Essential Tips on How Can I Make a Relationship Work and Strengthen Our Bond
The first thing to understand is that this is a very serious situation. When a woman gets to the point where she’s stonewalling, and let’s just define that very quickly, what I mean by that is she’s withdrawing from conversation. She’s not talking to you. She doesn’t want to converse with you, or she’s just very functional in her conversation. She doesn’t want to get emotional. She doesn’t want to have any depth to the conversation at all. When a woman is doing this, it’s very serious. The end of the relationship is very close at this point because let me explain what that means. A woman needs conversation like a man needs sex. Conversation to a woman is like water. A woman that is not having that conversation is in a desert. And if your wife has put herself voluntarily into a situation where she’s not talking to you, she’s withdrawn from the conversation, then she is very, very close to leaving the relationship, and it is imperative that you take action immediately.
So, if you’re in this situation, how do you start to turn it around? Well, the first thing to do is to understand cause and effect. Now, a lot of times we look at a problem in the relationship, such as stonewalling or narcissistic behavior or something along those lines, and we look at that behavior as the cause of the problems. We say, “My wife is not talking to me, and that is causing problems in the relationship. My wife is refusing to communicate, and that is causing problems in the relationship.” Now, the issue with this is that the stonewalling is the effect of the problem, not the cause of the problem. It’s not causing your problems any more than somebody with measles saying, “These spots on my face are causing these measles.” It’s the other way around.
So, what we need to do here is to understand what is the core underlying reason that the stonewalling is coming about. What is the actual cause of the problem? Because unless we can get to the cause and to the root cause of the problem, working on the effect is never going to help. Giving you a communication strategy, giving you a conversation strategy, giving you a blueprint, all of that stuff isn’t going to get her talking to you and tearing the wall down unless we understand what the root cause of the problem is.
And there are a couple of problems here that we need to address. The first one is going to be that emotional safety and security has been utterly destroyed to the point where a woman would rather spend her life in a desert than talking to you. Now, I know this sounds harsh, brother, but I’m here to help you, not to make you feel good about yourself. If your woman is not talking, it’s because every time she talks to you, every time she has a conversation with you, it’s painful for her. It causes her pain. Now, not talking is also extremely painful for her. To choose that pain over the pain of communication really lets us know that there are some major, fundamental flaws within the communication that we’re having with her that’s causing her significant pain, significant frustration.
Now, where the confusion really happens here is that as men, we don’t understand the damage that our conversation is doing. We’re logical, and a woman is emotional. We communicate at a logical level, and a woman communicates at an emotional level. Now, this is the fundamental cause of a lot of problems and why stonewalling comes about. As a problem solver and a logical person, we don’t respond to emotion very well. When a woman presents an emotional problem, we simply want to bash it, squash it, and destroy it. And the more quickly we do that, the better we see ourselves as a problem solver. If we can solve her problem quickly from our logical state of mind, we’ve done a great job. We’ve been efficient, we’ve been logical, and we’ve solved the problem. But the problem is, she did not want the problem solved. She was coming at it from a state of emotion. She wanted her emotion to be understood. And effectively, what has happened here is that instead of her emotion being validated, being connected with, being understood, and being heard, that emotion has been quashed, and her feelings, emotion, and relevance have been completely invalidated. It’s a very, very frustrating situation. Now, this is where a lot of stonewalling comes from. It can go deeper than that as well, so that is level one of the problem. It’s not understanding that she wants to be understood at an emotional level, not having a problem solved. This will lead to a lack of communication, and this will cause the problem.
The second problem is that every time your wife attempts to communicate with you, it causes a fight or conflict. She gets that conditioned stimulus that talking to you equals a fight, and fight equals pain. Maybe all of this is going on simultaneously. Maybe when she brings stuff up, her emotions are not recognized and dealt with logically, which, to us, is the right way to do it, but to her, it’s very insensitive. And maybe also, when she communicates, there’s a chance of a fight or a misunderstanding or something unpleasant happening. Or it could be even worse than that.
Let’s go to the third level, and that is when she talks, she’s verbally attacked by you. She’s put down, and she’s told that her views are worthless, and they make no sense whatsoever. A lot of times, as men, we can get this confused because we think that we’re being helpful, we think that we’re being logical when, actually, we’re not. We’re being very insensitive, and we’re really invalidating and destroying the woman’s sense of relevance within the relationship and relevance within herself. When you get these three levels happening, she’s going to start to withdraw. When she learns that communication with you is painful, she’s going to start to withdraw. We can use the terms emotional safety and security. This is the foundation to restoring a relationship. We can use these terms unless we can see how these are actually applicable within the relationship, within the marriage. It’s simply knowledge without application, and knowledge without application is absolutely useless to you. We’ve got to take this information and apply it to our marriage aggressively to bring about transformation within our marriage.
You can understand now why your wife is stonewalling, but unless you take that information and apply it to the marriage, revelation, information without application, is simply useless. Hopefully, you can see that emotional safety and security, the way she comes to you, she feels like she can be heard, she feels like she can be understood, she feels like her viewpoint is valid, she feels like she has a role in the relationship.
When that has been removed, communication for her becomes extremely, extremely painful, and she’s going to start to withdraw more and more. I’m guessing that this has happened over a period of time where she starts to withdraw, hoping that she’s sending a signal. It doesn’t get met, so she withdraws more and more until finally, she arrives at a point where communication is utterly pointless. Actually, trying to talk to you is going to be more painful than not talking to you. As we’ve mentioned, that is an extremely painful situation.
So what we need to do is fundamentally understand that the cause of the stonewalling is that emotional safety and security have been eroded, destroyed. The way to get her back talking to you, to bring her back into the conversation, is to show her that communication is not pointless. We can reestablish that emotional safety and security. We can reestablish boundaries for conversation. We can show her that she can be acknowledged, loved, heard, understood, and that communication is not a pointless situation.
That’s what we talk about in the “Win Your Wife Back” program. There’s some information in the description about that. If you’re interested, check it out. If not, take this video, take this information, and look at how you can reestablish emotional safety and security. If your wife is stonewalling you, this is fundamentally the solution to the problem. The cause of the stonewalling is a lack of safety and security within the communication or the boundaries of communication. The effect of that is stonewalling.
Don’t deceive yourself and think that the stonewalling is causing problems within the marriage. Don’t project the problems onto your wife and say, “I’m having all these issues in my marriage because she won’t talk to me anymore.” Go back to the cause of the problem, which is emotional safety and security, and work on that. You will see the effect change.
I hope that’s helpful. I hope that helps someone. Bless you, and I’ll talk to you very soon.
