Let me tell you something I’ve seen a hundred times in my office, and I want you to really hear this, because it matters.
When your husband goes silent in the room, when he shuts down, looks away, gives nothing, most people in your position read that as “he doesn’t care.” And I understand why. It looks like indifference. It looks like contempt. It looks like he’s checked out of you, out of the marriage, out of the whole project.
But here is what I actually see when a man stonewalls in couples therapy.
I see someone who is flooded. Physiologically overwhelmed. His nervous system has hit a wall and the shutdown is not a choice, it is a protective response that is so old, so deep, so automatic that he probably doesn’t even know it’s happening. The silence is not nothing. The silence is actually everything. It is his system screaming “I cannot survive this right now.”
That doesn’t make it okay. I want to be clear about that. Because your pain in those moments is real. You’re sitting right there, trying, opening up, being vulnerable, and the person you need most goes completely offline. That is its own kind of wound.
So here is what I want you to think about.
There are two things happening at once. You need connection. He needs safety. And right now, those two needs are in direct collision.
The work, the real work, is not to push harder to get him to talk. Pushing harder into a flooded nervous system gets you exactly nowhere. What I would be doing in that room is slowing everything way down. I would be helping you both see that the stonewalling and the pursuing, your reaching and his retreating, are actually one dance. Neither of you created it alone.
What I want for you two ultimately is what I call Sovereign Us. That is the place where you are both on the same team, where the relationship itself is the thing you are both protecting, rather than protecting yourselves from each other. Right now it sounds like you are on opposite sides of a wall. The goal is to get to the same side of it.
And that starts with your therapist helping him feel safe enough to speak, not pushing him to perform connection he doesn’t yet have access to.
Is the therapist addressing the stonewalling directly in session? That is the question I would be asking.
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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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