Stonewalling as Emotional-Shutdown Wrong Attractor: The Flooding-Driven Withdrawal Architecture, Contempt-Avoidance Basin, and the Return to Regulated Engagement

Stonewalling — the chronic pattern of emotional and communicative shutdown during interpersonal conflict — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_SW in the landscape of regulated engagement. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as regulated engagement: the capacity to remain emotionally present in conflict, communicate distress without shutdown, and maintain enough physiological regulation to engage productively with difficult relational material.

Drawing on Gottman's flooding construct and the Four Horsemen framework, two subtypes are distinguished: flooding-driven stonewalling (overwhelm-triggered protective shutdown) and instrumental stonewalling (deliberate relational punishment). The pursuer-withdrawer cycle is modeled as a coupled dynamical system in which the stonewaller's withdrawal increases the partner's distress, amplifying pursuit, which deepens flooding and further entrenches withdrawal.

Nine formal propositions characterize the flooding threshold, the two subtypes, the pursuer-withdrawer cycle, contempt as basin deepener, the physiological signature (heart rate elevation triggering shutdown), attachment-style modulation (avoidant attachment predicting greater stonewalling under equivalent flooding), the polyvagal account (dorsal vagal collapse as the physiological substrate), gender patterns, and return paths through physiological self-soothing, agreed time-outs, and repair attempts.