That’s a question I sit with a lot in my work, because the honest answer is: it depends, and the distinction really matters.
Let me give you the two versions of stonewalling I see in my office.
The first version is what I call the flooded shutdown. This is a nervous system event. The person goes quiet, goes cold, goes absent, not because they are trying to control you, but because their system has completely overwhelmed itself. They literally cannot process incoming information anymore. The lights are on but nobody is home. This person is not strategizing. They are surviving. They need time to regulate before they can come back online.
The second version is different, and yes, this one can function as control. This is the person who has learned, somewhere along the way, that silence is power. That withholding their presence, their words, their emotional engagement, is a way to manage outcomes. Maybe they learned it in childhood. Maybe it worked once and they kept using it. But when silence is deployed as a tool to punish, to end conversations that feel threatening, or to keep the other person anxious and off-balance, that is not a nervous system response. That is a relational strategy.
Here is how you can sometimes tell the difference. The flooded partner, when they have calmed down, will usually come back. They will want to repair. The controlling stonewall tends to stay withdrawn until they feel like power has been restored, until the other person has been sufficiently unsettled.
I think of it like someone holding their breath underwater. One person is drowning and can’t help it. The other person is choosing to stay submerged because they know it makes you panic on the surface.
What I would ask you is this: when your partner comes back from one of these silences, what does that look like? Is there a reaching toward you, even a clumsy one? Or is there a kind of resuming normal operations, as if nothing happened, leaving you holding all the discomfort alone?
That tells you a lot about what you are actually dealing with. And honestly, it tells you what kind of conversation you need to have next.
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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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