This is one of the most important questions in couples work, and I want to sit with it for a second before I answer it, because the way you’ve framed it tells me something. You’re asking “or” like it has to be one thing or the other. And I understand why. When someone goes silent on you, when they shut down and you can’t reach them, it feels like a choice they’re making TO you. It feels like a weapon.
Let me tell you what I know after twenty years of sitting with couples in that exact dynamic.
Stonewalling is almost never manipulation. Almost never. What it usually is, is a nervous system that has hit its ceiling. The body has decided, on a level below conscious thought, that the only way to survive this moment is to go offline. The shutting down IS the panic response. It just looks like nothing. It looks like indifference. It looks like “I don’t care.” But inside that silence, that person’s nervous system is often running hotter than anyone in the room.
Here’s the thing about how our brains work that the science backs up completely. Your brain is always running a threat assessment based on old files. Every present moment gets run through every similar moment from the past. So when someone stonewalls in a fight with you right now, they are not just responding to you right now. They are responding to every moment in their history where expressing themselves led to something bad happening. Their body learned, at some point, that silence was the safest exit.
Now. Does that make it okay? Does that mean you just have to absorb it and smile? Absolutely not. Because what happens on YOUR side is equally real. When your partner goes silent, your nervous system reads abandonment. Your old files activate. And suddenly you’re not just fighting about whatever you were fighting about. You’re fighting about every time you were left, every time you were dismissed, every time you reached out and hit a wall.
This is what I call the Waltz of Pain. One person gets flooded and shuts down. The other person reads that shutdown as rejection and pursues harder. The pursuer pursuing makes the stonewaller feel more overwhelmed and they shut down further. And round and round you go, both of you feeling completely justified, both of you drowning.
The real clinical question is not “is this trauma or manipulation.” The real question is: does this person, when they are calm and regulated, show up for repair? Do they come back? Do they acknowledge what happened? Do they show any evidence that the relationship matters to them outside the moment of flooding?
Because here is the truth. The proof of love in a relationship is not that you never shut down. It is that you come back. It is that you do the hard thing of returning, of saying “I went away. I’m here now. I want to understand what happened between us.” That repair, that return, that is the evidence that the relationship is real.
If there is no repair. Ever. If the shutdown is followed by acting like nothing happened, or by using the silence as a way to punish, to control, to make you feel small and wrong and desperate, then yeah. We need to talk about something different. Because there is a version of stonewalling that stops being a nervous system response and starts being a relational strategy. A way of maintaining power by withholding presence.
But most of the time, in my office? It’s terror. It’s someone who learned that going quiet was the only way to stay safe. And what they need is not to be accused of manipulation. What they need is a partner who can, eventually, say: “I know you go away. I know something happens for you. I’m not going anywhere. And I need you to come back to me.”
That’s where the real work starts.
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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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