I wrote in my last article about stonewalling, that nefarious process (and pattern) of shutting down a partner’s communication either aggressively, or passive aggressively, the effect of which is to leave the “stonewalled” partner feeling voiceless, alone, dismissed, negated as a person.
Many sociopathic personalities stonewall, but many stonewallers aren’t sociopaths, so how do you tell the difference? What are some signs that your partner’s stonewalling is an aspect of his “sociopathy” versus, say, his high “conflict-avoidant” personality?
Clearly some individuals are terrible at dealing with communication in general and conflict in particular. Their stonewalling may be mainly avoidant. Their wish to “deny” that trouble is afoot, their deep discomfort with emotional sensitivity and vulnerability, their high levels of defensiveness, their sense of incompetence and even hopelessness to contribute to the resolution of differences and meet confrontation effectively, may cause them to retreat, shut down, or “stonewall,” less from an attitude of indifference, disinterest and dismissiveness than from anxiety and fear.
Some individuals “freeze” in the face of perceived conflict and take “flight” literally in closing the communication hatches. Their intent may be less to hurt you than to protect themselves, and even you, fearing as they do that danger could ensue from an engagement of your concerns.
This is still stonewalling, and its effect is still perfidious, make no mistake. But its origins may come from a less malign place.
While stonewalling, then, can arise from less malign motives, sometimes, too often, it expresses serious pathological aggression, passive-aggression, hostility, contempt and callousness.
Clearly when “stonewalling” is accompanied by cold indifference—any form of cold indifference—to the stonewalled party’s wounded response to being “shut down,” this is a sign of serious insensitivity.
To state it differently: when the stonewaller, as a pattern, shows contempt towards the stonewalled party’s disturbed reaction to his stonewalling, this alerts us that we are dealing with a deficiently sensitive individual who almost certainly can be located high up on the narcissistic continuum, if not in the range of the “sociopath.”
This isn’t to say that the non-sociopathic stonewaller will react with sensitivity to your experience of his stonewalling. That’s a bit oxymoronic—if he were particularly sensitive to his stonewalling, by definition he wouldn’t be a stonewaller. But his reaction will typically express discomfort with the impact his stonewalling has on you.
He won’t, for instance, like the more sociopathic stonewaller, characteristically lash out at you with blatant hostility and nasty, hurtful, degrading accusations in response to your complaints of his stonewalling. He won’t typically blame you.
More likely he’ll shirk away, convey a perhaps somewhat sincere sense of helplessness to offer up anything more than the inadequate silence he’s offering up, as if to say, “What can I say? I have nothing to say. I’m not trying to hurt you. I just don’t want to, or can’t, deal with this. Leave me alone. Give me a break. I’m sorry you’re so exasperated and hurt. That’s the way it is.”
You will feel shut down, but you will feel shut down by someone who can’t deal, who himself seems, and perhaps is, in a sense, paralysed and helpless to deal responsibly, thoughtfully, engagingly.
In contrast, you will have a different feeling with the more sociopathic stonewaller. When he shuts down your communication, you will feel yourself—I can’t stress this enough—the object of his contempt.
You will feel palpably, viscerally, his indifference to the impact his stonewalling has on you; his indifference will feel as traumatizing as the stonewalling itself, leaving you, in effect, doubly traumatized by the interaction.
There is a sense of shock—that is, his emotional indifference, his callousness, his devaluation of your emotional experience will feel “shocking.”
As I suggested, you are likely to feel his scorn, his scoffing; are at high risk to endure his insulting, degrading comments, along the lines you are making trouble, talk too much, always looking for problems, don’t know when to “shut up,” always have to “over-analyse” everything; that you are mental, miserable; but the key thing that will accompany these, and similarly patronizing remarks, will be, as I keep emphasizing, the “contempt” for your experience that will be dripping shamelessly from his mouth.
These are some of the red flags to heed that you aren’t dealing merely with an incompetent communicator who stonewalls, which is bad enough, but with a seriously, hostilely disturbed communicator from whom you need protection, and most likely, escape.
(This article is copyrighted © 2012 by Steve Becker, LCSW. My use of male gender pronouns is for convenience’s sake only, not to suggest that females aren’t capable of the behaviors and attitudes discussed.)
anitasee
Hello all and thanks Steve for writing on this. It took me years to recognize the stonewalling as what it was. A sadistic pleasure in as Dr. Steve expressed it, “negating” me.
What boggles my mind is that I was so deep in denial, had made an imaginary construct of the kind of man he was- to translate his stonewalling into “stoicism”. He was strong, and accepted whatever crisis we were in with dignity. I was weak and needy.
He encouraged this take on his silences of course. He would listen for hours, and I was usually desperate to talk about whatever it was at hand, but sit silently, expressionless, with that cold stare and frequent scowls, always a scowl when he asked a question. Ughhh. It was crazy making.
Finally he would dismiss me and retreat to watching violent television, and I would retreat into a glass of scotch.
It took six more long years for me to leave him after a stonewalling incident that was so in my face there could be no denying it. But even then, rather than accept that he cared not a rat’s ass about me- I took it as a lapse in judgement, I didn’t forgive it, but I buried it.
It is only now that I am out of the blind anger stage that I can begin to unravel all the myriad ways I helped him hurt me. That realization brings its own kind of pain. The pain of realizing how little I cared about myself, how little i thought I deserved, how much I lied to myself about what I “had”.
Which brings me to the hardest part, i think. learning to trust myself and my perceptions after being so far off side for so very long. It is a journey.
snowwhite
Thank you for the clarification in this article. I can add another trait to my list of red flags. I now know I was stonewalled when I told charming I was getting an HIV test because of his past (or should i say ongoing) risky sexual practices. He insisted on putting me at risk and wouldn’t get tested. When I asked him to think about getting tested, he abandoned me for days while I anxiously waited for the results. When he finally contacted me he said I was rude because I brought it up!
snowwhite
…and he was mad at me for asking him to get tested and that’s why he stopped contacting me
G1S
Kim, what you described is the emotional abuse tactic of withholding.
The socially inept men that I know, the ones genuinely uncomfortable with emotional intimacy, would never ask if I thought they were being thoughtless. Heaven forbid that they open that conversation. Their depth of topics is limited to asking what’s for dinner.
darwinsmom
Kim,
I didn’t see the start of the movie, but saw a large part of it… All of the priest’s behaviour was exactly that of a spath, including his sermon after the confrontation with him in her office and the young nun.. while the principal nun was respecting his privacy at first, he tried to get the whole community against her. The red flags were all over the place. The movie was constructed well, that someone unfamiliar with the red flags would remain in doubt. For anyone with “experience” though imo the red flags were ALL OVER the movie, and it was enough to not want him to be near children. Plus, she was working from a point of view to protect the children. He worked only to save himself.
1day@atime
Regarding the contemptive attitude:
Yes, this rang so true for me. At one point near the end of our 30 yr marriage, I told him he should refer to me by the name “Pebbles,” because I was like a pebble in his shoe — a constant source of irritation…
skylar
Kim and Darwinsmom,
The beginning of the movie starts with a sermon about doubt.
The nun began to have doubts about the priest from this sermon about doubt.
I’d be interested in both your opinions on it.
To clarify, I did pull out the text where Meryl Streep whispers to herself “…Or had he seen truth once?” She is commenting about the lost sailor who has faith in his course.
http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/a1/doubt-script-transcript.html
Ox Drover
I haven’t seen this movie but I MUST see it.
WOW, that sermon is awesome, and you know I have felt sometimes like I was in a life boat, alone and can’t see the stars. …sometimes I felt I had a few people in the boat with me and they were chopping holes in the boat!
skylar
Oxy,
yes, they were chopping holes in the boat!
As it turns out, the priest giving that sermon is a spath and the nun noticed it, initially, from this sermon.
I’m still trying to figure out how? where was the tell?
Perhaps the tell was that he was reaching out to people who were keeping secrets. He was encouraging to come to him and tell him their secrets. And that’s what spaths do, so she was seeing a potential red flag.
persephone7
Sky,
I have only seen scenes from the movie but when I read the lines from it you just posted – and if the nun had experience with predators, as we have…that last line ‘When you are lost, you are not alone” – chilled me a bit. Because I think many of us were on a lost course, doubting the goodness of life or where we were headed about the time the predator/opportunist/spath – whatever, showed up – like the shark smelling blood in the water. We all want to have faith, but when you have doubt, you are so vulnerable to the person holding out what seems like a helping hand and comfort, and beware who you let steer your boat…