Shutting down during conflict can be a way of protecting ourselves or others when emotions feel too intense, confusing, or hard to express.
Shutting Down During Conflict: A Well-Intended Protection
How The Pattern Gets Started
In the important relationships we have as children and adults, we learn how to have safe and flexible connections. In an ideal world, I can feel what I am feeling, share it directly and clearly with you, you can take it in and send a message back. We can share ourselves without second-guessing, and it is welcome. We can give love and receive it.
When the conditions of our relationships don’t make this exchange so straightforward, our smart brains and bodies come up with the next-best strategy. If sharing directly isn’t available, we start relying on fall-back tools. Sometimes we activate and highlight what is going on, to make sure our message lands. Other times, it’s better to keep things to ourselves and stay small as we carefully walk on eggshells. Both approaches can be very reasonable depending on the circumstances. In this post, let’s explore the response of shutting down.
Reasons Shutting Down Makes Sense
Maybe we learned to disconnect in an environment that required this strategy constantly, or maybe it was in several crucial human moments. Regardless, we may have learned to go quiet or pull away if life taught us something like this:
If I go forward, I will get punished.
If I expose myself, I will regret it.
If I speak, things will blow up.
If I stay, it will only get worse.
If I try, it won’t be enough anyway.
With enough repetition of these experiences, we started defaulting to any of the following:
Staying silent, appearing calm even when overwhelmed, bracing for impact, leaving to get some relief or to give others a break, not sharing what we are feeling or better still, not feeling anything to begin with so we don’t have to be alone with it or deal with the aftermath.
To all of which I say: Well, of course and thank goodness! These strategies can serve us so well. Imagine if we didn’t have them when we most needed them.
When Patterns Ask For An Update
If we learned to disconnect in important or risky moments, our bodies will automatically resort to that under stress, to save energy. Which is why we might happily be open and vulnerable when things are going smoothly, but quickly turn to shutting down during conflict when the stakes are high. Shutdown can be safe, or at least familiar.
But when the repetition creates a deep groove, it might start feeling impossible to step out of it even when we want to stay present, connected and fully alive – for ourselves and for others. Maybe the rigid pattern created an image we have of ourselves or of others that would benefit from updating.
To do that, we first need the right conditions: the perfect blend of safety to learn, risking doing something new and knowing that someone will catch us if we stumble. Then comes the precious moment of a new strategy working for the first time (imagine expressing yourself and that making the situation better!). Maybe it’s small and tentative but it is there nonetheless. We practice, repeat, celebrate! We stay patient when the disconnection still kicks in strongly even when we wish it didn’t. Still, slowly a new path is born and more options added to the toolkit of life. Our window of choice expands.
In some situations, staying silent or exiting might still be the best response. But what a different life it might be, when we get to select this option amidst many that are available to us, and that serve us to make our life truly ours.
If you or your partner experiences shutting down during conflict, I would be happy to support you. Shutting down during conflict is a common response that we can work with in couples therapy. I offer Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy available online and in Melbourne and would love to learn about you and how shutting down shows up in your relationship.