Childhood Trauma in Adult Relationships: When the Four Horsemen Miss the Mark

You’ve read the advice. Use “I statements.” Don’t stonewall. Watch for criticism, defensiveness, and contempt. You’ve tried. Maybe you’ve read the books, gone to couples therapy, practiced the scripts until you could recite them in your sleep.

And it still doesn’t work.

Here’s what most relationship advice won’t say: if your criticism, your defensiveness, your shutting down, your contempt started in childhood — as the only reason you survived an abusive home — no amount of “I statements” will undo them.

Childhood trauma in adult relationships is not simply a communication problem or a bad habit. These patterns are adaptations. And until you look at where they came from, you’ll likely keep repeating them, no matter how many scripts you learn.

What I got wrong at first

When I trained in relationship coaching, I found Gottman’s Four Horsemen — criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, contempt — and I was thrilled. Finally, something concrete. Clear patterns, clear fixes.

I was hopeful. And I was wrong about how far hope alone goes.

I was in a relationship with a long-term friend. We’d reconnected after two years of no contact. I felt excited.

Then came our first conflict. He was condescending. My stonewalling part showed up. I noticed it. I took care of it. I responded calmly.

Next time, he blamed me. I took care of my defensiveness too. I said: “I see that you’re blaming me. I don’t know what you actually need. Would you be willing to tell me how you feel, and what you need from me?”

It didn’t work.

The pattern kept going. He blamed. He was condescending. I applied every healthy response I had. I wanted to practice the antidote to stonewalling. Nothing changed. I started to feel like I was in a war zone inside this relationship. I dreaded talking to him. My freeze part came back.

Eventually, a fight part broke through. I ended our friendship. I was tired of doing the work alone.

Later, I understood something simple: we never had an agreement to actually practice the anti-dotes together. These frameworks only work when both people are working toward changing them. Activated parts and a dysregulated nervous system make it harder to practice the antidotes — still, we need to find a way to manage that in relationships, to reduce the harm. Your story may look different than mine. Still, a relationship is a dance of two people.

In a toxic dynamic, when one person weaponizes vulnerability, denies your reality outright, or won’t take responsibility for what’s theirs, the same techniques don’t just fail. They make it worse. They hand the harmful partner a new language to manipulate with. They make the harmed partner believe they’re the problem for not saying it the “right” way.

Nobody prepares you for that. They teach the technique and assume good faith. They don’t tell you what happens when you use an “I statement” with someone who uses your feelings against you. Gottman’s four horsemen never tell you to assert your boundaries.

What the framework misses

Gottman’s research is real, and it’s helped a lot of people name what was hurting their relationship. Gottman studied marriages. The same four horsemen show up anywhere two nervous systems are in ongoing contact — friendships, family, coworkers. But it rests on an assumption most people never question: that everyone will take responsibility and grow. That the problem is just a skill gap, never a nervous system running old programming, never an activated part, never a person who isn’t willing to change.

Here’s what that misses:

These behaviours are often not choices. They’re what a body learned to do to survive — years before either person met the other. You may go into an adaptive behaviour, and the other person likely does too. If both nervous systems dysregulate, the dynamic gets worse. Listen to: Polyvagal Theory and Trauma.

If you learned as a child that conflict means violence, your nervous system has learned that conflict is dangerous. If your mother was constantly criticizing you, someone else’s critique can activate complex parts of you. So it’s harder to apply healthy behaviours in those moments. That’s where you might need to look. Though the other person is still responsible for their own criticism. That’s where they need to start.

Contempt is the hardest of the four to catch — in yourself or in someone else. Criticism sounds like an attack. Contempt can sound almost reasonable: a tone, an eye-roll, a joke that isn’t really a joke. By the time you name it, it’s often been running for years. You can’t fix someone else’s contempt. They need to look at it. But you can learn to see it faster than I did. Repair requires both people to work on what’s theirs. And sometimes the healthiest move isn’t repair. It’s recognizing there’s no safety here to repair and choosing to leave.

Most relationship advice won’t say the last part out loud. I will.

Many childhood trauma survivors take on too much responsibility in relationships — they were the ones managing everyone else’s feelings long before they had a self to protect. For them, “be gentler” isn’t the fix. They don’t need to soften. They need to take on less, trust their own limits, and assert themselves. That’s a different skill than anything in the four antidotes, and it’s often the one that matters most. Read more: Healing for adults with childhood trauma.

Childhood trauma in adult relationships: One pattern, up close

Take stonewalling — going quiet, looking away, shutting the door on a conversation mid-sentence.

For someone who grew up where any expressed need led to explosive anger, silence wasn’t coldness. It was the only response the body found safe. That’s a freeze response, not a character flaw.

If the other person has an anxious pattern, silence reads as abandonment — and the more one pulls, the more the other shuts down. Neither is doing anything wrong. Both are running old survival code in a room that doesn’t actually require it anymore.

The way out isn’t a better sentence. It’s naming the pattern before it happens: “Sometimes I shut down completely. It’s not about you — it’s old. I need time alone, and I will come back.” Said outside of conflict, in a calm moment, so it’s not a surprise the next time it happens. Or reflecting on it and sharing it with the other person after it happened. Openly discussing how both of you can manage the dynamic in a healthier way.

That’s one pattern. Criticism, defensiveness, and contempt each have their own version of this — a body doing something old, in a room that’s new. Read more: Parts work for adults with childhood trauma.

When the tools stop being enough

I want to say this plainly, because it took me years to accept it myself: you can do all of your own work — regulate your nervous system, name your patterns, take full responsibility for what you learned as a child — and it still might not be enough.

Because healing any relationship takes two people willing to look at where they came from. If the other person isn’t willing or able to, the relationship can’t heal through your effort alone.

This gets even more complicated in relationships shaped by privilege and oppression — where race, gender, class, ability, or other power differences shape the reality of the relationship. These dynamics can easily burden the person with less privilege. In that context, “stonewalling” can become a way to resist oppression, not a communication failure to fix.

Many of my clients sit with self-doubt or self-blame: Would my partner have changed their abusive behaviour if I had responded in a healthier way? The reality is that abusive behaviour is centred on avoiding responsibility. Your healthy behaviour would not have changed this.

That’s not your failure.

If you’re with someone who uses your vulnerability against you later, who can’t hear your reality without punishing you for it, who shows no real change no matter how many times you’ve had the conversation — the trauma-informed response isn’t trying harder. It’s protecting yourself. And maybe it’s a hint to work on your boundaries.

Childhood trauma in adult relationships: When it’s worth healing

If you’re with someone who is willing — who can look at their own childhood, who tries to regulate instead of react, who takes responsibility even when it’s uncomfortable — then this work is possible. Not fast. Not a straight line. But possible.

Catch yourself mid-criticism and pause. Saying “I need a break” instead of going silent. Recognizing contempt as an old protector showing up, and choosing something else in the moment it appears. These are small, and they’re the actual work.

These patterns don’t stay inside your romantic relationship, either. They show up in how you take feedback at work, how you parent, whether you can sit in discomfort without shutting the door. Learning to recognize your own fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response is work that serves you everywhere, not just at home. Read more: Signs of childhood trauma in adults.

Where this actually starts

The patterns started in your childhood. They don’t have to define what comes next.

I’ve done this work myself, and I’ve watched clients do it. I’m not saying your path looks like mine — it’s often layered, with detours. But real. And possible.

If you want to work through what’s playing out in your own relationships, book a free consultation.

Book a free consultation online — let’s explore whether working together makes sense

My trauma recovery practice is primarily online, allowing me to support clients across Canada and internationally.

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