Four. Stonewalling, which is often not what it looks like

Stonewalling is shutting down. No response, a flat face, leaving the room, going quiet for a day.

From the outside it reads as contempt or as punishment. Often it is neither. A person who is physiologically overwhelmed genuinely cannot process what is being said to them, and shutting down is what a flooded system does. It is worth both of you knowing that, because the interpretation of it causes more damage than the behaviour.

That does not make it harmless. A three day silence in a marriage is a punishment whatever it started as. The difference is what you do with it, and the honest version of it sounds like this: I cannot do this right now, give me twenty minutes and I will come back to it. And then coming back.

There is a ceiling on it in the tradition, and it is worth seeing which way the ceiling points. The report below sets a limit of three nights on a Muslim keeping apart from his brother. It names the exact behaviour, each of them turning his face away when they meet. And it settles the ending on whoever moves first rather than on whoever was right. Note that it sets a ceiling and not a floor. Nothing in it asks a flooded person to keep talking.