Gottman’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

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John Gottman has been the leading researcher on romantic couples–mostly marriages–for at least a decade. He has developed a technique for analyzing conversations that lets him predict with a lot of accuracy whether that couple will stay together during the next several years. One of the things he does is video a couple talking about a contentious subject and code the conversation for what he calls the four horsemen of the apocalypse: criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. The presence of these behaviors indicates that the relationship is being corroded.

Here’s a paraphrase of how he defines the four horsemen in The Marriage Clinic: A Scientifically Based Marital Therapy:

Criticism: Any statement that indicates that one partner thinks there is something wrong with the other, such as “What’s wrong with you?” or “You always blah-blah-blah.” Note that what he calls criticism is different from complaining. In a complaint, one partner says that they didn’t like something that the other did. For a complaint to become criticism, it needs a barb. A generalization like “You always…” or “You never…” will do, as will making the complaint about a character flaw, rather than a specific incident, like “Why would anyone do that?”

Defensiveness: When one partner acts as if the other is attacking them. Instead of directly responding to a statement, for example, the defensive partner might respond with a “counter-attack” like “What are you complaining about? You’re worse than I am!”

Contempt: Any statement or action which implies you are a better person than your partner, like mockery or eye-rolling. There is a facial expression for contempt, which Gottman also codes for. This is a version of  the sneer, from emotionalcompetency.com:

Stonewalling: When one partner removes themselves in some way from the conversation. This can be by leaving or ceasing to respond. Often this is combined with attempts to not show emotion on the face. This is the worst of the horsemen, just ahead of contempt. It seems to be quite difficult for a relationship with this kind of behavior to remain viable.

Gottman says that some amount of four-horsemen behaviors (except contempt, which apparently never happens in happy couples) are inevitable, and that what is critical is not that they don’t happen, but that they are repaired by soothing, softening, or meta-communicating.

[First published on Nathen’s Miraculous Escape, July 18, 2010.]

Four New Parenting Styles

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Most parenting psychology literature talks about four parenting styles, derived from the combinations of two parenting qualities, warmth (also called “responsiveness”) and demandingness, like this:

Parenting Style Warmth Demandingness
Authoritative High High
Authoritarian Low High
Permissive High Low
Neglectful Low Low

Parents who are both warm and demanding (having high standards) are called “authoritative” and considered in psychology to be the best parents. Parents who are both not warm and have low standards are called “neglectful” and considered to be the worst parents. Authoritarian parents and permissive parents (also called “indulgent”) come out in the middle somewhere, the first lacking warmth, the second lacking standards.

The table of parenting styles below is from Rodriguez, Donovick, and Crowley’s 2009 article, “Parenting Styles in a Cultural Context: Observations of ‘Protective Parenting’ in First-Generation Latinos.” In their work with Latino parents, they decided to add a third category, autonomy granting, giving us four new parenting styles: protective, cold, affiliative, and a new kind of neglectful. I’m still thinking about this, but it seems like it could be a breakthrough in parenting theory.

It will be interesting to see if this idea is meaningful in terms of outcomes for the kids of these different kinds of parents. There is evidence, for example, that the kids of authoritarian parents have a lot more trouble with alcohol abuse than those of authoritative, and kids of permissive parents have even more trouble than that. Will there be a significant difference on this outcome between authoritarian and “cold” parents, who differ only in their giving their kids the chanceto mess up or not? How about between permissive and “affiliative”?

Parenting Style Warmth Demandingness Autonomy Granting
Authoritative High High High
Authoritarian Low High Low
Permissive High Low High
Neglectful Low Low Low
Protective High High Low
Cold Low High High
Affiliative High Low Low
Neglectful II Low Low High

[First published on Nathen’s Miraculous Escape, July 12, 2010.]

Failures of Intuition

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Ed Moses begins the new Long Now Seminar talking about the BP oil spill, saying, basically, that there’s a 30″ hole, one mile down, that’s leaking about a million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every week. Keep in mind, though, he says, that the US burns a million barrels of oil an hour.

Oh… right.

It reminded me of an “Oh… right” experience I had the morning of September 11, 2001, when my friend Biko told me there had been terrorist attacks. It turned out that the early death-toll estimates were way higher than they turned out to be–we had heard that it was tens of thousands–but even then, Biko said, “Well, to keep this in perspective, a lot more people than that die of starvation every day.”

It’s amazing to me how relatively small-scale catastrophes grab my attention and get my emotions going, as long as they are dramatic in some way, while global-scale catastrophes can be easy to ignore.

This also reminds me of a lecture I attended last year by Paul Slovic about how our moral intuition fails when it comes to large-scale problems like genocide. He presented an experiment in which (among other things) one group of participants were shown a profile of a starving child and were given the opportunity to give some of the money they’d earned by participating to help the child. Another group of participants had the same experience except they were shown two children. The people who saw two profiles gave way less money than those who saw only one. It’s worse than diminishing returns. It’s not just that more people in trouble get less money per person, they get less money in total. It seems that bigger problems become more abstract, and so become less emotionally pressing.

The question is, how can we motivate ourselves and others to do what is right in situations where moral intuition routinely misleads us? The person who answers that question could really change things. Imagine a world in which the recent earthquake in Haiti was not that big of a deal because we had helped them out before it hit. After all, we all knew they had been desperately poor and vulnerable for our entire lifetimes. We just didn’t care that much.

[First published on Nathen’s Miraculous Escape, July 6, 2010.]

Idiographic Vs Nomothetic Family Therapy

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I’m taking a couples assessment class this summer, and right now I’m reading about a tension between family therapy models that Sciarra and Simon (in Handbook of Multicultural Assessment) call either idiographic or nomothetic.

Nomothetic models say that families have problems because they get out of whack in ways that families do. That is, each nomothetic model has its own list of ways that families can get out of whack and a therapist using that model is to keep a sharp lookout for those things. Structural therapists look for dysfunctional boundaries, for example. Strategic therapists look for incongruous hierarchies. Bowenians look for emotional reactivity. Emotionally-focused therapists look for maladaptive attachment styles. Each nomothetic model says that the therapist needs to assess for these underlying problems, treat them, and therapy should be successful.

Idiographic models call nomothetic models “cultural imperialism.” That means nomothetic therapists are just teaching (or tricking) their clients into thinking, feeling, and acting like them. Nomothetic therapists are forcing their culture on their clients. Calling someone a cultural imperialist is about as close to an accusation of pure evil as a post-modernist will make. Further, idiographic models say that culture (any culture) is oppressive of individuals, and that this oppression is the only reason families seek therapy. The ideographic therapist’s job (Sciarra & Simon list language-systems, solution-focused, and narrative therapies as idiographic) is to have a conversation with families about the ways they are being oppressed by their culture.

There are a couple of funny things going on here, but to understand it, first you need to know that nomothetic models are mostly “old-school” models that emerged in the 1950s and 60s, while ideographic models are newer, postmodern, all the rage, and emerged as a consequence of this nomothetic/ideographic conversation. In the 1980s, postmodern family therapists started saying that family therapy was arrogant and hierarchical and created the idiographic schools.

The first funny thing is that the old-school, nomothetic family therapy models emerged in much the same way, as a reaction to the arrogant and hierarchical field of psychiatry. The founders of family therapy said to psychiatry, “Human problems exist in the context of families. Your pathologizing medical model is not appropriate here.” Now the ideographic models are saying to the nomothetic founders, “Human problems exist in the context of cultures. Your pathologizing medical model is not appropriate here.”

Who is right? Well, that depends on your epistemology. So far, the nomothetic models have more experimental evidence to support them, and they are undeniably effective. To be fair, they have had more time to collect evidence, so in time things may go either way. And to be extra-fair, real post-modern idiographs can reject experimental evidence on philosophical grounds; experiments are so modern, so medical-model. What value system produced your research questions, anyway? That’s funny thing number two.

Funny thing number three is that, as Ken Wilber says, everyone may be right. Perhaps problems happen at every level of complexity, from our bodies to our minds to our families to our larger social systems, and nomothetic models just specialize in the family level, while idiographic models specialize in cultures. It’s a neat idea, possibly too neat, and difficult to tease out. I’ve written a little about it here.

The fourth funny thing is that the idiographic models, while broadening the scope of consideration in some ways, put the focus back on the individual in therapy. They say that culture is intrinsically dehumanizing, and that dehumanization is what an idiographic therapist talks about, but the other parties in the process are not part of the conversation. If I’m a narrative therapist and you send your depressed son to me, we will talk a lot about that depression. We will externalize it, maybe give it a name like “Mr. Funky,” talk about how Mr. Funky speaks with the voice of oppressive culture, talk about times when your son was able to overcome Mr. Funky’s influence and work on ways of increasing that ability. In the end, if I’m a good therapist, we have probably helped your son, but we’ve also focused on how your sonthinks, feels, and behaves, where a nomothetic therapist would have been focusing on the whole family–how do they interact? Do the parents get along? How might this symptom of depression make sense in your son’s immediate system of relationships? Who all has a stake in this behavior and can we get them in the room too? And so on. There is a way that by ostensibly moving the location of pathology out of the family to the larger culture, ideographic models have brought the clinical focus back to individuals, which may seem like regression to the founders of family therapy.

[First published on Nathen’s Miraculous Escape, July 3, 2010.]

How Can You Tell You Are An Adult?

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This is a question I’ve come back to many times in my life, and it’s a tough one. As a kid, there seems such a difference between kids and adults that it appears dichotomous; first you are a kid, then you are an adult. The actual transition is so gradual, though, it’s confusing.

The rituals our culture provides are pathetic and seem more and more pathetic in retrospect as I get older: graduating from high school, registering for the draft, being able to purchase pornography, being able to drink. Even graduating from college is pathetic in terms of an adulthood ritual. I just watched a bunch of people graduate from UO and they sure seemed like kids to me–certainly not children, but still dependent on parents, still at best vaguely aware of what they would do with their life, still without anyone depending on them.

There are biological markers, but no one I know was an adult at sexual maturity, even if they did manage to have sex or even conceive. Physical maturity doesn’t seem to correlate with emotional maturity at all. And brain scientists keep pushing back the age at which our brains are fully mature–lately I’ve been hearing 25 or 26, but fifty years ago it was 7, so in another fifty will we not have mature brains until we’re 45?

We could use financial independence, but what does that really mean? That we only ask our parents for help when we get into really expensive trouble? We could wait to say we’re adults when we are supporting our parents, but that’s tough for us Gen-Xers, whose parents will mostly die richer than us for social and political reasons.

I imagine the “real” answer is a combination of a bunch of factors, not amenable to a simple scheme, but I have come up with two, simple, adult-identifying schemes to offer. They are pretty subjective and fail to provide a distinct moment in which adulthood occurs, but they are my favorite ideas about this so far.

1) Gratitude for parents: We gradually become capable of understanding what our parents have done for us. Perhaps we are adults when we are able to, without idealizing them, fully appreciate our parents. This could be a good indication that we have moved past egocentricity.

2) The ability to distinguish threat from non-threat: A bus bearing down on us is a threat. Someone disagreeing with our opinion is not a threat, even if the disagreement is strongly worded and about religion, politics, or contentious-topic-of-your-choice. Perhaps we are adults when we can easily respond in an appropriate manner to the reality we are presented with–when we can consistently use reality testing.

[First published on Nathen’s Miraculous Escape, June 26, 2010.]

Virginia Satir’s Criteria for Terminating Treatment

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Virginia Satir lays out three sets of criteria for terminating treatment with a couple–criteria which, when met show that therapy has been successful. This is my favorite set, from p. 228 of Conjoint Family Therapy. The individuals in the couple can:

–Be direct, using the first person “I” and following with statements or questions which:

Criticize

Evaluate

Acknowledge an observation

Find fault

Report annoyance

Identify being puzzled

–Be delineated, by using language which clearly shows “I am me” and “You are you.” “I am separate and apart from you and I acknowledge my own attributes as belonging to me. You are you, separate and apart from me, and I acknowledge your attributes as belonging to you.”

–Be clear, by using questions and statements which reflect directness and the capacity to get knowledge of someone else’s statements, direction, or intentions, in order to accomplish an outcome.

I find these criteria charming, but I don’t think I will be able to use them overtly, for a couple reasons. First, insurance companies want a DSM diagnosis and a clear resolution of the Mental Disorders indicated. Satir did not speak their language. She didn’t like to label people.

Second, supervisors tend to want behavioral definitions of specific problems, so our treatment plans can say things like “The couple reports arguments have decreased from 4 times a week to 2 times a week, and that the intensity of those arguments have decreased from 7 to 4 on a 10 point scale.” This can be more collaborative and transparent with clients. It can appear to make things measured and therefore authoritative and amenable to research. I will have to write my treatment plans like that during school and probably any time I’m working for someone else. I’ll get good at it. Maybe I’ll come to like it.

[First published on Nathen’s Miraculous Escape, June 22, 2010.]

Irvin Yalom’s Existential Factors

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Existential psychotherapist (and the author of Lying on the Couch, When Nietzsche Wept, andThe Schopenhauer Cure) Irvin Yalom suggests that humans face five existential factors that play a large role in our lives and in the success of psychotherapy. This is how he describes them in The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, on page 98:

1. Recognizing that life is at times unfair and unjust

2. Recognizing that ultimately there is no escape from some of life’s  pain or from death

3. Recognizing that no matter how close I get to other people, I must still face life alone

4. Facing the basic issues of my life and eath, and thus living my life more honestly and being less caught up in trivialities

5. Learning that I must take ultimate responsibility for the way I live my life no matter how much guidance and support I get from others

[First published on Nathen’s Miraculous Escape, June 14, 2010.]

Congruent & Incongruent Communication, Paradox & Double Bind

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Family therapy got started when the grandparents of the field, interested in cybernetics–the science of self-regulating systems–started studying communication in families. Some of the more interesting ideas they came up with were the three progressively more problematic kinds of contradiction. This is a summary of Virginia Satir’s version of those contradictions, from Conjoint Family Therapy:

Simple contradiction: This is when a person says two things that contradict each other straightforwardly, as when someone might say, “I love you but I don’t love you.” This kind of contradiction consists of assertions that are incompatible, but at least out in the open, in an easily decodable way. That means that the receiver of the message can easily comment on the contradiction, saying “I don’t understand what you mean. You didn’t make sense to me just then.”

Paradoxical (or incongruent) communication: A paradox is a special kind of contradiction, where the incompatible statements exist on different “logical levels.” That is, one of the statements is part of the context of the other statement. These are significantly more difficult to decode and comment on. The two logical levels in human communication are usually verbal and non-verbal behavior, where the non-verbal behavior is the context for the verbal. For example (from p.83) “A says, ‘I hate you,’ and smiles.” If A had said “I hate you” with an angry look on their face, that would be congruent, but what does “I hate you” mean in the context of a smile? This is more confusing than the simple contradiction, both because it is more difficult to track the two levels of communication simultaneously, and because we have unspoken social norms against commenting about how someone is speaking. Consequently, it takes more awareness and bravery to question the speaker’s intent when they present you with this kind of contradictory communication. (Satir calls paradoxical communication “incongruent communication.”) Being able to metacommunicate, or comment on the communication going on, is the major tool of the psychotherapist. We don’t usually know it, but this skill is the main thing we go to therapists for.

The double bind: The double bind is a special kind of paradoxical communication that was first laid out in Watzlawick and colleagues’ Pragmatics of Human Communication. A double bind is a paradox with two additional rules, giving four total requirements:

1) A verbal statement

2) A contradictory non-verbal context

3) A rule that you are not allowed to metacommunicate

4) A rule that you are not allowed to leave the field

This happens to people all the time. Children, especially, mercilessly, unconsciously, are put in this position a lot because they are not in a position to leave their parents “field.” They are completely subject to their parents on every level.

Here’s an example: A parent, obviously stressed out, tense, and in pain for whatever reason, says to their child, “I love you.” This puts the child into a double bind, because the statement is contradicted by the “I don’t love you” expressed by the parents’ body language and facial expression. That’s 1) and 2). Third is that the child can’t comment on the contradiction because they don’t have the tools, and even if they did, and said something like, “Mom, I hear you saying that you love me but it doesn’t really seem like you love me right now. It seems like you’re having other feelings,” the child would almost certainly be punished in some way for being insubordinate, for questioning the parent’s love, for questioning the parent’s word, for making the parent feel uncomfortable. Fourth is that the child is not allowed to leave the field. That is, even if they had the communication tools, the awareness, and the bravery, they have no where else to go if they are rejected by the parent. Their lives are dependent on the love and support of the parent. They are stuck in the field. To cope, they “learn” one or both of the following:

I am not lovable. My parent knows this, and I have figured it out, but at least they are pretending that they love me, which keeps me alive, so I’ll go along with the pretense that they love me.

I may be lovable, but love feels awful. Still, it’s the best thing available.

Then the child grows up and, having their own children, perpetuate the process, being a pretending-to-be-lovable parent with awful-feeling love to give to the next generation. Not only that, but they develop adaptations to this way of living that look like DSM-diagnosable Mental Disorder conditions.

Metacommunication and congruent communication: Notice that metacommunication is the key out of all of these situations. In the case of a true double bind, you might need the help of someone else’s (a therapist’s or friend’s) metacommunication, but metacommunication is still the key. Someone needs to stand up and say, “I’m confused! Can we slow down here and talk about what we’re talking about? What can you say to me right now that your body language and facial expression will agree with?”

[First published on Nathen’s Miraculous Escape, June 12, 2010.]

Meditation as Brain Control

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This video makes me want to get an EEG machine. It’s of Ken Wilber narrating footage of himself moving through a few different meditative states while hooked up to an EEG machine. (EEG machines show you a very general picture of the electrical activity from your brain from electrodes on your scalp.) He says what each state feels like, too. Pretty neat.

(Minor correction: He makes it sound like dreaming sleep is mostly associated with theta waves, which is not quite true. Dreaming sleep does have some theta activity, but it’s mostly beta or “beta-like” waves. Theta is strongly associated with stage 1 sleep, that 5 or 10 minute transition between waking and sleep. It’s a minor point, but I so rarely find corrections to make in his work, I thought I’d take this chance.)

[First published on Nathen’s Miraculous Escape, June 10, 2010.]

The Color of Fear

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Many years ago, my friend Chad told me if he could make even a very modest living fighting racism, that is what he would do with his life. The idea had never occurred to me before. In that conversation we also talked about how it was really only people who were on the fence about race that were good targets for intervention; good luck changing the mind of an entrenched racist! So where do you find these on-the-fence-folks, and how do you make a living working with them? We made no more progress on the question.

Lee Mun Wah does just what we imagined. He is a “diversity and communication trainer” and the founder of Stirfry Seminars & Consulting. The population of Whites he works with are a lot more egalitarian-minded than I had imagined necessary, back in those relatively naive days–they are Whites who consider racism appalling but don’t see their own part in perpetuating it.

I watched these clips from Lee Mun Wah’s documentary of one of his groups, called The Color of Fear. It was some of the most moving footage I’ve seen this year. If you watch it, watch both clips to the end, and be prepared for some members to express anger. (Keep in mind that (according to my teachers) both David and Victor became diversity and communication trainers after this film was made.) This is incredible work. I hope I get the opportunity to lead groups like this in my career.

[First published on Nathen’s Miraculous Escape, June 6, 2010.]