Let me be honest with you right up front: stonewalling getting worse over time is one of the most important signals I see in my office. It tells me something real and it deserves a real answer.
Here’s what I know after sixteen years of sitting with couples.
Stonewalling doesn’t start as cruelty. It almost never does. It starts as survival — and if you want to understand why stonewalling happens and what drives it, the roots almost always trace back to the nervous system. At some point, one partner learned, usually pretty early in life, that when things got too intense, the safest thing to do was go quiet. To shut down. To leave the room or leave their own face. The nervous system says “I cannot handle this” and pulls the emergency brake.
The problem is that the other partner doesn’t experience that as self-protection. They experience it as abandonment. As contempt. As “you don’t matter enough for me to stay present with you.” And so they pursue harder, get louder, get more desperate. And the stonewalling gets worse. That’s the cycle. The more one person chases, the more the other disappears. The more someone disappears, the more terrified their partner becomes.
When it gets worse over time, it usually means one of two things.
Either the person stonewalling has learned that nothing good happens when they do stay present, so their nervous system is now even faster to shut down as a kind of pre-emptive protection. Or the relationship has slowly drifted toward a place where both people are performing the partnership rather than actually living inside it together.
Here’s what I want you to notice. The stonewalling isn’t the problem. The stonewalling is a symptom. Underneath it is almost always a person who is completely flooded, terrified of conflict, and genuinely doesn’t know how to stay in their body when things feel dangerous. That doesn’t make it okay. It makes it workable.
What actually helps is slowing the cycle down before it reaches the point of shutdown. That means calling a real timeout, not a punishing silence, but an agreed pause where both people commit to coming back. It means the person who tends to stonewall learning to say “I’m starting to flood, I need twenty minutes” rather than just going blank. And it means the partner who pursues learning that chasing a flooded person never gets them what they want.
The goal, the place I’m always trying to help couples reach, is where both people feel like they’re on the same team, protecting the relationship together rather than protecting themselves from each other. You can’t get there when one person is shut down and one person is desperate. You get there when both people trust that staying present is safer than disappearing.
So I want to ask you directly. Who is stonewalling in your relationship? And what does the moment just before the shutdown look like? Because that moment is where all the real work lives.
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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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