Dr. Pamela Kreiser
speaker
938 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 11 Aug
Dr. Pamela Kreiser’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So in this episode, we're going to talk about stonewalling. And here's the crazy thing. You might think you know what the word is, but it's really based on John Gottman's research, and it signals the end of a relationship. Now, you might think, wait, that's just a pretend thing. I haven't really heard of somebody breaking up because they don't talk about a topic. Well, we're going to cover that in this episode. We're going to talk about what stonewalling is, how it can be dangerous to your relationship, and we'll even surprise you with some of the research about men. I just had a burst from my Coke Zero.
Can we include that? I was literally, yeah, I was literally falling asleep on the car ride home because I was on self-driving and I was like, oh my gosh, you better slam a Coke Zero when you get there. Okay, so we got to break down stonewalling. Now, one thing that we all talk about a lot are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. So let's talk about it here. So scary sounding, my God. Yeah, so that's right. Okay.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse basically is a set of research that John Gottman's done over 45 years. And basically, John Gottman, if you don't know him, very famous researcher from the University of Washington who did a lot of work on relationship termination. And basically, he started his research out trying to figure out how to get a wife. No, he didn't.
And so then he actually got a wife. Her name's Julie, and we'll talk about Julie at some point in the podcast. But he set out to figure out what keeps people in these enduring relationships. So what are the qualities that keep us together? But also more importantly, what are the qualities or features or warning lights that come on in our relationships that we should watch out for? And he broke down in his research four of these horsemen of the apocalypse, and Stonewalling's one of the four.
Now, how I like to think about it is I like to think about it as a dashboard for our relationship health. Just like you'd be driving a car down the highway and you would see a light come on and you'd go, ooh, check engine light. That's bad. I should probably do something about that. I'm kind of bad. I don't always do something about it, but I tell my husband to do something about it. Which is really applicable here. You should fix this problem. Yeah, that's actually very good.
That's very good. So when one of the four or all of the four start flashing, that signals that there's some warning going on in the relationship. Now, John teaches this a little bit differently than I do. John says this signals the end of the relationship. According to his research, it's a signal that the end is near. For me, I'd go a little bit more medium on that. And I would say, I don't know that it's near, but I would say that if you have an intense long-term flashing relationship,
I think John's right. The relationship's going to end. So that means that we need to have a conversation about this important one called stonewalling to figure out what happens when you and I just basically shut down. We don't have the conversation anymore. This light is going to flicker on the dashboard. Okay. Shut down. Like, like you're feeling like attacked, like, like you're like, I got to fight you on this or what do you mean?
Well, I think when we think about emotional flooding, that helps a little bit here. Someone who's stonewalled basically can no longer have a productive, rational conversation. So that means that when stonewalling is happening, there's a shutdown. Like offline. Good. Yes. Offline. And when we're offline, we can't just get back online. But
It's not a possibility. So what happens is somebody might be in a conversation. We talked about it being close relationships. So let's talk about it here. In a close relationship, you get on maybe a difficult topic or somebody says something that's a little bit triggering. And if you have that emotional flooding, something takes over your body, the sensation, and you're no longer able to have the conversation. So that means you might have higher emotions.
Pulse rate, maybe over 100. You might have lower oxygenation in your blood, maybe under 95. So that's not a good saturation level. You might have all kinds of different reactions physically. But what you can't do is be rational.
So here's what happens when you and I have faced this in conversation. What happens is, let's say you say something and someone's stonewalling, all of a sudden you see them just do what Meredith said, they go offline, but their body's still there. So it's like, we also have lesser versions of this, like checking out of the conversation. And we've talked about that before.
that people check out. So you could say that this actually lives on a continuum where you might have a mini shutdown, but maybe it doesn't derail the whole conversation, but you also might have a full blown shutdown where that person's absolutely flooded and can no longer have the conversation.
Okay. So we'd have to ask, is that different? Is stonewalling different from defensiveness? John Gottman would say yes. And we'd say in defensiveness, we have a tendency to want to respond and protect ourselves and say, no, I didn't. No, I wasn't saying that. That wasn't true about me. We usually push back. Whereas this is really an avoidance or a step back. It could be a pause, but it's a pretty significant impact where we halt the conversation because
And there's a lot of ways that it might show up. So it might be that on certain topics that you stop having that conversation. It might be around certain people. It might be, I mean, you can think of them just as conversations you're not having. Here's the dangerous part that John Gottman would say. You're not having the conversation in a repeated pattern, which means you're not talking about that thing. Have enough of those. You're not talking about enough of the hard things.
we have studied in this area is the idea that if you lined up 100 stonewallers, 85% of them would be men. You found a bunch of them. Significant. Yeah, it's a huge number. Now, you can't say that means all men are stonewallers, and you can't say that 85% of the population of men are stonewallers. You can just say when you look at stonewallers by themselves, a lot more men. That's what I would conclude.
But here's the interesting part. It's not just that. It's what the research shows. The research shows that men not only are more frequently stonewallers, it takes less for them to get into stonewalling. So they're more sensitive, get into it more easily. They stay flooded longer and take a longer time to get out of it.
So as long as we've been forever talked about as women who are emotional and derail the conversation, the research shows the opposite. It's men that are getting flooded quicker, staying flooded longer and not able to get out of the flooding very well. So that's kind of counterintuitive to what society says, right? Because we say men are insensitive and women are overly sensitive.
That's just my personal data. We don't know why. We don't know why, men. It's more often men. I mean, we could speculate that. The research really shows that those things are true, and it's been confirmed a bunch of times. It's a pretty interesting thing to evaluate. I don't think it's something we would think, because I don't think we think men equals emotional flooding. No. But we do think that men can't have the emotional conversation, which would say they are stonewalling.
We could say that. I've heard a lot of speculation about this topic. So some people speculate that men don't want to have the conversation or maybe don't have the tools to have the conversation or maybe aren't allowed the space for a real conversation without being punished. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Okay, well, there's another of the dashboard warning lights. So we have the four. We have stonewalling, we have criticism, defensiveness, and... Contempt. Yeah. And so we know that contempt is the big bad one. Not that they're not all bad, but contempt is the one that really...
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