The Four Horsemen: Stonewalling

The fourth and final of the Four Horsemen is stonewalling. In his book The Marriage Clinic, Gottman defines stonewalling as occurring "when the listener withdraws from the interaction" (p.46). In other terms, stonewalling is when one person cuts him or herself off from the other. It is a lack of responsiveness to your spouse and the interaction between the two of you. Stonewalling, as with the other three horsemen is a very negative characteristic that you don't want to find frequently in a marriage.

Stonewalling is shutting yourself down to your spouse. Typically when someone is listening to you, they exhibit various signs of doing so; non-verbal cues such as nodding, eye contact, and facial expressions, as well as verbal cues such as "uh-huh," or "yup." Stonewallers don't exhibit any of these cues of responsiveness that a typical listener does. Instead they may appear stiff and rigid, glance away, down, and around, and basically exhibit no signs of listening or really being present in the interaction. Stonewalling can include literally just getting up and walking out while the other person is trying to speak to you. Gottman (The Marriage Clinic, p.46) found the following in his research to be true about stonewallers:

• Men are consistently more likely to stonewall than women (kind of like women are more likely to criticize than men).
• 85% of Gottman's stonewallers were men.
• When women stonewall, it is quite predictive of divorce.
• Male stonewalling is very upsetting for women, increasing their physiological arousal (things like increased heart rates, etc.) and intensifying their pursuit of the issue.
  

Stonewalling is sometimes an attempt to self-sooth or basically try to decrease the intensity of the situation. This makes sense then for men to be the more frequent stonewallers, because a lot of times in arguments or interactions, men do not know what to do or how to communicate what is going on, how they feel, etc., so they just shut down to keep from getting too upset. This may sound like a positive thing, but it isn't. It is the person shutting down from communication and from their spouse. It causes a chain reaction that ultimately leads to a more intense interaction. Shutting down and becoming unresponsive to your spouse is not a good idea or option, and as Gottman has found, is one of the big predictors of divorce.

The alternative to stonewalling is responsiveness. We all know that interactions between ourselves and our spouses can be pretty intense and frustrating at times. I know there have been times where I have just kind of shut down to Steve because I just didn't know where to go from there, but ultimately we have to force ourselves to stay engaged and working at a resolution. If you start to feel like you are about to stonewall, communicate that to your spouse. Take a few deep breaths, and remain present in the interaction. Men, try to remind yourselves that stonewalling is only going to intensify the interaction, upset your wife and push her to become more persistent on you engaging, and ultimately is going to damage the marriage to one degree or another. Some interactions and discussions are extremely difficult and frustrating, but remaining present and responsive to your spouse is so important. Communication is a means of building up our spouse and our marriage, so we have to learn to become proficient communicators.

The Four Horsemen typically come as a sequence of interactions that is started with criticism and spills over into defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. Gottman emphasizes in The Marriage Clinic that "it is important to note that our best single predictor of divorce is contempt" (p.47). The really important thing to keep in mind here though is that even in happy, stable, and successful marriages, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling all occur. The difference is that in those marriages they don't occur as frequently, and when they do, those couples are more effective at repairing them. Also, contempt is virtually non-existent in those couples, which as I have said repeatedly, is the most dangerous of the four horsemen. Don't freak out and panic though if there are some or all of the horsemen present in your marriage - we all have some presence of them in our marriages. Avoiding contempt and then learning how to do some effective repair work when the other 3 horsemen appear is what is essential to a happy and successful marriage. "Effective repair leads to interest, affection, humor, and lowered tension" (The Marriage Clinic, p.47).

As always, marriage is a gift and a work in progress. Try to avoid the Four Horsemen, but when you can't, try to effectively repair them. Practice turning criticism into a complaint, defensiveness into responsibility, contempt into respect (avoid contempt as much as possible in general!), and stonewalling into responsiveness. Always be trying to build up your spouse and marriage!