Why Is A Narcissist Stonewalling You So Agonising? 

A narcissist stonewalling you is wholeheartedly rejecting to engage with you.

That means zero communication and zero emotional interaction with you.

It’s agonising to be on the receiving end – especially when it’s your partner treating you that way.

So when a narcissist goes quiet on you, they’re undoubtedly trying to hurt you. 

It’s the silent treatment in its basic form because both acts involve no connection. But stonewalling manifests in different ways.

What is Narcissistic Stonewalling?

A narcissist stonewalling you, will immediately begin when you confront them with a discussion they don’t want to have.

Like:

“Babe, who’s that chick’s photos you keep liking on instagram?”

And if they don’t want to answer that, they’ll actively avoid responding to you. They’ll shut down the conversation before it’s even had a chance to start. And like its name suggests, it’s like talking to a brick wall: you’ll get nothing back. 

It goes hand in hand with the silent treatment because the outcome is the same: ignoring you. The silent treatment by a narcissist can sometimes occur without warning. Whereas a narcissist stonewalling you will happen directly after an interaction they want to stay away from. 

When narcissists face accountability, they’ll ignore the subject you want to address, no matter your approach. They won’t answer your concerns, and instead, they’ll do everything in their power to put an end to the conversation.

Examples of a Narcissist Stonewalling:

• Not replying to text messages
• Avoiding your phone calls
• Walking away from you
• Dismissing your concerns
• Ignoring your questions
• Abandoning you
• Changing the topic of conversation
• Actively ignoring you, like texting during a discussion
• Refusing to talk about the topic

Is Narcissistic Stonewalling Manipulation?

A narcissist will stonewall because they don’t want to deal with taking responsibility. It’s a form of manipulation as it helps them regain control of the situation. And it’s mainly experienced during the devalue stage of the narcissistic abuse cycle.

Stonewalling and Gaslighting

In the same way as gaslighting, stonewalling’s a preventative tactic for narcissists to escape their current situation. It’s comparable to gaslighting because they’re manipulative and help shift the blame from them. It also makes you question if you caused their behaviour towards you.

Stonewalling and gaslighting behave similarly by dismissing your concerns and making you feel invalidated. So they lead to the same outcome: you feel hurt, powerless and pushed away. And in time, they play a part in your ability to think clearly.

Stonewalling and gaslighting are punishments for putting the narcissist on the spot. They don’t like being in the firing line and will dodge it at every cost. Remember that narcissists react out of defence because they don’t like feeling threatened.

So when you want them to take accountability for an issue, they’ll prey on your insecurities rather than responding. And in turn, this makes them feel powerful. The manipulating tactics of stonewalling and gaslighting provoke a reaction from you. And so it removes the limelight from them.

The effect of a narcissist stonewalling you is that they no longer have to discuss the problem with you. But shutting you out from attempting to have a healthy conversation isn’t normal behaviour.

And you know what? It’s also really draining to deal with such extreme efforts to avoid talking to you.

Why do Narcissists Stonewall you?

Overt narcissists show their rage loud and clear. While covert ones use silence as their weapon of choice; they like to discipline you quietly and subtly.

Handling difficult convos with stonewalling is not only unacceptable, its fucking immature!

But sadly, it’s a common technique for narcissists. So, how do you take a narcissist stonewalling you?

Understand the Narcissist’s Stonewalling Motives

Once you understand the motive behind stonewalling, you can learn how to respond to it and deal with it. 

When a narcissist stonewalls you, they’re essentially looking for a reaction out of you. So when they end the conversation, they don’t want to discuss it. But they’re also using it as ammunition – they want to get a rise out of you. 

Their punishing dismissal triggers many fears and worries in you. And your automatic reaction is to want to fight back and demand answers to your questions. But they’re not going to just give that away. 

Instead, the narcissist will either walk away from you, abruptly finish the conversation, or start giving you the silent treatment. But their silence is actually communicating control over you. Because it implies they want something from you. 

3 Reasons why a Narcissist Stonewalls you:

1. To Control the Conversation

Firstly they want to win back control of the conversation. And they do this by generating uncertainty over how long their ignoring will last.

So it leaves you scrambling and worried because they deny you the answers you need for closure. Hence, their lack of input drives you to talk more to relieve the discomfort of their silence. 

But here’s the thing:

You’re waiting on them for a response. So the ball’s in their court. But their mind games encourage you to keep enticing them to open up. You’re putting in all this effort, trying to find anything that’ll get them to start talking to you again.

And guess what?

The conversation’s now taken a wild turn – cos you’re not even talking about the original stuff anymore. It’s so crafty and completely lets the stonewaller off the hook. Because they’ve twisted things in their favour and dodged all responsibility.

2. To Prevent you From Bringing up the Same Subject Again

Secondly, their stern reaction acknowledges that you’ve hurt them somehow. So they put up a wall as a defence mechanism that harms you. The stonewaller’s pain is communicating that they don’t want you to bring up that subject again.

They’re teaching you that there’ll be consequences for your actions. This means that should you address the same discussion in future – they’ll return to ignoring you again. So, you learn to associate abandonment with matters that are out of bounds for them.

3. Shift the Blame Onto you

Lastly, stonewalling helps narcissists shift blame onto you and remove them from the focus. Naturally, when someone mistreats you, you can’t help but think you might’ve done something wrong. 

This causes self-reflection as you rewind the moments before they ignored you. You’re analysing your actions for what led to their silence. Self-blame is a common outcome and is in line with the stonewaller’s goal of making you feel at fault.

If they can manipulate you enough to feel in the wrong, you’ll apologise to them. As a result, the narcissist has successfully deflected accountability onto you – and they’re no longer the problem. 

How to Handle a Stonewalling Narcissist

The Emotional Effects of Narcissistic Stonewalling

Stonewalling’s a control technique because it makes you change the way you act. It’s how narcissists’s push your buttons and test your boundaries.

And it makes you check yourself and think you’re the problem. Because how do you not take someone ignoring you as a personal attack? Anyone would. So stonewalling makes you paranoid and wonder if you did something wrong.

Cutting you off mid conversation is basically saying: “your feelings don’t matter”. It’s a heartless reaction that makes you feel invalidated and undeserving of their attention.

So you’re bound to feel angry and desperate as you struggle to win their affection back and feel visible to them again.

And that’s exactly what they’re hoping you’ll do.

Because when a narcissist’s stonewalling you, they’re giving you a glimpse into a life without them. So they want you to fear losing them and get you doing anything to keep them around.

Fear’s a great motivator to help control you because you don’t want a repeat of this treatment, right? So what ends up happening instead, is you try to prevent them stonewalling you. Which means you walk on eggshells and avoid bringing the same thing up again.

But you’re pandering behaviour’s unnatural. It’s not normal to be punished for being honest. You should be able to bring up valid concerns without worrying about their reaction.

How do you Respond to Stonewalling and Silent Treatment?

Stonewalling motivates the receiver to take action. So the best reaction you can give a stonewaller is no reaction. 

Don’t allow them an insight into how you’re feeling because they feed off your response to them. So they can’t control you if you don’t give them access to your emotions.

You need to fake it until you make it and basically pretend that you’re ok. It’s not easy to do as you fight against your natural impulses. But it would help if you refrained from indulging in their mind games.

Pushing back with questions only results in further abuse from them. It allows them to continue ignoring you because it shows signs that you’re not letting the matter go. The more anger and panic you offer, the more power they have over you.

If you want the stonewalling to end, don’t enable it because that’s how they continually get away with it. Instead, remain unresponsive and apply the grey rock method to your interactions.

How to Deal With a Narcissist Stonewalling you

Here’s a little advice for you:

Forget chasing after a narcissist when they stonewall you. And put that energy into yourself instead.

Focus on your well-being

When they ignore you, it gives you space from them too. Use that time to heal the parts of you that they’re triggering.

Stonewalling can spark the fear of abandonment — mainly because you don’t know when it’ll end or if they’ll return. But the unsafe feeling that brings, can also highlight some unhealed wounds in you that need your attention. 

If you fear abandonment, you typically hold on to unhealthy and abusive relationships. Thats because your anxiety about being alone’s more dominant than your need to leave your partner. Your fear is also likely to develop because you’ve been exposed to emotional abuse for a while.

So use the time apart from them to work on fixing yourself and what you need. Invest in therapy if you can afford to; it helped my development massively.

Self-care

Self-care is just as important too. And we often neglect it when we’ve been constantly pouring our energy into someone else. Because when you’re an empath, your needs tend to be forgotten and tossed aside. And narcissists prey on that because we’re more attentive to them instead of ourselves.

So look for ways to get back in touch with you. Find things you like to do, whether that’s being outside, taking a hot bath or meeting a friend for a coffee. Simply explore what brings you joy.

Connection

Talking to women who’ve had similar experiences to you can also help you. When you connect to relatable stories, it’s comforting. It helps you feel less alone in your recovery and move out of rumination. Because connection distracts those bad feelings and makes you feel better. 

When you’ve been starved from connection and love in your relationship, you need to get it from other sources. And connecting with people around you will do that. It’ll make you feel happier, more important and like you belong somewhere. And these things will help build you back up again.

What’s an Example of a Narcissist Stonewalling?

Stonewalling is a means of inflicting severe mental pain on someone’s psyche. It imbalances your well-being in many ways. 

Not knowing why someone’s ignoring you, or how long it could last drives you insane. The worry and stress you feel makes you lose sleep, your appetite and your motivation to do anything. You might even revolve your whole day around waiting for a response from them.

In most cases, a narcissist stonewalling you derives from their feeling of discomfort. But they’re incapable of telling you that. So when they sense pressure, or feel like they look bad, they’ll attack you by shutting down instead. Their defensive reaction stems from a place of vulnerability. But they cannot communicate that to you.

If I ever brought up how I felt about the lack of sex with my ex, he would immediately recoil. He worked away a lot, and naturally, I looked forward to reconnecting with him when he came home. But then I noticed how infrequently he wanted to have sex with me. Yet every time I raised the issue, it would never go anywhere. If anything I regretted bringing it up.

So I looked inwards as to why he didn’t want to. Maybe I wasn’t attractive to him, or he didn’t love me anymore. Or perhaps it was because there was someone else.

And as you’d expect, the conversation never left me with answers, just further doubt. It always ended the same way: feeling like he was punishing me for raising a legitimate issue. 

Understanding Narcissist Stonewalling

Looking back, you start to piece together the emotions you went through. And look, I’m no psychologist, just someone sharing what I’ve been through and learned along the way.

But diving into narcissism and stonewalling can be eye-opening for you. Because it helps give you the language to make sense of your experiences.

Of course, stonewalling leaves you with a lot of unanswered questions. But understanding how it works, helps you fill in the blanks.

For example, this is how it helped me interpret my relationship, which might help you figure out yours:

Like I explained earlier, my ex always shut down whenever I brought up our lack of intimacy. He just couldn’t handle the confrontation and avoided it at all costs. So this gave me one piece of the puzzle.

And the other piece was this:

He’d been doing the dirty and cheating on me. So it makes sense he stonewalled me because he didn’t want to raise my suspicions, right?!

Because if I found out about that, it wouldn’t have painted him in a good light. And as you know, narcissists don’t like looking bad – they want to keep up their appearances.

So his stonewalling reaction kind of makes sense to me now. It doesn’t excuse his behaviour, but it helped me get closure on the relationship. Because it put my experiences into perspective and showed me how manipulation works.

Don’t Trivialise Your Stonewalling Experience

Education around this is really important to help you wrap your head around it all. You can’t get the answers from them, so you need to find them yourself.

And if your relationship ended in a discard like mine, it’s pretty standard for it to be abrupt and end without closure. So you’re bound to feel confused after it all. But you don’t need your ex to validate what you went through. After all, you lived it.

And once you have a name for what you went through, it’s like everything starts to click into place. The fog lifts, and you can start to make sense of all the chaos.

My goal’s to make understanding stonewalling and narcissism easier for you. And by blogging my story, I hope you learn and see parallels to your own experiences.

Don’t downplay or brush off stonewalling like I did. Trust me, I’ve been there, and I know how damaging this abuse can be to your mental health. And if I can spare you from feeling the way I did, then maybe you can also spare someone else too.

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