Stonewalling: Why We Do It, And Tips To Overcome
I have something to admit, I’m a stonewaller during emotionally charged conversations or under stress.
I withdraw, I lose the words to speak, I “seemingly” become vacant to the conversation and my partner and I disengage. I can also come across passive (aggressive) when people in work ask me things that stress me out. I’ll struggle to look their way, mumbling as I try and figure out my way around it.
It’s not what I want to be doing, mind you, and yet it’s as if my body’s automatic response to high-pressured situations is to shut off.
From the research I’ve done around stonewalling, that isn’t too far from the truth.
Whilst the harm of stonewalling is well documented, and is one of the 4 behaviour signs that a marriage is headed for divorce, to view stonewalling as a unsolvable problem and marriage “ender” neither benefits our partners or ourselves. In order to give ourselves and our relationships a true chance of healing, growth, or survival, we have to understand the person beneath the stonewalling, if indeed we or them are open to being understood — more on that, later — .
With this in mind, I wanted to take today’s article to dive into the science behind stonewalling: why us stonewallers have less choice than you’d think in acting the way we do, how to identify stonewalling behaviours, and how to overcome them.
To note, I am not saying stonewalling is right, and it can be used as a manipulative technique by those who are abusive and have bad intentions. However, for the genuine stonewaller, it has as much to do with their past as it does their current reality and we can’t work with this group of people if we discard them as narcissists, rude, or bad. It’s unlikely they would be this way it if they had a choice.
A Person In Freeze, Why Stress Creates A Wall
There are many routes out of a stressful situation that our body has evolved to take. We can fight or flee, by means of an adrenaline-charged boost from our brain’s hypothalamus when there is danger, we can fawn and appease the stressor’s demands (people-pleasing), or we can shut down entirely and freeze. *Think of the disaster movies where an individual is frozen in fear at the sight of a tsunami wave coming their way. That’s freeze.
Whilst we all have the ability to respond to stress in different ways — depending on the stress we’re facing — , some of us have our preferred option depending on how we adapted to stress in childhood.
For example, when I was younger I felt unable to escape the stresses I was experiencing. In my mind there was no point fighting or fleeing them because neither option were viable. Instead, my reaction was to dissociate from the stress and shut down. Some would call this a “learned helplessness” response in which an individual faced with consistent stress is forced to “turn off” their reactive systems in order to better cope.
Martin Seligman, a pioneering psychologist in the field of psychiatry did some famous work with dogs on inducing this state by subjecting them to electric shocks that they couldn’t get away from. Eventually they became demotivated, passive, and dissociate from the pain, despite still being subjected to shocks. Even when given a way out after imposing this helpless state, they failed to show any motivation.
As habits form over time and repeated behaviour, if we learn to cope in this manner as a child, eventually it becomes our automatic response to stress. This means that even when faced with situations — like an emotionally charged conversation with a partner — our immediate response is to shut-down, as we learned to do all those years back. In a way, we’re transported out of our reality and back to our reaction to the trauma we previously experienced.
That’s the thing with stonewalling, it’s often not a conscious choice for the individual who’s doing it. Our emotional brain, that which generates the stress-response, is intertwined with our physiology and is largely unconscious, meaning we have little control over when we feel threatened and fall into freeze.
So if you tend to freeze in the face of stress, have a think of where this first emanated for you. Were there times in your childhood when you felt unable to escape? Like Martin Seligman’s dogs, was your only choice to dissociate and numb-out? If so, it’s likely this is now your brain’s go-to way of dealing with stress after all these years.
Signs Of Stonewalling and Freeze Responses
Externally, stonewalling can look like the physical or mental withdrawal from someone from a conversation. Their eyes gloss over, they won’t seem “present” to the conversation, they’ll lack movement, and likely lose the ability to speak. Attempts at conversing with them will likely be met with the odd word, if any, which has obvious implications on the discussion at hand.
Bessel Van Der Volk, known for his work on PTSD and trauma and author of “The Body Keeps The Score” showed that the brain’s of individuals experiencing freeze responses in the face of stress showed decreased activity in an area of their brain called Broca’s area. Broca’s area helps us articulate speech and when activity is impaired, we’ll struggle to find the right words to say. As someone who has experienced this, you can quite literally feel as if you’ve lost all motivation to speak.
Despite appearing to freeze externally, internally the environment for a stonewaller can be quite different. Freeze responses, despite appearing to shut the body down, actually induce two-opposing reactions in the brain and body.
To save the chemical details, though I’ve written about this before, the branches of our nervous system that give us energy (sympathetic) and make us relax (parasympathetic) both become activated at once. This differs from the primarily sympathetic reaction that occurs during fight/flight responses — hence their highly-reactive namesakes.
This means the internal environment for the stonewaller is likely filled with panic, racing thoughts, and confusion, and yet they feel motivationally impaired to do anything about it. In Bessel’s brain-scans, as activity at the Broca area goes down, the area generating fear-responses, the amygdala, goes up. However, some individuals who have faced significant trauma have brain’s who go completely silent, meaning they have completely dissociated from the present.
A Present Reaction To A Past Memory: Overcoming Stonewalling
It’s worth remembering that whilst you may be stonewalling, or are observing someone stonewall you, the current predicament is unlikely a direct response to the present moment, rather a remembrance to past-trauma being re-triggered.
For example, the adult male who was once scolded over crying and was conditioned to believe men shouldn’t have emotions, may become triggered by an emotionally charged conversation that threatens to unravel a sensitive side of them they were forced to shut-down long ago.
Therein, it isn’t so much YOU who is the problem, but a life-time of conditioned beliefs that is behind their response. Depending on how severe the conditioning was, and how helpless they felt in their ability to fight back, stonewalling can come up. Others may become outwardly expressive (fight) or walk out (flee).
Despite the isolating nature of stonewalling, for the individual themselves and their partners, freeze responses can be worked through, though they require a commitment on the stonewaller’s behalf to do the deeper work. This is integral. You can’t work with a stonewaller who doesn’t want to let their walls down, or even try.
Top-down and bottom-up therapies can both manage the root-causes of stonewalling as well as the psychological and physiological imprints they incur. Through awareness, we can better notice when our body is shutting down, when we need space away to re-group, and how to navigate triggering conversations.
Ironically, it’s open-communication which will ultimately decide whether stonewalling becomes a larger issue, or not.
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