The Things We Do to Push People Away
By Meg Wilson, Director, Unison Mental Health
There's a moment in a lot of arguments that people in relationships can describe almost identically, even when they can't agree on anything else. Things are escalating. One person is still leaning in, still trying to be heard. And the other one does something — says the cruellest available thing, drags up the old wound they know will land, goes suddenly, flatly cold, or simply stands up and walks out of the room.
If you've been on either side of that moment, you know it doesn't feel like a choice. It feels more like something happening to the conversation than something either person decided to do.
I want to give that moment a name, because naming it changes how you relate to it. I call these distance-creating behaviours: the things we do, mid-conflict, that are designed — usually without our conscious say-so — to put space between us and the person in front of us.
What they actually are
The first thing to understand is that distance-creating behaviours are not really about the other person. They look like they're aimed outward. They're actually doing a job on the inside.
John and Julie Gottman, who spent decades recording couples in conflict, described a state they call flooding — or, more technically, diffuse physiological arousal. When a conflict tips past a certain threshold, the body treats it as a genuine threat. Heart rate climbs above roughly a hundred beats per minute, adrenaline releases, blood pressure rises, and the thinking, listening part of the brain goes quiet under the fight-or-flight response. The Gottmans' point is stark: in that state, it is physically very hard to take in what your partner is saying, no matter how much you want to.
So the body improvises. It reaches for the fastest way to end the flood of input, and the fastest way is to make the other person go away. Name-calling does it. So does contempt, or bringing up the affair, or the parenting failure, or whatever you know will make them recoil. So does going stony and silent — what the Gottmans call stonewalling — or physically leaving.
Every one of those is a distance-creating behaviour. They are, underneath, the same move: this is too much, get it away from me.
Why the body chooses distance
It helps to know this isn't a character flaw or a sign the relationship is broken. It's a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems evolved to do.
Daniel Siegel's concept of the window of tolerance describes this usefully: there is a band of arousal within which we can think clearly, stay curious, and remain in contact with another person. When conflict pushes us above that window — heart hammering, thoughts narrowing, the urge to say something sharp — we are in hyperarousal, running on the sympathetic nervous system's fight-or-flight response. Cruelty, door-slamming, and the reaching-for-the-wound-you-know-will-land all live here. They are mobilisation: the body trying to end the threat by making it back off.
But some people, particularly when emotional threat connects to older or more overwhelming experiences, don't stop at hyperarousal. They move through it and land somewhere quite different — hypoarousal, or shutdown. The flat, faraway, disconnected quality that reads to a partner as she stopped caring is often the opposite: a system so overwhelmed it has pulled the emergency brake. Physiologically this can mean a drop in heart rate and blood pressure, a going-still, and a genuine impairment of the ability to speak, respond, or even track what is being said. The partner reading it as indifference is, understandably, wrong.
Sue Johnson, who developed Emotionally Focused Therapy, mapped how this plays out between two people rather than inside one. She noticed that relationships fall into a pursue–withdraw pattern: as one partner presses in for connection, the other pulls back to manage the overwhelm, which makes the first partner press harder, which makes the second withdraw further. To be clear, the withdrawer usually isn't cold. In Johnson's framing they're often the more overwhelmed of the two — distance is simply the only regulation strategy they learned.
Most of us built these strategies young. If, growing up, the safest thing to do with a big feeling was to disappear it, or to get sharp enough that people backed off, then your body filed that away as what works. It genuinely did work, once. That's why it's so automatic now.
Growing the behaviour, not just banning it
Here's the part I care about most: you cannot simply delete a distance-creating behaviour. If the underlying need is real — and it is, the need for space when you're flooded is completely legitimate — then telling yourself to stop just leaves the need with nowhere to go. It'll come out sideways.
What actually works is to keep the function and change the form. The need is space. The old form is a slammed door. The new form is a sentence.
That might sound like: "I'm flooded and I can't hear you properly right now. I need twenty minutes and then I'll come back to this." The Gottmans found that number isn't arbitrary — it takes most bodies around twenty minutes to actually come down off the physiological wave, but only if you genuinely step away rather than keep rehearsing the argument in your head.
A few things make the new form possible. One is catching the signal earlier — the jaw tightening, the tunnel vision, the urge to say something you'll regret — and treating it as information rather than a starting gun. Another is agreeing on the exit before you need it, so a time-out reads as care rather than abandonment. Esther Perel points out that in conflict most of us are really asking one of two questions — are you there for me? and do you accept me? A time-out that comes with a promise to return answers both. A slammed door answers neither.
None of this is fast, and it isn't about becoming a person who never wants distance. It's about being able to say I need space instead of having to manufacture it by making someone flinch. That's a smaller change than it sounds, and it changes almost everything.
If you recognise your own arguments in this — the reaching for the cruel line, or the going cold, or the walking out — it's worth talking through with someone. It's a common focus in relationship therapy, and a free 15-minute fit call is an easy place to start.