Communication Patterns
Gaslighting, stonewalling, demand-withdraw, contempt, the four horsemen and their antidotes.
36 entries
All behaviors in Communication Patterns
Active Listening
Full reception of another person — body, attention, and follow-up question — held long enough that the speaker can tell their words have actually landed and the listener has nothing else running underneath.
Apology Without Change
Repeated, sincere-sounding apologies followed by no behavioural shift — the apology used as a ritual that closes the immediate exchange without absorbing the deposit that would have changed anything.
Backhanded Compliment
Praise that arrives with a small sting embedded in it — a sentence built so the speaker can discharge envy, contempt, or status anxiety while keeping plausible deniability that they did anything but compliment.
Bid for Connection
A small, often half-formed gesture toward another person — a glance, a comment about a bird outside the window, a half-question — that asks, beneath the surface, are you with me right now?
Criticism
Naming a person's character as the problem instead of naming the behaviour, the impact, or the need underneath — a deflection that protects the speaker from the harder work of asking for what they actually want.
Crosstalk
Interrupting, overlapping, or talking over another speaker — competing for the conversational floor instead of taking turns — so that output is prioritised over reception and the conversation becomes a contest of airtime rather than an exchange.
DARVO
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender — a four-move sequence in which someone called out for a harmful act denies it, attacks the person who raised it, and recasts themselves as the wronged party, so that the original concern cannot be examined.
Defensiveness
Counter-attacking, explaining, or justifying in the half-second after a complaint lands — protecting self-image instead of absorbing what was said, so the conversation cannot move past the speaker's standing.
Demand-Withdraw Pattern
A two-person loop in which one partner pursues, presses, and escalates while the other retreats, shuts down, or goes quiet — and each move reliably produces more of the other, locking both Belonging Systems in opposite directions.
Direct-but-Cold Communication
Technically clear speech delivered with affective flatness — the words say what needs saying, the tone strips out warmth — so the message lands as criticism, even when the content is reasonable.
Emotional Mirroring
The act of reflecting another's affect back to them with attunement — a high-density deposit when present, an effortful but empty performance when reproduced as technique without contact.
Empty Validation
Performed empathy — 'totally, that's so valid' — delivered in the shape of reception without the actual cost of receiving, satisfying the form of the exchange while leaving the speaker unmet.
Excessive Apology Pattern
Chronic over-apologising — 'sorry' before sentences, requests, presence itself — as pre-emptive deflection of imagined criticism, performing smallness to reduce a relational threat that has not yet appeared.
Excessive Reassurance Seeking
Repeatedly asking a partner, friend, or family member for confirmation — *are you mad? are we okay? do you still love me?* — that the body cannot retain long enough for the next ask not to arrive.
Gaslighting
Distorting another person's account of reality — *that didn't happen, you're remembering wrong, you're too sensitive* — so that the speaker's belonging is protected by destabilising the listener's grip on the event.
Harsh Startup
Opening a difficult conversation with contempt, criticism, or accusation in the first thirty seconds — *you always, you never, what is wrong with you* — and thereby predicting the next thirty minutes before they have begun.
Indirect Conflict
Fighting about a chore, a tone, a forgotten errand — when the actual disagreement is about closeness, trust, fairness, or care — because the surface fight is workable and the real one is not yet sayable.
Kitchen-Sinking
Starting a conflict about one specific thing and rapidly expanding the scope to include every related, half-related, and unrelated grievance the speaker can reach — *throwing in the kitchen sink* — until no item can be addressed because all of them are on the table at once.
Mind-Reading Expectations
Expecting a partner, friend, or family member to know an unspoken need and reading their failure to guess as evidence that they do not care, while never converting the need into a clear ask.
Over-Explaining
Delivering long, careful justifications for an action, choice, or boundary in anticipation of an accusation that has not arrived — the length of the explanation eroding the credibility it was meant to defend.
Passive Aggression
Discharging hostility through non-confrontational channels — forgetting, lateness, sighs, sarcasm, half-meant compliance — so the resentment is delivered but never has to be owned as resentment.
Reflective Listening
Paraphrasing the speaker's content back to them in your own words so that reception can be confirmed before any response is offered — *what I hear you saying is …* held as a check, not a technique.
Repair Attempts
Small bids made inside a conflict already in progress — a joke, a touch, a *wait, can we start over?* — that signal a wish to de-escalate without requiring either party to have already calmed down.
Sandbagging
Quietly hoarding small grievances over weeks or months and then dumping the whole stockpile at once, usually triggered by a single small infraction that opens the gate to everything that came before it.
Sarcasm as Defense
Humour used as armour — a tone that delivers a real thought while denying that the thought is serious, so the speaker can say the thing without standing behind it if the room reacts badly.
Silent Treatment
Withholding speech, contact, or warmth for hours or days after a conflict — using absence as a discipline the partner is expected to feel, while the surface story remains that nothing is wrong.
Soft Startup
Beginning a difficult conversation without contempt or accusation — *I noticed X, I felt Y, I would like Z* — so that the first thirty seconds set the conversation up to be workable rather than defended.
Stonewall-Pursue Pattern
The chronic dyadic dynamic where one partner withdraws and the other follows — each move confirming the other System's classification, the pair locked into a loop neither chose alone.
Stonewalling
Going silent and unreachable inside a conversation — the body still present, the channel closed — so the Belonging System can survive an exchange it has classified as too costly to remain inside.
Triangulating Communication
Routing relational content through a third party instead of speaking it to the person it concerns — going to mum about dad, complaining about a partner to a friend, telling a colleague about a manager — because the indirect channel feels safer than the direct one.
Turning Against
Responding to a bid for connection with hostility, sarcasm, irritation, or contempt — treating the bid itself as an imposition, so the loop closes against the bid-maker rather than around them.
Turning Away
Missing or failing to register a bid for connection — often unintentionally, often because attention was elsewhere — so the bid-maker's parasympathetic opening half-closes and the relationship registers a small subtraction instead of a small addition.
Turning Toward
The act of noticing a bid for connection and answering it — even minimally, even with a syllable, even without setting down what you were doing — so the other person's parasympathetic opening completes rather than half-closes.
Under-Explaining
Replying in terse, low-context fragments that leave the listener guessing — protecting against vulnerability by minimising disclosure while looking, on the surface, like communication.
Validation
Naming the legitimacy of another person's feeling — its sense, its proportion to what happened — without arguing it, fixing it, or trying to talk them out of it.
Veiled Requests
Asking for something through hint, complaint, or sigh — *must be nice if someone cleaned the kitchen* — rather than naming the ask directly, because the indirection protects the asker from the cost of a clear no.