Let me start with something that might feel counterintuitive right now.
Your partner stonewalling you is painful. I hear that. But I want you to sit with something for a moment before we talk about what to do with it.
The withdrawer is not cold. They are terrified.
What looks like a wall from where you’re standing is actually a person who has learned, probably long before they met you, that the safest thing they can do when things get intense is to go quiet. To shut down. To disappear into themselves. Underneath all of that silence is usually something that sounds like: “I feel like I can never get it right.” Or “I’m scared that my failure is hurting you.” The stonewalling is not indifference. It is a wound wearing armor.
Now here is the part I really want you to hear.
When you feel them pulling away, what do you do? My guess is you reach harder. You push more. You raise the intensity, trying to get some kind of response, some kind of signal that you still matter. And when you do that, what happens? They go further in. And then you reach harder still. You can probably finish this sentence yourself.
That cycle, that push and pull, that is the enemy. Not your partner. Not you. The system you two have built together without meaning to.
This is what I call the pursuer and withdrawer dynamic, and it is one of the most predictable patterns I see in twenty years of sitting in this chair. It is so predictable it is almost boring, except that it is destroying people’s relationships every single day.
The work is not getting your partner to stop stonewalling. The work is both of you learning to see the cycle for what it is, something you are both caught inside of, something that is happening to both of you, not something one of you is doing to the other.
When a couple can look at each other and say “we are both hurting, we are both scared, we are both protecting ourselves,” something shifts. That is where the two of you stop being opponents across a battlefield and start being on the same side of the table. That is what I call Sovereign Us, the moment you are protecting the relationship together rather than protecting yourselves from each other.
But here is what I want to leave you with today. Your role in this is not just to wait for your partner to stop stonewalling. Your role is to ask yourself: what is the longing underneath my protest? Because when you can bring that, the real thing, the fear of not mattering, the fear of being alone, the fear of not being chosen, instead of the push, everything changes.
That is a different conversation than the one the cycle keeps starting.
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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: How to Stop Fighting and Start Communicating in Your Relationship
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