The Gottmans’ research on this is clear. They identified stonewalling — one partner shutting down completely during conflict — as one of four behaviors that predict whether a relationship will fail. If your partner goes silent every time you try to talk about something important, you are not overreacting. This pattern is genuinely destructive.
Their team also showed that stonewalling is not a choice. They measured heart rates and stress hormones during couple conflict and found that the partner who shuts down is physiologically flooded — the body in a state that makes processing language close to impossible.1 They are not ignoring you. They cannot hear you. That is why “just talk to me” almost never works. You are asking them to do the thing their nervous system is actively preventing them from doing.
Where I differ from the Gottmans is the remedy.
The Gottmans’ antidote is to take at least a twenty-minute break, let the nervous system calm down, and come back to the conversation.1 That is reasonable advice. But I would ask: what happens when they come back and the same hard topic is on the table? If the thing that caused the flood has not changed, a calmer nervous system meets the same threat. And from the other side — if you are the partner who has been trying to talk, and your partner leaves the conversation, the form may be different from stonewalling, but the experience of being left alone with it may not be.
The Gottmans identify the flooding as a physiological problem, so they propose a physiological remedy: calm the body, try again. But if every time you jump in the water you sink to the bottom, the answer is not a flotation device. The answer is learning to swim.
What the flooding is actually responding to.
The partner who shuts down is not flooding because the conversation is hard. They are flooding because underneath the conversation is a very negative story about the relationship they are in:
Your emotion seems crazy to me… I can’t talk to a crazy person.
You obviously think I am a terrible person. What is the point of talking to you?
Why would I sit here and take this abuse from you? You think I need to calm down… YOU are the one who needs to calm down.
When that story is alive, your entire relationship and personhood feels under attack, and stonewalling makes sense. When the conversation feels like a personal assault, flight makes sense. The flooding is not responding to the argument. It is responding to the possibility that the person they depend on most is unwilling or unable to respond to them. You can take a thousand breaks. If that story never changes, the flooding is unavoidable.
What actually changes it.
Emotionally Focused Therapy does not teach the person who shuts down how to stay in the conversation. It does not give them breathing techniques or scripts or a better way to ask for a break. Those are behavioral tools — they manage the surface without touching what is driving it. EFT helps both partners see the story that is running underneath the pattern and unite in the shared goal of changing it. They don’t just identify it intellectually — they feel it, in the room, with each other, and realize that the story, and the dance that it causes, is the real enemy. When the story that has been fueling the flooding gets examined and the partner’s actual experience starts to come through, the story changes to reflect a new reality. And when the story changes, both partners respond differently — not because someone taught them to, but because the situation they are responding to is genuinely different.
That is the difference between a behavioral intervention and an attachment-based one. Behavioral tools ask: how do we manage this reaction? EFT asks: what is this reaction responding to, and can we change that? When the thing underneath changes, the reaction changes on its own.
Our practice is built on EFT. If you want to understand more about how it approaches the negative behaviors that insecurity in a relationship causes, you can read about why couples keep having the same fight or about Emotionally Focused Therapy itself.
Is stonewalling the same as the silent treatment?
The Gottmans draw a clear distinction. Stonewalling is a physiological flooding response — the person’s nervous system is overwhelmed and they cannot process language. The silent treatment is intentional withdrawal used to punish or control. They look similar from the outside, but the mechanisms are different. Most of the shutdown I see in couples is flooding, not punishment.
Can this pattern actually change?
Yes. Research on Emotionally Focused Therapy (Spengler et al. 2024) shows a recovery rate of approximately 70%, with gains that hold at two years.2 The pattern changes when both partners can see what the flooding is responding to and the story driving it starts to shift — not through behavioral management, but through a genuine change in how each person experiences the other.