Much like coins have two sides, there are also two sides to many marital issues. Yesterday I addressed the topic of anger and its impact on relationships.
The other side of that coin is when your spouse shuts down or withdraws. Withdrawing from your relationship may have good intentions, yet its impact and message is anything but good.
Withdrawing or shutting down sends the message of “I reject you”. When marriages are healthy, they can handle periodic rejections. When your marriage is in crisis or dealing with an affair, this kind of rejection is disastrous.
With the hurt of affairs, each of you are more sensitive to rejection. Your feelings are raw, so rejection hurts more than intended. The hurt is even more intense when either of you have experience childhood abuse.
In such cases, the rejection triggers many early life hurts in addition to the hurt of the affair. Your shutting down or refusing to talk is making the situation worse than it needs to be.
When one of you shuts down, it leaves the other holding all the pain. If you’ve read my stuff for a while, you may recall mention of the pain see-saw, which withdraw contributes to.
On the inside you may think that shutting down or not talking is keeping a lid on the hurt. The reality is that your shutting down is increasing the tension and creating more hurt.
You are putting an emotional hand grenade in your spouse’s hands while assuming a stance protecting yourself. There’s a time you need shut down to gather your thoughts, yet when used repeatedly, it weaponizes your coping style. Your withdraw turns into an emotional weapon.
When you shut down and claim “I wasn’t doing anything wrong”, you may be right. You weren’t doing anything that intentionally hurt your spouse, you just left them alone in their pain. You didn’t do anything to work things out, open up communication or shoulder their pain with them.
If you don’t know any way of handling things other than shutting down, you need some new skills. Fortunately, you can learn some new ways of handling those uncomfortable topics and times.
In the ‘Affair Recovery Workshop‘, you’ll learn some ways of changing your relationship dynamics and have new tools for moving past roadblocks like withdrawing.
Best Regards,
Jeff
2 Responses
“Adults talk things through. Adults help each other find solutions. Adults find ways of working through the shortcomings and weaknesses of each other.”
I think his quote from your article on” teaching your spouse a lesson” fits this artlcle well .
In my relationship it’s hard to know if my husband was trying to teach me a lesson because he refused to discuss with me anything about his true thoughts…he gradually simply withdrew from sharing the life he determined to live
Trying to “mind read ” and learn what pleases your spouse is difficult when they have made up their minds that they don’t have to have anything deeper to share while they invest in creating a secret life
In retriospect he didn’t become more comfortable to adjust to being one flesh ….eventually after 26 years of having to settle for accepting him as being a great guy who was simply fine with the limited ways we shared life ….I learned he simply was fine keeping me and our family as a “compartment ” of a much “larger” and “greater” life with many superficial friendships and some of them more intimate than others.
I used to learn more about my husband when I was included for some event for his work which was a rarity…listening to other people talking with him!
How did I become the enemy?
Frankly I don’t think he cared enough about me to think about the broad range of effects this had not just on me but our whole family and even those who observed our marriage ….
It’s sad…he was so good at this fiom of deceptiion
Zaza,
It’s good hearing from you. When husbands withdraw into their secret life, it creates problems. I wish husbands understood the importance of sharing with their wives. When wives don’t have that connection, it leads them to guess and speculate rather than communicate. Those same husbands who wonder why their wives have gotten weird don’t realize the role they played in that.