Is the Gottman Method Bad for People Who Shut Down?

Dr. Olivier van Hauwermeiren, PsyD

This post is part of my Ask a Therapist series, where I take questions I've answered on r/askatherapist and go a little deeper than the comment section allows.

The Question

I was in couples therapy for two years, and the therapist would constantly send me into "freeze" until I couldn't speak, and then berate me for not speaking. Shutting down like this isn't new for me, and it isn't limited to conflict. I recently learned this therapist was probably practicing the Gottman Method, which treats this "stonewalling" as the most dire sign of relationship failure. Is that what this is, even when it happens outside of relationships? Is there a type of couples therapy that can work with people like me, or am I just not cut out for relationships?

My Answer

I'm Gottman trained, and you're missing a key piece about stonewalling. We're trained to see stonewalling as a sign that a person is flooded (I don't know if that's what you experience). If you're a stonewaller, it doesn't mean you're going to fail every relationship.

I teach folks to identify when they're flooded and when their partner may be flooded. Introducing humor, taking a break from the intense conversation, doing gentle startups to reduce the chances of flooding. All Gottman principles.

Hope this helps!

Let's Go Deeper

The word "stonewalling" carries a lot of unearned moral weight. It sounds like a choice, like you're coldly refusing to engage. So when someone reads that stonewalling is one of the Gottman "Four Horsemen" (the four communication patterns John Gottman's research linked to relationship breakdown), it's easy to hear a verdict: this thing my body does means we're doomed.

That's not what the research says, and it's not how the method works.

In Gottman terms, stonewalling is almost always the visible tip of something physiological called flooding, known in the research literature as diffuse physiological arousal. Your heart rate climbs, stress hormones surge, and the parts of your brain that handle language and complex problem-solving effectively go offline. The silence isn't a tactic. It's a nervous system that has hit its limit. That's precisely why the method's prescription for stonewalling isn't "talk anyway." It's the opposite: learn to recognize the early signs of flooding, call a structured time-out, self-soothe until your body settles (usually twenty minutes or more), and then return to the conversation. Gentle startups and well-timed humor exist for the same reason: they keep both partners below the flood line in the first place.

Which means that pushing a flooded person to keep talking, let alone berating them for going quiet, isn't a hard-nosed application of the Gottman Method. It's a departure from it. No competent reading of that model treats overwhelming someone's nervous system as therapeutic. If that's what someone experienced in a therapist's office, the problem wasn't that the method was too harsh for them. The method wasn't being followed.

It's also worth saying: when shutting down happens well outside of relationship conflict (in any high-stakes conversation, even in individual therapy), that's usually telling us something bigger than a couples-communication pattern. A freeze response that generalizes that broadly deserves its own attention, often in individual work with a trauma-informed therapist. And the workarounds that help aren't cheats. A therapist who reads what you've written when speech won't come isn't lowering the bar. They're meeting your nervous system where it is, which is the whole job. Writing things down, taking breaks, slowing the pace: these are legitimate clinical tools, not accommodations you should have to apologize for.

So is someone who freezes "not cut out for relationships"? No. A shutdown response is a pattern with a mechanism, and patterns with mechanisms can be worked with. The Four Horsemen predict trouble when they run chronic and unrepaired. They were never meant to be read as a prophecy about people who are already asking exactly the right questions.

If this resonates, it's the kind of work I do. You can book a free 15-minute intro call, or read more in the Ask a Therapist series.

Olivier van Hauwermeiren, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist serving New York City via telehealth, licensed in New York and Wisconsin and PSYPACT-authorized to practice telepsychology in 40+ states. He specializes in anxiety, OCD, trauma, and performance challenges among high-achieving professionals.

Keep reading