I grew up with constant fighting. Now I shut down during conflict. How can I work through this?
Andy writes: When faced with a difficult conversation or moment, I have the tendency to shut down. I withdraw into myself and just freeze up. My head goes blank, and it's difficult for me to focus on the conversation at hand. What are some effective ways to work through this? I struggle to even be willing to understand my girlfriend's point of view during arguments. Also, growing up with parents fighting constantly has affected me in so many ways. How do I keep my parents’ fighting out of my current relationship?
Dear Andy,
As you already realize, being open to our partner during a difficult conversation is absolutely essential for the health of a long-term relationship.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
Even without past trauma and difficult childhood dynamics like the ones you experienced with your parents’ fighting, it can be really difficult during tense moments with an intimate partner to stay calm enough to think clearly, listen to what our partner is really saying, and then be able to express our own perspective thoughtfully.
There’s a lot going on during difficult conversations, so let’s unpack this bit by bit. Let’s start with your experience of shutting down and freezing up during conflict. Once you shut down, your mind goes blank and, at that point, you aren’t really able to follow what your girlfriend is saying because you’ve stopped taking anything in.
What you’re describing is a nervous system response to stress. It’s your body reacting to your current situation based on what it has learned in the past.
We don’t get to choose how our nervous system reacts to these kinds of situations—it’s like a hardwired mechanism that the human body evolved over millennia in an effort to keep us physically and psychologically safe.
Shutting down, going blank, freezing up—that’s all part of the “freeze” stress response. Biologically, our bodies are designed to activate the freeze response under very specific conditions—specifically, our body initiates a freeze response when it determines that we’re in a situation that’s both dangerous and inescapable.
That doesn’t mean that your difficult conversations with your girlfriend are actually dangerous or inescapable, of course. It’s just that your body believes they are.
I’ll spare you the in-depth neuro-scientific explanation of this. But, suffice it to say, when we’ve been repeatedly exposed to very intense stress or trauma in childhood, our nervous system goes a bit haywire. Even decades later, it still overreacts.
If there are even mild similarities between what’s happening now and what happened in the past, it’s like our body makes the decision that it’s better to be safe rather than sorry.
It then activates the whole trauma-based freeze response even when what’s happening isn’t actually dangerous. And because our body reacts far more quickly than the speed of conscious thought, we often slip into a freeze state before we’re fully aware of what’s happening.
As you know, this makes conflict resolution in a relationship pretty challenging. It can be pretty frustrating to try to work with this kind of stress response, especially when it kicks in automatically and often even before you have a chance to decide how you want to show up for an emotionally charged discussion with your girlfriend.
The good news is that even though we don’t get to choose how our nervous system reacts to stress, we can still work with our nervous system and with our intimate partner to ultimately develop the capacity to have the difficult conversations that are so essential to loving relationships.
The key to working with your body is first to remember that even though your freeze response is causing difficulty in your relationship with your girlfriend now, it’s trying to protect you and keep you safe.
So, before we go further, take a moment to feel gratitude for your body’s protective mechanisms. This is the first step in learning how to work with your body instead of trying to override your body’s stress response.
The most effective way to start expanding your ability to engage in sensitive conversations with your partner is to focus on expanding your “window of tolerance” for the discomfort that accompanies communicating about hard things. What that means is that you develop the capacity to contain more discomfort without your system powering down completely. This is going to require that you discover some strategies that are personally effective for soothing your nervous system.
The process of expanding your window of tolerance takes time, which means that your ability to hang in there while having a challenging conversation will gradually improve as you practice staying calm.
Essentially, this is the work of dissolving your body’s association between interpersonal conflict and danger. Over time, you’ll be able to re-train your body to associate these kinds of uncomfortable discussions with more positive feelings of connection and mutual understanding.
So, let’s talk about what this process of building your window of tolerance looks like within the context of your relationship with your girlfriend. Let’s say that you’re going about a regular Saturday morning, tidying up the kitchen after a dinner party that went late into the night, and your girlfriend walks into the kitchen and says, “We need to talk.” Immediately, you notice that your heart starts to race, your breathing is shallow, and your muscles are tense. You sense danger, and your whole body is bracing for what’s coming.
These kinds of physical responses are signs that you’re on high alert and you’re already close to your capacity for coping with the emotional distress that accompanies conflict.
If we were to think of the window of tolerance as though it were an electrical circuit, your system just got a sudden surge of input and it’s on the verge of being overloaded and unable to process what’s happening. When an electrical circuit is overloaded, the system flips a breaker.
That’s what shutdown is like: it’s your body’s built-in safety mechanism for preventing overload. Again, it’s designed to protect you. But it makes conflict resolution nearly impossible, unless you know how to work with your tendency to freeze.
So, back to morning in the kitchen with your girlfriend, what do you do? There she is, standing there in front of you, with her eyebrows drawn together like she’s definitely not happy with you. And your mind is racing through everything that’s happened in the last 12 hours to try to pinpoint what you’ve done wrong and why she’s upset. At this point, your typical reaction might be to say something immediately like, “What’s wrong? What did I do?”
But this time, because you’re working on expanding your capacity to handle relationship stress without getting overwhelmed and shutting down, you focus on taking a slow, deep breath and you remind yourself that—whatever it is she wants to talk to you about—it’s not an emergency.
You can actually pause and take a moment to settle down, calm your body, and remember that even though these kinds of conversations feel scary, nothing dangerous is happening here.
In my experience, once a partner understands these kinds of trauma-based stress responses, they can be a great support as we work toward finding ways to help ourselves stay present in difficult conversations.
So, ideally, in this imagined scenario, your girlfriend is already aware that you react to her attempts to talk about issues by getting stressed and potentially shutting down. She knows this because you’ve already talked to her about it.
You’ve said something to her like, “Hey, I know we’ve been having difficulty working through important issues because I shut down when we talk about hard things. My mind goes blank and I just freeze up … and that’s why I never have anything to say during these conversations. I just want you to know that I get how frustrating this has been for you. It’s frustrating for me, too. I’m in the process of trying to figure this out. I’m going to try doing a better job telling you when that’s starting to happen, so that I can calm down and do a better job listening to what you have to say.”
Because you’ve said something like this, your girlfriend already knows this is something you’re working on. And hopefully, she wants to support you in this work.
So when you say to her, “Give me a moment here. I’m feeling like I’m about to get overwhelmed. I don’t want to shut down completely,” she’ll know what it is you’re talking about. And she’ll hopefully give you the space to calm down. Maybe she might even say something like, “Good idea. Take some time. I’ll be in the bedroom when you’re ready to talk.”
When you grow up with parents who engaged in scary forms of fighting, learning how to have difficult conversations is necessary and vital work.
When you develop the skills for conflict resolution in relationships, you’ll ultimately discover that these kinds of conversations nurture a deeper connection and create a more resilient relationship with your partner.
So it’s important to be patient with yourself, and it’s also important to be persistent in your efforts. One way you can do this is by setting aside time to talk with your partner about how you two can work together to shift this pattern in a more positive direction in your relationship.
Having a plan already in place for what both of you will do when you get overwhelmed means that all you need to do in the midst of conflict is focus on executing your plan.
Anticipate that you are going to need a lot of practice with staying engaged when conflict does arise.
Remember that difficult talks don’t have to take place in one single conversation. When you’re expanding your capacity for conflict that doesn’t overwhelm your system and trigger a freeze response, you will most likely need breaks in the midst of the discussion.
How long those breaks need to be depends on how long it takes to get yourself back into a calm, centered, and grounded place where you’re able to think clearly and really listen to your girlfriend. Sometimes all that’s needed is five minutes in a separate room. Other times, it might take a few hours. Or you may need to sleep on it and revisit the conversation the following day.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Serious issues are rarely resolved in one conversation. And the more you can approach topics as a series of conversations, the more effective you will be at developing your window of tolerance.
For many individuals who freeze during relationship conflict, the temptation is to try to avoid difficult conversations if at all possible. This makes a lot of sense. As humans, we tend to avoid discomfort whenever possible. So, my caution for you is that when you need to take a break from a discussion to calm down, make sure you come back to the conversation as soon as possible.
In addition to circling back to issues your girlfriend raised, learning how you can initiate difficult conversations will help you build your emotional capacity for hard talks. It will increase your sense of confidence in your ability to confront issues in your relationship directly, so you’re no longer just reacting to your girlfriend’s attempts to bring up sensitive topics.
Like any relationship skill that’s worth developing, learning how to have positive and productive conversations around difficult issues takes practice.
There will likely be times when you surprise yourself and have an easier time listening to what your girlfriend has to say than you would have predicted. And there will be other times when you get flooded and overwhelmed, and you shut down before you’re able to pause the conversation. That’s completely expected, and it doesn’t mean your efforts aren’t getting results.
Just keep practicing. Keep breathing. Keep taking breaks when you need to and keep coming back to the conversations. Over time, you’re going to notice that you’re able to maintain your balance during conflicts that really would have thrown you for a loop in the past.
And on that note, Andy, I’m wishing you courage, confidence, and the chance to discover safety in your relationship, even during difficult conversations.
~Angela
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DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical condition.
about angela Amias, LCSW
Angela Amias, LCSW is a relationship therapist and nationally-recognized expert on trauma and relationships. She’s the co-founder of Alchemy of Love, which provides trauma-informed relationship programs and resources. She’s also the founder of the Institute for Trauma Informed Relationships, which provides training and education to therapists and coaches who want to help their clients heal past wounds and create more fulfilling relationships.
As an expert on trauma and relationships, Angela has been featured in numerous publications, including Today, Oprah, Cosmopolitan, The Independent, Well + Good, Inc., Forbes, Business Insider, Salon, MSN, Women’s Health and the Toronto Sun.
