Stonewalling and Avoidance Aren’t Helping Your Relationship

Stonewalling and Avoidance Aren’t Helping Your Relationship

by | Sep 9, 2024 | Articles, Couples Therapy in Asheville

Stonewalling and Avoidance Aren’t Helping Your Relationship

 

Is you have a tendency to shut down the conversation, retreat into your own space, or avoid the other person entirely when conflict hits, you might using stonewalling and avoidance. And it’s probably hurting your relationships.

Stonewalling is a defense mechanism that occurs when one person in a conflict opts to end communication altogether. Stonewalling can look like shutting down, checking out, withdrawing, spacing out, or busying oneself with work or other tasks, all to avoid the conflict at hand.

I recently had the pleasure of working with writer Christine Perez on an article she wrote for Vogue:

What to Know About Stonewalling, the Silent Relationship Killer. 

In it, she takes a deep dive into this phenomenon of stonewalling. What it looks like, why you do it, and why it’s harmful.

Stonewalling and Avoidance

Stonewalling is just one of many behaviors of people who have an avoidant attachment style. If you were brought up in a household where you didn’t do things like:

  • talk about feelings
  • share your internal world
  • resolve conflicts or hurts with the people close to you and/or didn’t see healthy conflict resolution demonstrated
  • express your emotions

…then you may have an avoidant style of relating.

Stonewalling and avoidance may have saved you in your youngest years, since in this type of family system, parents were either not willing or able to meet your (or even, possibly, their!) emotional needs. People who tend to be avoidant are generally raised by people who tend to be avoidant.

If you’re a parent and don’t want to pass on this relationship style to your kids, know that there is hope. We can stop this cycle. Therapy helps.

 

Support for Stonewalling and Avoidance

If you’re someone who stonewalls, avoids confrontation or being vulnerable altogether, and you’d like to get some support. reach out today. Working through avoidant attachement or avoidant tendencies is best done with the support of someone who knows how hard it can be to open up.

Learn more about my practice and how I can help here.

Reach Out Today

Therapy for Childhood Trauma

Therapy for Childhood Trauma

by | Sep 29, 2021 | Articles, Schema Therapy, The Human Condition

Photo Credit: Harper’s Bazaar

Therapy for Childhood Trauma

This morning I read an article that has inspired a new category of Blog Post for Whole Self Therapy: The Human Condition. In The Human Condition, I will be sharing stories that illustrate what we humans all share: feelings, experiences, and unmet needs.

One of my favorite shows over the last few years has been HBO’s Succession. It’s a fabulously written and acted series about a super-wealthy family consisting of a patriarch, Logan Roy, and his four entitled adult children. In Succession, we watch each of Roy’s children struggle in their intimate relationships and vie for power as well as their father’s approval. Each character is so complex that it is hard to make a clear judgment about any of them; they are all nuanced and relatable in some way.

The elder, Logan Roy, is played by the seventy-five-year-old actor Brian Cox. In his recent interview published by the NY Times, Cox speaks about his mutuality with the authoritarian character he plays:

He’s quite angry. That’s something that probably he and I have in common.

Why are you angry? I’m angry about my childhood, in retrospect. I look upon it now, and I go, “Jesus, that was [expletive], and there was nobody really to help me.” I had to do it all on my own. I felt I needed some parental help. I needed some guidance. My son will tell you. I’m quite angry at times.

 

As a Schema Therapist, his words jumped out at me. Here is a man, a well-established and successful actor who is self-aware enough to know that his anger stems from his unmet childhood need for guidance. Perhaps if Brian Cox had done some therapy for childhood trauma, he would not still be holding onto his anger as an elder adult. The reality is that: 

We all have unmet childhood needs. 

This is the human condition. 

Working together in therapy for childhood trauma, we work to explore and express those needs and the feelings associated with them. We do this because our experiences from childhood don’t leave when we turn eighteen; they stay with us for a lifetime.

For Cox, there is unresolved anger. While knowing and expressing it are both positive things, what is unfortunate is that it sounds like the anger is being expressed in the wrong direction: toward his son. When we carry around feelings that have not been fully resolved we all can “take it out” on those we care about the most. And very few of us do that intentionally.

This is why it is important to “do your own work” so that you don’t inadvertently hurt those closest to you in your life now with the wounds that were bestowed by ghosts from your past. This is how we end the legacy of relational trauma.

 

Check out the full New York Times article here:

Brian Cox Has No Sympathy for His Filthy-Rich Family on ‘Succession’

If you’re seeking therapy for childhood trauma in Asheville or anywhere in the state of North Carolina, contact me today.

A Tale of Two Forces

by | Feb 15, 2016 | Articles, Words & Images

Although it has been several years since I was introduced to the allegorical teaching about the individual’s ability to choose in dealing with internal conflict, this lesson has recently resurfaced in my personal and professional life over the past several weeks. While traditionally conveyed in a Native American allegory, I have found the same sentiment expressed by the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, in the introduction to his new book Love’s Garden, A Guide to Mindful Relationships. The similarities in these metaphors are clear:

In both of these allegories the idea that each individual has opposing forces within which we all must learn to navigate is emphasized. The individual’s ability to choose where they put their attention in these narratives is clear, which creates a sense of autonomy and personal power.

Not unlike the epic story told in the Star Wars movies, we each have a light and a dark force, but it is up to the individual to be aware of those forces, and to concentrate their efforts toward their chosen aims. As the saying goes “where the mind goes, the energy flows.”

Even in cultivating an awareness of these polarities can begin to create a space in which we can cease self-judgment and begin to understand and honor the dynamics of having a Self. We all have these forces within. We all get to choose where we focus, how we expend our energies. In that space of freedom we can begin to explore our options, and choose according to our values instead of acting out of habit.

In his book, Thich Nhat Hahn expands upon this idea of dual gardens within and also uses the ‘two garden’ metaphor as it applies to relationships. He encourages each of us to not only nourish the garden of kindness and compassion within but to also see those qualities in our beloved and through the process of ‘selective gardening,’ to foster their qualities of inherent goodness, kindness and love.

Read the full introduction to Thich Nhat Hanh’s new book on Lion’s Roar

Child.ol’.a.try: 1. Worship of one’s children at the expense of one’s marriage. 2. Why parenthood today kills sex and creates marital dissatisfaction.

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There are no long-term, lasting benefits from taking A.D.H.D. medications… but mindfulness seems to be training the same areas of the brain that have reduced activity in A.D.H.D. That’s why mindfulness might be so important…  it seems to get at the causes.

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