Criticism

Criticism involves attacking someone’s personality or character rather than a specific behaviour and often couples will blame.

Criticism is very different from complaining. A complaint is a specific statement of anger, distress, displeasure, or other negativity. Criticism is much less specific.

Attributes include:

Blaming – Assigning blame to the other person

Character Attack – “You always…..” “You never…..”,” You don’t care”, “You should know better”

Kitchen sinking – Coming up with a long list of complaints, becomes overwhelming for the partner and not constructive

Betrayal Statements – Similar to blaming, but more specific to trust – I can’t believe you did that, you know how much that means to me

Negative Mind- Reading – A mind reading statement is any attribution that makes a negative assumption about one’s partner.

Consider:

Criticisms can be away of deflecting responsibility and considered defensive.

Contempt

Contempt is the attempt to insult or otherwise communicate a lack of respect towards one’s partner.

Contempt is different from disagreement, it has an Icey quality with a suggestion of superiority – as if looking down one’s nose at one’s partner

Attributes include:

Sarcasm – Derisive laughter or ridiculing comment regarding something the partner has said – “sure I bet you did”. When the meaning of the statement is obviously reverse of what is being said.

Mockery – Repeating something one’s partner has said with exaggerated intent to show lack of respect for the statement or the person who made the statement

Insults – active communication to humiliate or belittle the other person “you’re an idiot”, ”your  incompetent”, “your stupid”,” your ugly”

Hostile Humour – humour that is mocking or insulting

Eye Rolls – virtually always considered contempt

Defensiveness

Defensiveness communicates an innocent victim stance. They assume that they are blameless. “Why are you picking on me”, leave me alone, I didn’t do anything wrong approach.

Attributes include:

Yes – But – The statement starts off as a yes but follows by a disagreement

Cross complaining – Meeting a complaint with a counter complaint. This way deflecting from the initial complaint.

Excuses – Instead of meeting the complaint with a “yes I know”, finds another place to rest the blame

Rubber man/woman – The partner defends and pushes the blame back on to the partner for the same complaint.

Counter –Criticism – This has a juvenile quality to it.  The response is “well you don’t do it either”

Aggressively defensive – The intensity is high. The individual does not back away, but rather assertively defends themselves. “No I did not do that?”`

Physical cue – arms crossed

Stonewalling

Stonewalling is when a person ceases to listen to what the other person is saying. This happens when the person is adverse to that what the other is saying. Common when a partner is complaining, criticizing, raising an issue, or otherwise upset. Person is tuning out to what the partner is saying because of what the other is saying.

Attributes include:

Away Behaviour – Person focuses on something trivial to avoid eye contact. They are trying to avoid attack.  The person is conveying I would rather not be here.

No Backchannels – There is no vocal or nonverbal backchannel, no head nod, and no facial movement. They may even remove themselves from the conversation. This is a total lack of listening behaviour.

Monitoring Gaze – It is similar to the away behaviour expect occasionally they will give eye contact and then quickly look away.

Physical cues –  Face appears stiff or frozen

Consider:

If the partner looks defeated the person may have withdrawn because they are now saddened by what has just been said to them.