Stonewalling
Withdrawing from an interaction while still physically present: no eye contact, no response, a flat face, monosyllables, or walking out.
What drives it
Usually a response to physiological flooding: the person is overwhelmed and shuts down to stop the overload. It can also harden into a habit that keeps conflict permanently unresolved and leaves the other person powerless.
How it shows
Work
In a review, the challenged executive goes still, stares at the table, says 'Fine' and nothing more. By email, a peer simply never answers the thread where he was questioned. In a negotiation, a counterpart goes quiet and leaves, not as a tactic but because he can't think. Look at the face: frozen, eyes averted, jaw set.
Relationships
Mid-argument one partner turns to the phone, says 'whatever', or leaves the room without a word. The other escalates to get a response, which floods the stonewaller further. In Gottman's samples it was more common in men.
Self
Heart racing, mind blank, no words, and all you want is for it to stop. If you are calm and choosing silence to make a point, you are doing something else.
What tells it apart
Silent treatment: Stonewalling happens inside a conflict and comes with signs of overwhelm; the silent treatment is deliberate, lasts hours or days, and is aimed at making the other person pay or comply.
Emotional flooding: Flooding is the internal state; stonewalling is the behaviour it often produces. Someone can be flooded and still talk, or stonewall out of habit when calm.
Deactivating strategies: Deactivation is a broad avoidance of closeness that shows even in calm times; stonewalling is specific to moments of conflict.
A test
Offer a twenty-minute break with a firm time to come back: a flooded stonewaller returns able to talk, someone using silence as punishment does not.
Questions to carry
- After a twenty-minute break with a set time to return, how able to talk was the person who shut down?
- When I go blank in an argument, what is happening in my body right before?
How strong the research is
moderate. Strong observational links with relationship distress in Gottman's lab; the flooding mechanism is plausible and partly supported, but most data come from one research programme.
Where it comes from
John Gottman, 1994
On the family tree: John Gottman
Sources
- John M. Gottman, What Predicts Divorce? The Relationship Between Marital Processes and Marital Outcomes (1994)
- John M. Gottman and Nan Silver, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (1999)