You know, when I hear “stonewalling,” I want to gently push back on something right away, because how we frame this matters enormously.
Stonewalling is almost never a power move — and if you want a deeper look at why stonewalling happens and what it actually is, that context matters here. In my sixteen years of sitting with couples, what I see underneath stonewalling is almost always a nervous system that has completely flooded. The person who goes silent, who shuts down, who leaves the room or goes blank-faced – they are not choosing to punish you. Their body has essentially hit an emergency brake. They are so overwhelmed that continuing the conversation feels physiologically dangerous to them.
That doesn’t make it okay. It still causes real damage. But it changes where the work lives.
So here is how I think about rebuilding trust after stonewalling has become a pattern.
First, you have to name it together, outside of conflict. Not in the heat of a fight. On a Tuesday afternoon when nothing is on fire. Someone has to say, “When we fight and you go silent, I feel completely abandoned. I need us to figure this out.” And the person who stonewalls needs to say, “When the conversation gets to a certain pitch, I cannot stay in my body. I disappear. I don’t want to, but I do.”
That conversation, right there, is already repair work. It’s the visible, felt evidence that you are both willing to do the hard thing, to show up and be honest about what is actually happening, rather than just reacting to each other’s surface behavior.
Second, you need a real exit agreement. Not stonewalling, which is an involuntary shutdown, but a conscious pause. The difference is enormous. A conscious pause sounds like, “I am flooded right now. I need thirty minutes and I will come back.” That is respect. That is self-awareness. That is someone protecting the conversation rather than abandoning it.
The trust gets rebuilt when the person who used to stonewall starts coming back. Every single time they come back after a pause, they are proving something. They are showing their partner, “I did not leave you. I regulated, and I returned.”
Third, the partner who felt abandoned has work to do too. Because often, and I say this gently, the flooding that causes stonewalling was preceded by something. An escalating tone, a criticism that landed like an attack, a relentless pursuit that felt suffocating. That is not blame. That is the cycle. Both people are in it. Both people are responsible for changing their part.
The goal of all this work is reaching that place where you are both on the same team, protecting the relationship together rather than protecting yourselves from each other. When you get there, you can actually see that your partner’s shutdown was fear, not contempt. And they can see that your pursuit was attachment need, not aggression.
That shift changes everything.
Trust is rebuilt in small moments of rupture and repair, over and over again. It is not one big conversation. It is fifty small ones where someone does something different than they used to do.
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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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