You know, I hear those four words, and I want to sit with them for a second. “Shuts me out completely.” That lands.
Here’s what I want you to understand first, because I think it might actually help you breathe a little easier even in the middle of this pain. When your husband shuts you out, when he goes quiet, withdraws, builds that wall—that is his version of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. He is fleeing. He is shutting down. And the reason he does it is the same reason you feel desperate for him to come back. Because you matter enormously to each other.
I know that might sound backwards. Like, if I matter so much, why is he leaving me out here alone? But here’s what I know after sixteen years of sitting with couples. People only shut down like that when they are overwhelmed by what’s happening between the two of you. His closing off is not indifference. It’s a protest. It’s a scared organism trying to survive a moment that feels threatening to him.
Now, that doesn’t make it okay. And it doesn’t mean your pain is wrong. Your pain is completely real and completely logical. You’re reaching for your person and the door is closed. That’s one of the loneliest experiences a human being can have.
But here’s where it gets really important. When you’re shut out, what do you do? Most likely you move toward him in some way, right? You try harder, ask more questions, maybe get louder or more emotional, trying to get him to come back. And every time you do that, what does he do? He goes further in. The door gets heavier.
That’s what I call the cycle. Your move toward, his move away, your move toward harder, his move away further. Both of you are hurting. Both of you are in it. His withdrawal looks like coldness from where you’re standing. Your reaching looks like pressure from where he’s standing. Neither of you is the villain. Both of you are terrified.
What needs to happen before anything else is that both of you can see this cycle as the problem, not each other. The moment you can both look at the pattern together and say, “God, look at this awful thing we keep doing to each other, and look how much we both hate it”—that’s when something can shift.
But I want to be honest with you. You probably cannot get there alone. One person seeing the cycle clearly doesn’t fix it, because this is, as I always say, a three-legged race. You can’t drag someone across the finish line. You can move toward understanding what’s happening, and that matters. But ultimately both of you need to be in that room together, literally or figuratively, looking at this thing you’ve built together and deciding you want something different.
What I would ask you, right now, is this: when he shuts down, what’s the fear underneath your reaching? Not the frustration. Not the anger. What’s the thing underneath all of that, the thing that feels most tender and most true? That’s where your real work begins.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: Stonewalling in Relationships: What Your Partner’s Silence Actually Means
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