Written by Shahida Arabi, MA, psychopathology expert
Stonewalling consists of withdrawing from and ending discussions before they’ve even begun. Has your partner, friend, or family member ever deliberately ignored you or given you dismissive, cold replies when you tried to have an important discussion or addressed something significant to them? Have you ever felt silenced by a toxic person’s silent treatment? That is what stonewalling can look like.
When a manipulator stonewalls you, they withdraw from constructive or necessary conversations or discussions and refuses to address your concerns. The person may choose to outright ignore your requests, respond with dismissive, invalidating replies, or evade responding appropriately altogether by giving vague responses that refuse to answer your original questions.
According to researcher Dr. Gottman, there are “four men of the apocalypse” or four communication styles in a relationship that can predict its inevitable demise. These are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Stonewalling can be part of a demand-withdraw pattern in toxic relationships where victims try to resolve issues or confront mistreatment and abuse, only to be shut down. Such a pattern is associated with greater marital struggles according to research.
Withdrawing from a partner like this can be extremely damaging to a relationship over time. As researcher Dr. Paul Schrodt (2013) discovered, this demand-withdraw pattern in relationships, in which one partner withdraws and the other partner becomes increasingly demanding in response, can cause anxiety, depression, and further conflict within a relationship. While some partners (especially male partners) tend to use stonewalling to avoid conflict, what happens is that it actually causes more emotional friction and distress.
“In many cases, when one partner stonewalls another, the conversation is shut down before it even has a chance to begin.”
In conjunction with stonewalling, periods of the silent treatment can also be weaponized strategically by manipulators to control and punish you, especially if they sense that you are thriving without them, are no longer giving them the emotional reactions to their emotional baiting tactics, or gaining freedom from their control. The silent treatment is used to provoke insecurity, jealousy in cases of manufactured love triangles, as well as a sense of perpetual dread to keep you fixated on this person and trauma bonded to them rather than healthily detaching from them.
In the context of an abusive relationship, both techniques are deliberately used as control tactics – ways to intimidate, belittle, and demean the victim into feeling insignificant. When a narcissist gives you the silent treatment, it’s a way to devalue you and make you feel invisible. It provokes you into reacting so that you are prone to doing whatever you can to gain back their attention and approval.
The Psychological Effects of Stonewalling and The Silent Treatment
The silent treatment and stonewalling can have actual effects on the brain. These withdrawing behaviors may be perceived by the brain as a form of romantic rejection and social ostracism, and such perceived rejection or alienation can activate brain networks associated with loss, reward, motivation, craving, addiction, pain processing, and emotional dysregulation (Fisher, et al., 2010; Cacioppo et al., 2016).
In addition, silent treatments and stonewalling can occur as part of a pattern of intermittent reinforcement to train the victim’s brain to get addicted to the dopamine-fueled relief of getting a response. Since dopamine flows more readily in the brain when there are unpredictable periods of positivity integrated into the sweet-and-mean cycle of emotional abuse, victims work harder to get the “reward” of relief they feel once they get a response from the manipulator, like a gambler at a slot machine seeking the rare and elusive win.
When narcissistic or psychopathic manipulators engage in stonewalling, they do so for the purpose of power and control and to escape accountability. Since these behaviors activate the same parts of the brain that process physical pain, feeling ignored can leave someone feeling injured – literally. These effects can linger powerfully for the victim, causing fresh abandonment wounds and reinforcing old ones.
Partners often react to stonewalling by engaging in frantic attempts to avoid abandonment or overexert and overexplain themselves, attempting to engage in further discussion. Yet all stonewalling does is teach survivors how to live and thrive without the narcissist. Instead of doubling your attempts to contact the narcissist, use the manipulator’s silence as a period of self-care and detachment. Use it to connect to the reality of the manipulation you are experiencing and recognize that you deserve better.