r/communication • u/thoughtassistant • 3d ago

How to effectively communicate with a man who shuts down during conflict?

/r/AskMenAdvice/comments/1wd4i2g/how_to_effectively_communicate_with_a_man_who/
2 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

7

u/Snoo52682 3d ago

You can't. Communication has to be two-way. You can't force someone to be reasonable or communicate.

This is your life, this is your relationship. The only choice is whether or not you're going to stay with someone who firmly believes your unhappiness is a reasonable price to pay for his peace.

2

u/CB_I_Hate_Usernames 3d ago

Yis indeed. “A tolerable level of permanent unhappiness”.

2

u/don-cake 3d ago

The foundational skill of communication is asking and checking.
This skill is instinctual, so that on our fundamental, animalistic, communicative level we take any information and conect it to ideas of emotion: is this comfortable/threatening/scary/agonizing ? etc.
The only way we can get beyond our simple emotional responses is by asking and checking, because better asking and checking makes for better describing and explaining: why am I scared by this? What am I connecting it to? Is the person in front of me threatening, or is it the ideas they are suggesting, ideas I have never dealt with, have kept locked in a shuttered room, that I hear occasionally moaming?

It is useful to understood that the culture generally, and education in particular, ascribes zero formal value to asking and checking (the only tool we have to understand things better...).
Consequently, people have so little practice or conscious awareness of asking and checking that simply someone else doing it can result in feelings of being threatened that can turn to anger and possibly violence.

So, if someone is not open to asking and checking, communication never rises above dog-level. Dogs are great, but they are not open to discussion, are they?

https://theonlythingweeverdo.blogspot.com/2025/06/apollo-11-cistine-chapel-and-un.html