Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - When One of You Shuts Down and the Other Feels Rejected

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

You’re trying to talk something through…and suddenly, one of you is gone. One of you can’t find the words.Shuts down. Goes quiet. And the other feels it instantly. Rejected.Confused.Maybe even hurt… or angry. And just like that, you’re no longer on the same team.You’re in a pattern. Because when one person shuts down and the other reaches for connection, it can quickly turn into a cycle of withdrawal and pursuit that leaves both of you feeling misunderstood. But what if that shutdown isn’t indifference…and the hurt you feel isn’t overreaction? What if something deeper is happening beneath the surface for both of you? In this deeply personal session, I respond to Bria, who finds herself shutting down during conflict and struggling to explain it to her partner without creating more distance. This episode will help you understand what’s really happening in those moments and give you a new way to stay connected without overwhelming your system or your relationship. What’s actually happening when one of you “goes blank” and the other feels pushed away The hidden pattern that turns simple conflict into disconnection for both of you How to explain shutdown in a way that builds understanding instead of distance What each of you can do in the moment to interrupt the cycle before it escalates A simple way to calm your nervous system and come back into connection How to stay present in hard conversations without shutting down or pushing each other away If you’ve ever felt yourself disappear in the middle of a conversation…or sit across from someone you love and feel like you’re losing them in real time… This episode will help you understand the pattern you’re in and give you a way to move through it together, with more awareness, more compassion, and real connection. In this episode, you’ll learn:If you’d like to learn more about building better love, check out Quantum Love, and to get your question answered in a future session, email me at [e-mail] or leave a voice note here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Berman, and for more than 30 years, I've worked with individuals and couples to help them build deeper, healthier relationships with one another and with themselves. Welcome to Language of Love Sessions. This is where I work one-on-one with you, my listeners, in real time. These sessions are intimate, personal, and grounded in what's actually happening in your life and relationships. Let's get started and get fluent in the language of love. Language of love session time.

This is when I love to answer your questions, whatever is on your mind. Here is an email from Bria. She says, Dr. Laura, when conflict starts, I shut down. I can't find the words. I disassociate. And then my partner feels stonewalled. I don't want to be dismissive. but I'm overwhelmed. How do you explain shutdown to a partner in a way that they can understand?

And what agreements can you create so both people feel safe and heard? I love that you're even asking that, Bria, about agreements, because obviously you understand enough about couples dynamics. Maybe you've been in a couple of therapy sessions by now where you understand the power of agreements. And this is one of those situations where you want to make some agreements. And you also want to help your partner understand that when you shut down in the face of conflict, it is usually a trauma reaction being triggered. So in this case, the trigger is conflict, right? So the trauma could be an abandonment trauma, right? Where you adopted a story as a young child, maybe one of your parents left, maybe one of your parents stonewalled you or gave you the

silent treatment when they were displeased with you, but you learned that conflict could lead to abandonment. Displeasing your key caregivers could lead to emotional or literal abandonment, right? And this could happen for reasons that had nothing to do with you, but the child always thinks everything has to do with them. It could have had to do with an addiction or some other issue going on in one of your caretaker's lives or both of them, but you experienced it as being your fault, right? Certainly, if you grew up around a lot of conflict, which was very volatile or violent or really scary or big,

then you can struggle. That can be another kind of trauma where you struggle in the face of conflict where you don't feel safe, right? But what happens in real time, even though you're now a grownup and you can protect yourself, a much younger part of yourself is taking the wheel. That's what's happening when we have a trauma reaction. So you're in the middle of a conflict or a conflict is starting. Your partner maybe is showing some frustration or displeasure or disappointment or whatever

it is, and you are feeling like the relationship is at risk and all those old little girl feelings you had at such a young age of feeling unsafe, ungrounded, abandoned, you know, for a child abandonment and fear of abandonment is not just, I'm going to lose love. It's the key to our survival. You know, we need our caretakers for food and shelter and protection. So if they abandoned us, we're as good as dead, you know? So it is full fear that we felt back then. And so when you have your reaction in real time now, what's happening is that little child part of yourself is taking the wheel and shutting down in this case, right? For someone else, it might be that they leave the room. For someone else, it might be that they get even bigger and more

aggressive. Like whatever strategy you adopted in earlier childhood, that's what's happening. And you say that you disassociate, you can't find words, right? So you stop talking and you just kind of go blank. And of course, if your partner doesn't understand what's happening, they're going to think you're stonewalling them, which, you know, according to the Gottman Institute is one of the four horsemen, one of the four biggest issues that cause breakups in relationships. So you really want to attend to that. Step one is having a conversation with your partner when you are not in conflict, when things are peaceful, you know, you say, Hey, I really want to talk to you about something I've been noticing, or maybe you've noticed that when we start to have a

conflict, I can shut down. I don't want to do that. I don't mean to do that, but I know that I have some trauma that has nothing to do with you that happened much earlier in my life that just kind of takes over. I get really, you know, what's happening is basically you're getting really anxious. Your nervous system goes into overload and you just shut down. So the first thing is that you want to inform them of what's happening. And then you want to come up with a strategy for dealing with it. So the strategy is two parts. The first is that I want you to get some support for your trauma. I'm going to tell you in a minute how to manage the trauma reaction, but we don't want to have to go through life managing our trauma reactions all the time.

Of course, we're going to get triggered. All of us are going to get triggered. Even if we work through our traumas. We're still going to get triggered sometimes. But if you haven't worked through it, you're going to be constantly having to manage this. And so not only will this get better if you get some trauma-informed therapy, whether that's somatic experiencing, including EMDR, or whether it's talk therapy, whatever it is, I want you to see someone who has a really good background in trauma. You can go to traumahealing.org. That's a great resource for you and find someone near you, but you want to work with someone to resolve, right? To work through the trauma because then you are much less triggered and the rest of your life, there are a million

ways that you don't even know, probably half of them, million ways that this is affecting your life, making you play small, keeping you from taking risks in relationships, in life, in work, feeling insecure with yourself. I mean, there's so many ways that this impacts you. So if you can work through the trauma, so much will open up in your life, including in your relationship. And that's part of the conversation. When you're having this conversation, you want to say, look, I recognize that this is my own trauma that has nothing to do with you. Just the conflict we're having is triggering it. So I'm going to take responsibility and I'm going to get help and I'm going to go see someone and I already found someone, right? That's part of the conversation.

And then you're going to explain that, you know, and this is what happens. And so now comes the strategy. In addition to getting the help, the in the moment strategy. hey it's Dr. Laura Berman I've been a sex love and relationship therapist for over 30 years and the main question I always get asked is how the heck do we spice it up in a long-term monogamous relationship well if you want to take your love life your sex life to the next level whether you're in a relationship or not check out my free course on quantum sex it's going to teach you how to take your sexual response to the next level capable of full body orgasms, how to use sex magic to manifest your dreams and how to connect on an even deeper level sexually with your partner.

Just go to drlauraberman.com and you'll find it right there on the homepage, the quantum sex free course. Check it out. Let me know what you think. once again two parts the first part is to create space so you notice you're getting and you may not always notice right you can even enlist your partner's help like say okay i'm going to try to notice when i feel this coming up in my nervous system but if you notice me just going blank and disassociating meaning that you're kind of leaving your body which is what you probably did as a little kid to keep yourself safe, right? That's what we often do. If you notice that I'm not really in the building emotionally anymore, or I just completely shut down and I'm not noticing

it, please call me to consciousness. Say, honey, are you in a trauma reaction right now? Or make up a safe word. Honey, is this bananas and watermelons or whatever? But help me notice if I don't notice myself. And then what I would like to do is just take some temporary space so I can calm my nervous system down, right? So you notice or your partner notices that the trauma trigger has happened. Then your next step is to get out of the traumatic situation, the thing that's triggering the trauma. So if you can, you're going to go outside and put your bare feet on the ground or on the grass. You can just leave the room and take some grounding breaths where you breathe in deeply and imagine light flowing in through the top of your head and

filling your whole body. And as you breathe out, it's shooting out your tailbone, rooting you, going deep into the earth, rooting you into the earth. You know, you take like five to six deep breaths like that, or you can take what we call the four or six breaths where you breathe in for the count of four and out for the count of six. All of these things really only take like three to five minutes to ground your energy a little bit, calm your nervous system down. So you can do the grounding breath for three to five minutes where you're breathing in through your nose, breathing the light in and breathing it out through your tailbone deep into the earth. You can take the four, six breath. You can take a breath where you say voo that activates the

vagus nerve, which calms the nervous system down. So you breathe in through the nose and then you, I'm going to make this sound for you now, but you make this sound that goes until you run out of breath. I won't make you listen to me do the whole thing, but do that for three to five minutes. And by the end of that, including putting your feet on the earth if you can. Your nervous system will feel calm. You will come back into your body. There are lots of other techniques too out there that a somatic experiencing therapist can work with you on, but that will calm your nervous system down. You've gotten out of the situation. You've calmed your nervous system down and then you don't blow off the conflict. Now from a calm place, you go

back either immediately or you make an appointment to go back. If you don't, if the time has run out and you don't have time to have the conversation, make sure you come back to it and you have it in a calm way. The other thing that can really help, especially if there's an abandonment trauma underneath this is for both of you to breathe together, right? So if you feel safe enough with your partner, you can say, you know what? I'm just noticing some trauma coming up. Can we breathe together? Can you hold my hand? Can you hug me? Right. And imagine just like, help me ground. I had a lot of abandonment trauma when I was young, emotional abandonment and aggression and big, you know, saw a lot of physical abuse around me. So my husband who, you know, is very assertive

and very comfortable in his own skin. And in the beginning of our relationship, he learned not to do this, but in the beginning of his, of our relationship, when he got angry, he would never say or do anything aggressive or below the belt, but he, you could see he was, you know, you could see he was really angry and it would trigger me and I would shrink or I would get really big and aggressive back one or the other. And I realized that part of it was just old trauma. And part of it was that I felt like the relationship was being at risk, even if we were just having a silly conflict about something small. So one of the things that we did and that I asked him to do is just say to me, I am here. I am not leaving you. I love you. And I'm angry right now, right?

So I would make him hold my hands and say, I love you and I'm not leaving you. And I'm angry right now because of X, Y, Z. And that made a huge difference. So it could be something as simple as that. If you know what it is that you're getting triggered around or what the fear is where your partner can help attend to that. But you talk through the conflict. And if you notice that you're starting to shut down again, you do it again. And over time, you're training your nervous system to be okay with conflict and to recognize that this is very different than what you experienced as a child. And you can be seen and heard, right? So those are your agreements that you're going to take time if you need it, that you're going to ground

yourself, that you're going to ground together, you're going to calm your nervous system down, and then you're going to try to work through the logistics. And watch or listen to the podcast I made about getting your needs met and love, because that episode, I gave you the steps for how to get your needs met, right? You say how you're feeling, the story underneath how you're feeling and then what you want. And that's a beautiful way to navigate conflict and to get both of your needs met. I hope that helps. Keep us posted on how it goes. And I'm always here for you. You can email me at languageoflovepod at gmail.com. You can also leave a voice note if you want to. Just go to drlauraberman.com slash languageoflovepod.

We'll see you next time.