Do you often find that during fights, your partner pulls away, leaving you feeling abandoned and unsure of how to fix things? Perhaps they withdraw emotionally, physically, or both, and you’re left sitting in the aftermath—overwhelmed, anxious, and questioning whether your relationship can recover. This pattern, known as relationship withdrawal, can be deeply painful and create a cycle of disconnection that feels impossible to break.
If this scenario resonates with you, you’re not alone. Relationship withdrawal is a common, yet harmful, coping mechanism that can undermine the closeness and trust in a partnership. In this blog, we’ll explore why withdrawal happens, how it impacts your relationship, and, most importantly, what you can do to address it and foster a deeper connection with your partner.
The Fifth Losing Strategy: Withdrawal. What Is Relationship Withdrawal and Why Does It Happen?
Here are the most common reasons you might resort to this losing strategy:
- It can be a form of punishment, which makes this particular form of withdrawal a combination between withdrawal and passive-aggressive retaliation/revenge,
- A part of you may want to retaliate against your partner, while a bigger part of you wants to protect your partner/relationship from it. So, to try to achieve this, you withdraw,
- You generally fear conflict,
- You mistrust and/or feel uncomfortable with closeness,
- You’re reluctant to be vulnerable,
- You’ve developed a sense of futility in your relationship,
- You experience fatigue (Real, 2007, p. 54),
- You learned this strategy while growing up and it became your reliable, go-to strategy when things got tough,
- You get flooded in triggering moments, which means you don’t get enough oxygen to the brain. In these states, we often stonewall, where he look away or even run away from our partner in an attempt to reduce our emotional intensity, bring oxygen back into our brains, and bring ourselves back into a general state of equilibrium.
We can also withdraw from the entire relationship. For instance, two ships passing in the night is an example of withdrawal’s teeth sunk deeply into a relationship.
In his book, The New Rules of Marriage, therapist Terry Real shares, “One client told me, ‘John and I just started leading more separate lives. He had his interests. I had mine. He had his friends. I had mine. Eventually, there simply wasn’t much left to bind us together” (Real, 2007, p. 54).
How Relationship Withdrawal Leads to Distance and Resentment
Withdrawal can take the following forms:
- “You tiptoe around your partner, fearing his volatility, thinking him either too fragile or too explosive to handle stressful issues”.
- “Or, you can withdraw discussion and negotiation about one particular issue, such as child rearing or meaning, because you ‘know’ in advance that you ‘won’t get anywhere’” (Real, 2007, p. 54).
A Key Distinction: Withdrawal Versus Mature Acceptance
Every relationship has its flaws and problems. Given this, it can be tempting to think that avoiding a particular discussion or fighting for change in a particular area with your partner is crucial. There is a world of difference, though, between real, healthy acceptance and false acceptance inherent in withdrawal.
“Real acceptance feels like a choice” (Real, 2007, p. 55).
How to Reach Mature Acceptance (Instead of Withdrawal)
“In a grown-up relationship, when it becomes clear that, for now, a certain want or need of yours will not be fully met no matter how many different strategies you try, you run through a relationship reckoning.”
You ask yourself: Are enough of my needs being met in this relationship to make grieving those wants and needs that will be granted worth my while”? (Real, 2007, p. 55).
If your answer is an enthusiastic and genuine yes, that means you’re choosing to stay in the relationship. Therefore, you’re experiencing real acceptance. In this path, “you’re owning your choice to be with your partner as a choice, as opposed to an unfortunate imposition (one very likely to stir up mounting resentment in you)…you’re tolerating the pain and disappointment of missing out on the thing/things you want/need without seeing yourself as a victim” (Real, 2007, p. 56-57).
To land on this positive and encouraging place, it dramatically helps to take consistent and thoughtful stock of all the reasons you chose, and continue to choose, to be with your partner. Additionally, it helps to give yourself and your partner vivid examples of these reasons so it’s much easier for you and your partner to most powerfully feel these incredible reasons for your attraction, love, respect, and longstanding, powerful bond. Essentially, create a regular attitude of gratitude to aid in your journey of mature acceptance as opposed to unhealthy, resentment-building withdrawal.
“If you have tried everything to get a need met and it’s clear that it is not in the cards, you must take ownership of your choices. Either move into acceptance and relish the gifts you are given or realize how important your need is and deal with it. Perhaps you need more, or a different kind of, help. Perhaps you need to issue an ultimatum: ‘If you can’t pledge to monogamy, that’s your choice [I can’t control you], but I will no longer be here’. Perhaps you need to consider ending the relationship altogether: ‘As much as I love you, I’ve decided that I cannot in good conscience subject either myself or our children to your volatile anger and verbal abuse’. In any case, remember that no one has a gun to your head. There is only one person responsible for the choices you make” (Real, 2007, p. 57).
Another Key Distinction: Withdrawal Versus Responsible Distance-Taking
Taking space from your partner can, and often is, healthy and necessary.
Let’s say you and your partner start to get into a heated conversation. Emotions shoot up dramatically in a matter of moments. One or both of you feels so strongly, let’s say at a level of an 8-10/10, where 10 represents the most intense version of the emotion(s). In this state, you/you both are likely flooded, meaning you/you both have a brain(s) deprived of oxygen. When we are flooded and lack key oxygen to the brain, we aren’t able to think straight or listen well. We can’t be funny, creative, or problem solve. We certainly can’t move forward with the conversation in any productive way to work it out like a functional team. If we aren’t able, in moments such as these, to calm ourselves down so we are no longer flooded, we have only one healthy option: take a mutually agreed-upon healthy break.
In a mutually agreed-upon break, we say something like this: “We aren’t our best selves now. We need to take a break. According to top couples’ therapists, Dr. John and Julie Gottman, in their book, Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict into Connection, there are critical ground rules to follow for what comes next. They detail that partners should agree to come back to the conversation in 20 minutes to 24-hours (and ideally specify an exact time). Additionally, their research uncovers that, it is critical, during that break time, to avoid replaying the details of the fight/plan and how you are going to try to solve it, as well as thinking about your partner in a bad or even a good way. Our doing any of this only keeps our emotions escalated and moves us away from our key goal in this time: self-soothing/bringing our emotional temperature down to a reasonable place and thereby restoring oxygen to our brains so we can be our best selves again.
Now, let’s turn to the distinction between this responsible distance-taking versus unhealthy withdrawal.
“Real relationships are an endless negotiation between closeness and distance. Both are important. But there are responsible ways to take distance and there are irresponsible ways to take distance. Withdrawal is irresponsible distance taking. It is unilateral, and without functional communication – the one who withdraws is either silent or screaming. By contrast, responsible distance taking is neither unilateral nor provocative.
Two other critical elements of responsible distance-taking as compared to withdrawal are the following: responsible distance-taking always includes an explanation and a promise to return to the conversation.
“Instead of answering the question ‘Do you want to talk’? with ‘No’, you say, ‘No. Here’s why:______. And, here’s when I can:______’ or ‘Not now. I just got home from work and I need to unwind a little. Let’s talk after we put the kids to bed’. Or, ‘Thanks for asking, hon. To tell you the truth, the last thing I want to do right now is talk about my day at work. But, give me a half hour or so to zone out and check the news, and then I’ll be happy to hear about your day’” (Real, 2007, p. 58).
Essentially, responsible distance-taking includes the following 3 types of statements:
- No,
- Here’s why I’m saying no,
- And here’s my alternative proposal (Real, 2007, p. 58).
Hoping to Learn More about the Losing Strategy of Withdrawal and What to do Instead?
Are you and your partner getting into a lot of terrible, chaotic, and challenging fights that end abruptly with one or both of you leaving? When this happens, does it leave you or you both feeling extremely unsettled, upset, abandoned, and betrayed? Are you tired of this kind of cycle?
If the answer to any of these is yes, we can help. At Stress Solutions, we help couples like you learn all about losing strategies like withdrawal and learn how to both say no to it and say yes to winning strategies. Every day, we help struggling couples like yourself to change their relationship in the most meaningful ways to develop the kind of mutual happiness, peace, and fulfillment you deserve. We encourage you to reach out by phone for your free phone consultation with one of our therapists at Stress Solutions, located in San Diego, California.
