Why Your Partner Shuts Down in Arguments

Episode Summary of “Why Your Partner Shuts Down in Arguments”

Have you ever felt like you’re hitting a brick wall during a conversation with your partner? Why Your Partner Shuts Down in Arguments is often less about a lack of caring and more about a nervous system that has reached its limit.

In this episode, we explore the “underneath” of the withdrawer’s experience—moving past the frustration of silence to understand the biological stress responses of flight, freeze, and fawn. By recognizing these patterns as attempts to preserve the relationship rather than acts of rejection, couples can move away from the “fire” of conflict and toward a shared sense of emotional safety and reconnection.

What You’ll Learn:
– The Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn stress responses.
– Understanding the “fight to fix” vs. the “withdraw to calm” dynamic.
– The metaphor of removing oxygen to put out the fire of conflict.
– How childhood experiences and past trauma shape conflict styles.
– The “Chasing” cycle: Why pushing for answers often leads to more shutdown.
– Practical tools for de-escalation: Using “I” statements and signal timeouts.

Don’t forget to check out our free 10-week relationship email course. This email course is really designed for people who are maybe having trouble with communication or connection in their relationship and helping them develop some quick wins right away to start improving it.

Free Relationship Pattern Assessment

Many couples assume they have a communication problem when they’re actually stuck in a relationship pattern that keeps creating the same conflict.

Take the free Relationship Pattern Assessment to discover what pattern may be keeping you stuck and learn what to focus on next.

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Episode Transcript for “Why Your Partner Shuts Down in Arguments”

This podcast is sponsored by Communicate and Connect Counseling, where we have a team of therapists who provide individual couples and family therapy services, all tailored to meet the needs of military and veteran families. To learn more about our services, visit www.communicateandconnect.com.

Welcome to the Communicate and Connect podcast for military relationships with your host, Elizabeth Polinsky, a military marriage counselor. If this is your first time listening to the Communicate and Connect podcast, please take a second to go rate review and subscribe to make sure you get all our future episodes.

We also really want to know what it is you love about our podcast, and if for some reason you’re not loving it, we want to know that too because we’re committed to providing the best quality content to help you improve your relationships.

You’re listening to episode 75, Why Your Partner Shuts Down in Arguments.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky: Does your partner tend to go quiet or walk away? Right in the moment that you’re wanting to talk to them. That’s exactly what we’re gonna talk about today on the Communicate and Connect podcast. Hi, I’m Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky. This is episode 75. Why Your Partner Shuts Down in Arguments.

One of the things that often happens for couples, which is tends to be a source of conflict, is that one person tends to want to talk through things together, and then the other person might want to avoid the conflict, at least at that time, and they might walk away or they might go quiet or they might shut down.

And so let’s talk about why does this happen. This is actually part of the stress response, and so you may have heard of the concept fight flight, freeze. This is when your nervous system is sensing that there is a threat. Or danger of some kind. And everyone is different. So some people when their nervous system is getting overwhelmed and there’s a lot of stress and they’re sensing that there’s some danger of some kind, they may want to fight.

And they may want to be the one in the relationship who is fighting to talk about things. They want to talk about it, they’re pushing to talk about it. If their partner goes into the other room, they’re following the person into the other room. They are ready to fight, but they’re wanting to fight to fix. They’re wanting to do it, not to fight to fight, but to fight to get to the other side together.

Then you have the flight response, which is when I’m overwhelmed and my nervous system is saying, oh no, this is not good. I gotta get outta here, they have to get outta here. And so then they walk away. They may leave the house, they may drive away. It could also be like going on a walk, going on a run. And then this is a way to try to calm down, to try to get there at a body level, their emotional system back to a safe place.

And then you have something called the freeze response. This is also part of the body’s stress response. And so freeze can look like a deer caught in the headlights where they go really still, they’re kind of non-responsive. Freeze tends to happen when it feels like I can’t really leave the situation. And so, for many people, if they feel like they can leave, they might leave.

But if they feel like for some reason they can’t really leave, they might freeze instead. Sometimes mixed in with this is also what people call a fawn response, which is kind of like people pleasing or appeasing my partner. Maybe I can’t say anything at all. That would be a freeze response.

Or if I am trying to say things that I think you wanna hear, that would be the fawn response. And again, this is all related to stress in someone’s nervous system when they are feeling like there might be some kind of danger.

And so what is important to know about this when it comes to couple communication dynamics is that a withdraw, any of the fight, flight, freeze, fawn options, are not really about, like rejection or not wanting to improve the relationship. They’re usually about being overwhelmed at a nervous system level with what’s happening.

So I know I use the example of like the person who’s fighting, they usually want to fight to get to the other side, to get to a point where we’re reconnected. People who withdraw or use the fight, freeze, or fawn response, they have learned oftentimes in their life that conflict is bad.

That they are not gonna be maybe believed if they share. That maybe if they share and try to work through something with somebody else, that it’s just gonna go bad. It’s gonna create more problems. Especially if they had some traumatic experiences in their childhood or their family or in previous relationships, they may have learned that there actually is a sense of danger or there very well could have been like physical danger if they had tried to engage versus leaving or doing, whatever they think the other person would want them to do in that situation.

And so this really has to do with, I don’t want things to get worse. And so, somebody who is doing a more withdrawing action tendency, maybe when they’re feeling overwhelmed and not safe, is doing it because they want to just calm everything down. They also want to preserve the relationship.

They want the relationship to be in a good place, and conflict doesn’t feel good. It feels like a threat to the relationship, that if we’re in conflict, there’s a risk to us here and that the best thing to do is to like get us through to the other side by calming everything down.

So I like to think about it, a good metaphor for this, is the idea of putting out a fire. So some one could put out a fire by pouring water onto the fire, but you can also put out a fire by removing oxygen from the space. So somebody who’s in a fight mode. They are somebody who’s like, let’s get water. Let’s hose this down. Let’s jump in and like fix it.

The person who is withdrawing, whether that is by fleeing, freezing, or fawning, is also trying to get the conflict to go down to reestablished peace and connection in the relationship, but they’re doing it by trying to remove oxygen. So that way the fire, or in this case, the conflict doesn’t burn bigger.

Sometimes you can have two people who flee, or two people who freeze, or two people who fight, or two people who fawn. But that’s less common. I think the most common thing is that you have one person who’s fighting and one person who is either fleeing, freezing, or fawning.

And this is a bit of a challenge because it creates a pattern where both of them continue to feel overwhelmed and a bit in danger because the person who wants to fight to get through, to solve the problem, to work through it, to get back into a good place.

That kind of like fight energy can just feel like the conflict is escalating to the person who wants the oxygen to go down, and for the conflict to go down. And so then they kind of trigger each other in a way because the more one person fights to get to the solution, the other person views their heightened fight energy as like, oh no, the conflict is getting worse.

I gotta calm this all down. I gotta calm me down. I don’t want it to go bad. And then they withdraw more. But then the more they withdraw, the more the fighting person feels a sense of danger and threat, and their nervous system gets activated even more. And then they wanna fight to get through to the solution more. But then of course, as they want to fight more, the other one is feeling overwhelmed by conflict feeling like it’s escalating and then they might withdraw more.

And so what helps somebody, like if you’re a partner, is a partner who shuts down, whether that is shutting down by leaving the room or shutting down by kind of freezing and kind of going blank and being non-responsive and shut down in the moment. Or whether they start fawning and they start maybe like apologizing or saying what you wanna hear, but you can kind of tell that it’s not authentic. It feels like they are saying what you wanna hear.

If your partner is doing one of these things, it’s important to not chase them. That is the natural tendency for somebody who can get more in that fight energy, and who is wanting to address things and work through it and not go to bed angry and everything like that.

So instead of fighting harder, I get that it’s very hard to do because everything in your body is saying, this is not okay. I’ve gotta fix this. Now I’ve gotta do something. But that is also your overwhelm, and so what you can do is you can try to pause, give yourself a break, give your partner a break. This is really, really helpful to just let both of you calm down a little bit and then come back to the conversation when either of you are not feeling triggered.

It’s also important that you start talking about yourself in moments like this. So instead of pushing for your partner to say something, and you might be asking questions or you could get even critical, like you never wanna talk like, what’s wrong with you?

Healthy couples talk through things, but it could come out in a very critical way. Instead of kind of pushing for them to talk more, what you can do is talk about yourself and you can say, I’m noticing that I’m feeling really anxious and worried right now. I’m wanting us to somehow work through this together.

And then you can say, can we talk about it more? Are you in a place where you could talk about this and help me with all of the anxiety that’s coming up for me? The more you make the conversation about you, the easier that is for your partner to hear and engage with.

It is pretty much like the opposite of adding fuel to the fire because if you talk about your partner, then your partner is gonna say, oh gosh, this is getting worse. It’s escalating, and now I’m being blamed. Now I’m being attacked, that my partner wants even more for me. I can’t possibly make them happy here, and so I gotta get out of here.

So if you make it about them, it’s just gonna overwhelm them more. So the more you can make the conversation about you, I’m feeling triggered. I’d like to talk about it. I’m hoping we can work through this. I’m wanting to feel good in our relationship again. The more you can make all of the language about you, the easier it’s gonna be. But sometimes that’s hard for people to do. So if you can’t do that yet, please know that you’re not alone.

This takes quite a bit of practice and quite a bit of getting used to understanding your emotions yourself and understanding why you are getting triggered and what’s happening for you emotionally, and what do you actually need from your partner. You kind of have to know all of that in order to be able to communicate it to your partner.

So if you’re not there yet, the thing that I would have as a takeaway from this episode is that you can agree to a signal for a timeout, and that could be simply saying, I need 20 minutes to calm down and then I’ll come back. And both partners, whether you’re the fighter or the withdrawer, whether that’s flight, freeze, or font, both of you can use this and say, I just need 20 minutes to calm down, and then we can come back and talk about it.

So if you found this episode helpful, I think that it would be so great if you shared it with your partner and had them listen to it so that way the two of you can see, okay, who’s the fighter? Do both of us fight Who withdraws? Whether that’s fleeing, freezing, or fawning. Alright, I’ll see you next time.

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If so, please take a second to go rate review and subscribe so you get all of our future episodes. Make sure to check out the show notes. To sign up for our Free 10 week relationship email course.

This email course is really designed for people who are maybe having trouble with communication or connection in their relationship and helping them develop some quick wins right away to start improving it.

While I am a therapist, this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not considered therapy, and it should also not be a replacement for therapy. If you think you need a professional of any kind, you should definitely go find one.

Until next time.