On Sunday June 3rd, Chazaq had the pleasure of hosting a special guest speaker from Chicago. Rabbi Dr. Hertzel Hillel Yitzhak is a Rav of his community and also practices as a Clinical Psychologist. He spoke to a full room and excited audience about how therapists can now predict whether your marriage will succeed or end in divorce with over 90% accuracy. The following is Rabbi Yitzchak’s summary of the class given: These predictors for whether your marriage will succeed consist of four styles of conflict found in marriage: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness and Stonewalling. If you will eliminate these four conflict styles your marriage will have far greater odds of surviving and thriving.
Criticism involves attacking your spouse›s personality or character–rather than a specific behavior (complaining)–usually with blame. Criticism is one of the deadliest things we face in our marriages. It may sound like this: «You only care about your friends. You really don›t care about us anymore.» «You keep leaving messes for me to clean up. You are like one of the kids. I can›t trust you anymore.»
Contempt
What can happen if criticism continues and becomes very frequent or if one spouse is so sensitive to it, then the couple can enter the next stage of conflict style – Contempt.
What separates Contempt from Criticism is the intention to insult and psychologically abuse your spouse. You are shooting insults right into the heart of your spouse’s sense of self. At this point in the relationship, the person feels like their spouse if a loser, disgusting, incompetent. When Contempt begins to overwhelm your relationship, you tend to forget your spouse’s positive qualities, at least while you are feeling upset – you can’t remember a single positive quality or act.
Defensiveness
Once contempt has entered the relationship and it has not been resolved, then couples enter conflict style Number 3 – Defensiveness.
The spouse being criticized usually becomes defensive when attacked. It’s easy to understand why this happens. If you are being bombarded with insults, the natural reaction is to defend yourself from the attack.
“Leave me alone, why are you picking on me?”
“I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my fault.”
Defensiveness is a natural reaction to anyone being attacked. However, defensiveness is a destructive behavior because it is not helping to resolve the main issue at hand. It only escalates the conflict rather than resolve anything.
The major problem with defensiveness is that it interferes with healthy communication. Rather than understanding your spouse’s perspective, you are too busy defending yourself. As a result, nothing gets resolved.
Stonewalling
After a while, when couples move from criticism to contempt to defensiveness, they become so exhausted and overwhelmed that they simply do not speak to the spouse who is attacking them. They turn into a stone wall. They went from being poor communicators to not communicating at all. Sometimes, one spouse would continue to criticize and shout while the other spouse simply shuts them down.
The spouse may say something to them and they react with a stonewall face. Or they may respond with a “Mmmm” or “Uhaaa” or shrug their shoulders, as though they have given up hope altogether. When asked about their behaviors, stonewallers typically say that they are behaving in such a way to be neutral and not make things worse. But they don’t realize that behaving this way is in fact making their relationship worse.
It’s very upsetting to speak to someone who is stonewalling. 85% of stonewallers are men. Men tend to be more physiologically overwhelmed than women by marital tension – for example, during a confrontation, a man’s pulse rate is more likely to rise along with his blood pressure than a woman. As a result, men may feel a greater need to escape from intense conflict with their spouse in order to protect their health. That’s why male stonewallers are more likely to run out of the house when being attacked by their wives.
Stonewalling is not an indication that the marriage is bound to fail. However, once either spouse stonewalls regularly, this is an indication that the marriage becomes very fragile.
In summary, criticism begins when one spouse makes continuous requests from the other spouse but their requests fall on deaf ears.
However, criticism also guarantees that we will NOT get what we want. WHY? Because when you criticize your spouse, they get into defensive mode and the only way to defend themselves is to attack you back. So now you are left with a back and forth exchange of arguing and attacking until you both feel exhausted
and hopeless.
Rabbi Dr. Yitzchak Yisraeli is also an author of books in Halacha. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Chazaq Hosts Special Guest Speaker Rabbi Dr. Hertzel Hillel Yitzchak On Making Marriage Work
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