I’ve come to understand something about myself, and it’s both painful and clarifying:
I gravitate toward people who use silence as a weapon. Stonewalling—cold, controlled, absolute silence—is a dynamic I know intimately. It’s the language of withdrawal I’ve been trained to translate as love.
Even now, with every resource and insight and therapy under my belt, the discard silence doesn’t hurt any less. I know it’s not love. Not the wolesome sustaining and sustainable safe kind of love.
I know the kind of closeness I long for—deep, mutual, and safe—is only possible with someone who meets conflict with curiosity, courage, and a genuine desire to understand, de-escalate, and reconnect. Someone who can both hear and express hard truths with love.
Stonewalling says so many fucked up things without saying a single word:
- You’re not worth responding to.
- Your pain doesn’t move me.
- I’ll withhold presence until you behave the way I want.
- I am in control. You are not.
It’s psychological starvation. It’s abandonment dressed up as “calm.” I must stop trying to decode someone else’s refusal to show up. I know that in addition to being deeply wounded, I’m kind, funny, generous, caring, playful, intense, hard-working, full of integrity—all of it. I’m so many good things. Being stonewalled and discarded by people who do that to others says nothing about me—except that it’s what I’ve been conditioned to expect. Kind and evolved people simply don’t behave that way.
