Why Do I Shut Down During Conflict With My Partner? Understanding the Trauma Response
Shutting down during conflict with your significant other doesn’t mean you don’t care. It often means the “Freeze response” has been activated, which is common in those with childhood trauma wounds - it ensures protection from the perceived threat.
Here, your nervous system may just be perceiving your partner’s angry face and change in tone as the ultimate threat. This may be perceived as a threat to your physical safety, emotional safety, or both, depending on your life’s story and how your experiences have wired your nervous system. If your nervous system could talk, it would probably say something like: “I need to shut down so I save myself”, “I need to shut down so I can keep the peace and avoid rejection from my loved one”.
Childhood trauma wounds showing up in adult relationships impact how conflict is handled.
Conflict in relationships, any type of relationship, is normal. You may logically know this already - you know arguments are normal, you know not seeing eye to eye with your partner is common, you know a conflict doesn’t have to last forever. Logically, you’re already there. You get it. But your body is still reacting as if your partner is actually your alcoholic dad flipping between his Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde personas, or as if your partner is actually your narcissistic mom calling you all sorts of names. When your nervous system has been shaped by abuse, physical and emotional neglect, it needs to believe you’re about to get wounded in order to protect you.
For a Childhood Trauma Survivor, handling conflict with logic doesn’t mean more convincing - it means to cultivate inner safety first.
You know it’s not the best reaction to shut down during conflict with your partner, even if we can intellectualize it and logically understand why it exists. For you to prevent “shut down mode” or the “Freeze response” to kick in during conflict, you first need to cultivate inner safety by talking to your nervous system in its own language. To simply try to convince yourself that you’re not in danger in the moment or to try to remember to breathe in the moment won’t be helpful - your trauma response will prevent you from accessing information stored in your logical thinking brain. This means you’ve got to access your subconscious, and build the bridge between what your logical brain knows, and what your survival brain is feeling.
EMDR Therapy with Parts Work is what helps release trauma and rewire the nervous system so shut down mode is prevented.
As an EMDR Certified Therapist, I’ve seen something like this time and time again: client does CBT therapy and DBT therapy, keeps experiencing trauma triggers in their relationship, wonders why they can’t apply the concepts learned in therapy, proceeds to internalize this experience as a personal failure. It’s not your fault that CBT and DBT concepts haven’t worked for you: your trauma is stronger than that.
I often see clients when they’ve had enough of simply talking about their trauma and are done trying to challenge their thoughts. This is not a top-down experience - this is bottom-up. An appropriate approach to treat this challenge is one that can accurately pinpoint the missing piece, and that’s EMDR therapy with parts work (IFS and Ego State).
EMDR Therapy with parts work to treat the shut down mode can look a little like this:
Preparation: We get relevant info as to how your nervous system works (i.e. presence of dissociation), we map out your parts and prepare them for EMDR work (we get to meet the parts who think you’re stuck in 1990 something and provide them with the emotional safety they need to let you do EMDR), and we create a plan for EMDR processing (the memories to target to reprocess).
“Classic” EMDR reprocessing: We reprocess the 1st, worst, most recent events surrounding the theme of your nervous system activation using bilateral stimulation (eye movements, tapping, or handheld buzzers). We go through the Desensitization phase (where you don’t believe and don’t feel like the memory is distressing anymore) and the Installation phase (where you believe and feel that you are safe now).
We desensitize you towards a future triggering event: This is called the Future Template technique in EMDR therapy. While we don’t have a crystal ball and don’t know what the future holds, we do know that there will be another conflict at some point with your partner. We don’t know when exactly this will occur, but we know it’s a matter of time before it comes again (because conflict is normal). This is where we get you to feel desensitized towards your triggers so that when the time comes, your nervous system can go: “Oh, yeah, that situation. I know what this is, it doesn’t freak me out. It’s kinda boring actually, I know how this ends. It’s fine.”
