Misrepresentations of Gottman Institute Research Findings in "Love and Respect"

From the Desk of "Mr. Nomad"

Nov 18, 2024

It is my GREAT pleasure to introduce you to this wonderful piece of writing by my favorite writer—my husband!! For the purposes of this publication, he shall be known as “Mr. Nomad.” What follows in an examination of the way Emerson Eggerichs misuses research by The Gottman Institute to push dubious claims in his book “Love and Respect”. I’ll quickly note that if you read “Love and Respect” and your takeaway was something like “my spouse and I should mutually invest in our marriage with kindness and honor,” then I truly am grateful! However, if this book is examined in detail, one is likely to find shoddy research, poor biblical interpretation, the normalization of emotional immaturity, and an embarrassing ignorance regarding female sexuality. This article focuses on the misuse of Gottman quotes and research.

From the desk of Mr. Nomad - The date is April 14, 2020. Mrs. Nomad and I (prior to being Mr. Nomad) were just over a month into the pandemic lockdowns and less than a month into our dating relationship. We were writing one another tender and sweet emails as we started dating. This is a lightly edited portion of an email I sent to Mrs. Nomad in the nascent days of our relationship. I don't give out much dating advice, but here are my pearls of wisdom: if you want to impress the girl you are most fond of, write her a literal research paper about a book you are decidedly not fond of. Enjoy.

silhouette photo of couple standing on beach watching sunset — Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Misrepresentations of Gottman Institute Research Findings in Love and Respect

Dr. Emerson Eggerichs puts forward this thesis statement for his book Love and Respect: "Wives are made to love, want to love, and expect love... Husbands are made to be respected, want respect, and expect respect" (p. 6). He draws this over-simple conclusion from a poor reading of Ephesians 5:33, namely that "Paul is clearly saying that wives need love and husbands need respect" (p. 15), as though these two things must be mutually exclusive, as if Paul were saying "Love your wife, but do not respect her; respect your husband but do not love him." We will not get into Eggerichs' faulty reading of Paul here. The domain of this discussion is instead Eggerichs' data points for supporting this reading of Ephesians 5:33, which includes anecdotal evidence from his own marriage (see page 10), "experience as a counselor" (page 17), and appeals to research in the couples counseling field (page 35). And it is this last category that we will focus on here.

Of the sources present in Love and Respect (see notes section, pages 319-324) there is only one directly related to the field of therapy and couples counseling - John Gottman's Why Marriages Succeed or Fail. An argument can be made that Eggerich's references to Simon Baron-Cohen's text, The Essential Difference, are also an appeal to material a counselor would use, as Baron-Cohen is a psychologist; but a brief glance at this book shows that it is the result of scientific inquiry into physiological and neurological differences between male and female brains. The subtitle of the book, "Male and Female Brains and the Truth About Autism," reveals the direction of the book and its purposes, which do not include couples counseling. Baron-Cohen's thesis is "the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems" (p. 1). The table of contents for The Essential Difference does not appear to suggest applications for counseling, and certainly does not contain a counseling model such as John and Julie Gottman have developed.

None of the other authors cited by Eggerichs have degrees in counseling, psychology, or psychiatry. Thus, we are left with an expected yet disturbing finding: John Gottman is the only couples' counselor cited in Love and Respect, and Eggerichs has only cited from one of Gottman's texts - Why Marriages Succeed or Fail.

What we find more disturbing is the material Eggerich's cited from Gottman's book - or rather how he cites this material. Eggerichs cites Gottman five times - once in chapter 2, twice in chapter 4, once in chapter 5, and once in chapter 6. All of these chapters compose part 1 of Love and Respect, titled "The Crazy Cycle." This portion of the book sets out the book's overall thesis statement - that women need love and men need respect. Parts two and three of Love and Respect chart out the counseling applications of this thesis. So, Eggerichs cites Gottman to support his claim that women need love and men need respect, but does not cite Gottman for any kind of counseling applications or interventions. This is odd - Gottman is after all a counselor who has an evidence-backed & fully-thought-out framework for couples counseling! Yet Eggerichs appears to ignore this.

But this is purposeful. The truth is, should Eggerichs cite and apply counseling research and protocols from Gottman, his thesis will falter. Gottman's research is very unlikely to support or find cohesion with Eggerichs' arguments. Eggerichs was extremely excited to find this statement in chapter two of Why Marriages... under the heading "Marriage Styles," where Gottman writes this about successful couples married 20-40 years to the same person: "No matter what style of marriage they have adopted, their discussions, for the most part, are carried along by a strong undercurrent of two basic ingredients: love and respect" (p. 61, emphasis mine). Eggerichs must have peed his pants when he read this, because it appeared to him that his thesis must be backed up by decades of Gottman's research. But Eggerichs misses out on one fundamental difference between his view of love and respect and that of John Gottman - Gottman does not distinguish between these actions on the lines of gender roles. What Eggerichs does not see, or rather chooses to ignore, is this inherent mutuality of love and respect between both partners in the marriage, regardless of gender or gender role. Gottman does not propose that Men are to love and Women to respect - and, as we will see, there is no way to read that proposition onto his statements here.

Eggerichs goes on to cite three places in Gottman over four citations. Three of these citations are from the chapter titled "The Two Marriages: His and Hers," and the last citation from the chapter "The Four Keys to Improving Your Marriage." If it seemed too critical to state that Eggerichs was actively choosing to ignore the mutuality between marriage partners in love and respect, I hope his citations will show that his focus is purposefully narrow, choosing to ignore the majority of Gottman's arguments and research to support his own thesis regarding gender roles. That three of his five citations of Gottman are in the single chapter dedicated to possible gender differences in marriage should alert us to Eggerichs' cherry-picking. Sadly, though, even when attempting to find support for his thesis, Eggerichs fails to do so. And this is not a complicated failure nor one hard to locate - a simple reading of the context around pulled quotes shows that Eggerichs is purposefully re-contextualizing Gottman for the explicit purpose of supporting his own alternative thesis.

We have already seen this in the earlier quote, where Eggerichs ignores the obvious mutuality of love and respect between partners. Citations two and three read this way in Eggerichs:

"Gottman states, 'Such interactions can produce a vicious cycle, especially in marriages with a high level of conflict. The more wives complain and criticize, the more husbands withdraw and stonewall, the more wives complain and criticize.' Gottman adds that as a wife becomes belligerent and contemptuous, the marriage is in serious danger. If this cycle isn't broken, it will probably end in divorce." (p. 60; Both quote and paraphrase taken from Gottman p. 152)

This appears to Eggerichs to be his "ace in the hole" - not only does Gottman support the gender difference between love and respect, but he does so in a way that involves a "cycle," lending legitimacy to Eggerichs' "Cycle of Craziness." But flip back to the beginning of this subsection in Gottman's chapter, headed "Balancing the Ship of Marriage," and you will read this:

"In general, it may be more desirable biologically for women to get issues aired and settled and for men to avoid them... If your relation-ship begins to sink under the stress of an unhappy marriage, these gender differences can become exaggerated, making matters much worse. In fact, we find, by and large, in happy marriages there are no gender differences in emotional expression! But in unhappy marriages all the gender differences we've talked about emerge: Men are more defensive; men try to keep the emotion on a neutral track but women don't; men are the big stonewallers, withdrawing from the negative emotions of their wives because they are more easily flooded. And the men's withdrawal and defensiveness just fan the flames of their wives' frustration." (p. 149)

Gottman's obvious message is this - gender differences are more likely to be signs of unhealth in a marriage than health! In happy marriages, these gender differences are minimal, not maximal. Further, while it may appear that women are the issue - especially if you read only Eggerichs' quote - Gottman makes it clear that both men and women contribute to unhealth in their marriage through their behaviors. Eggerich is pulling his citation from a subsection where Gottman illustrates the dangers of probable gender differences in emotional communication; but instead of citing this larger idea, Eggerichs simply quotes from an example of poor emotional expression between partners to argue that, no, it's not the emotional expression that needs fixing, but the fulfillment of a man's desire to be respected; respect from the wife is the solution - and so the problem must be a failure on the wife's part to understand her husband's needs. You will notice that in the remainder of this chapter, Eggerichs does not criticize the male response to stonewall, though stonewalling is one of the four horsemen of failed marriages (this is quite apparent if you have read Gottman). Eggerichs appears to rationalize the male response to stonewall, stating that "to him that's the honorable thing to do," and that "He is simply trying to do the honorable and respectable thing, but his wife thinks he's rejecting her" (p. 60; see discussion below on why Eggerichs later recommends husbands not to stonewall).

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It should be very clear by now that Eggerichs has an exceptionally poor understanding of the basics of Gottman's counseling research. But if we stop there, we may be giving Eggerichs too much credit. It is my belief that Eggerichs is knowledgeable of what Gottman is writing, but chooses to ignore it in order to support his own thesis statement. I cannot prove this allegation, but our exploration of his use of Gottman could point this direction. Or, rather, Eggerichs' lack of use of Gottman's actual counseling model may be better evidence that Eggerich is choosing to ignore evidence-backed interventions that do not rely on gender differences as the main places of change.

Because we've come this far, let us finish by addressing the final two citations Eggerichs makes of Gottman. In chapter 5, Eggerichs states "As John Gottman observes, 'the major goal is to break the cycle of negativity'" (p. 77). Eggerichs is re-contextualizing the term "negativity" to refer to the nagging of a wife who does not respect her husband. Just read the paragraphs on pages 76-77 for how Eggerichs uses the term: "She keeps on using negativity because she feels empowered by it" (76); and, "the wife who feels empowered by negativity isn't even aware she needs to break that cycle" (77). Gottman, however, is not describing women as negative on page 175 - he is describing negative cycles of communication. Page 174 - "Obviously, the problem isn't a lack of skill. It's that their ability to communicate with their loved one is stymied by the negativity that's enveloping their marriage." Notice the mutuality and lack of gender distinctions in this statement. Gottman proposes four strategies to reduce this negativity, and not one of them involves a gender role or a gender difference. Each of the four strategies applies to each partner equally.

Eggerichs' final citation of Gottman comes in chapter 6, and though this is Eggerichs' most competent use of Gottman, it is also his most purposefully disingenuous and academically dubious. Eggerichs actually says something helpful here: "Dr John Gottman concluded that it was very effective when a husband could embrace his wife's anger. He advised men not to avoid conflict if they want to make their marriages work.... 'If you stay with her through this discomfort, and listen to her criticisms,' says Gottman, 'she will calm down. If you stonewall, she'll be edgy and may escalate the conflict" (p. 96). Taken alone, this is not bad advice - in fact, it's good advice for men. Of course, in context, what Eggerichs advises is repugnant, as he operates from the assumption that the wife's desire to express her emotions is base and disrespectful, and what a man must do is simply endure it until her mania passes. Men are to handle their wives' emotions (p. 96). Women are to control their negative emotions (p. 88). Feelings are antithetical to faith (p. 89). Emotions are not important - respect is (p. 91). Do not listen to your wife - simply "conceal the dishonor" (p. 91). In essence, the "Crazy Cycle" is one for which women are primarily responsible. These views are reprehensible and absolutely at odds with Gottman's research and couples counseling model. Notice the difference between Gottman's actual quote and Eggerichs' butchering of it:

Says Eggerichs: "'If you stay with her through this discomfort, and listen to her criticisms,' says Gottman, 'she will calm down. If you stonewall, she'll be edgy and may escalate the conflict.'" (p. 96)

Here's Gottman's original text:

"If you stay with her through this discomfort and listen to her criticisms rather than insisting that she's exaggerating or getting hysterical over nothing, she will calm down. If you stonewall and refuse to listen, she'll be edgy and may escalate the conflict, making it more likely that you'll wind up feeling flooded" (p. 159; italics to show what Eggerichs has removed from the quote).

Notice that Eggerich does not note that his quotation has removed text from the original. Where the text is italicized, Eggerichs has removed Gottman's words without making an appropriate notation (typically in these places a quote will use an ellipsis [...] to show that text has been removed, or a bracket [ [paraphrase] ] to show a paraphrase has been added; Eggerichs does neither). This is textbook misrepresentation of a cited author, and further suggests that Eggerichs is not ignorant as much as he is intentionally misusing sources to support his incorrect thesis. For the astute reader who points out that "Eggerichs is simply using material in a way that highlights what is useful and deletes what isn't, probably because he has constraints on how much text he can include and he has to be economical, just as any other author would;" to that reader I would point out that in Eggerich's paragraph containing the quote on page 96, he paraphrases Gottman's entire page 159 paragraph, using identical language and phrasing without offering a citation, making it look like Eggerichs is the one proposing the advice therein. This is plain dishonesty. Actually, it's plagiarism and it never should have made it past an editor.

To conclude, Eggerichs uses Gottman in a way that is academically dishonest, removes important context from the original text, re-defines words in a way that is inaccurate to the original, makes no use of the evidence-based resources and interventions offered in the original, plagiarizes content, and purposefully advances a hypothesis antithetical to that of the educated researcher and clinician. It's disgusting. Eggerichs is a dishonest and disingenuous author who finds that he, along with his publisher, Thomas Nelson, Inc., can publish work that somehow both plagiarizes and misrepresents John Gottman, for his own financial gain, to the detriment of the original author from whom he steals, while misleading couples who are simply trying to get their marriages on track.

/End

Homebound Nomad

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