SILENT TREATMENT lasts for as long as you’ll tolerate it.

The silent treatment — is the behavior pattern most damaging to a relationship.

It’s a form of contempt that turned out to be the number one predictor of divorce.

If you’re in a dynamic with someone giving you the silent treatment, take an objective look at things.

Stonewalling is common among individuals with personality disorders (particularly covert narcissism), as well as those with dysfunctional attachment patterns.

Assuming it’s the latter, which is more commonplace, the silent treatment triggers a push/pull or demand pattern that’s almost impossible to interrupt. It continues until the relationship is too broken to be revived.

The silent treatment is most often initiated by the avoidant personality, whose greatest fear is engulfment. It’s a learned behavior from a family of origin that’s ingrained long before the person has their first adult relationship.

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Thank you?….I think the?silent?treatment?is THE most sinister and provocative form of aggression. And it's intended to be. And it's not just narcs who use this.

Fine to end communication when an issue has been decided, but it's usually done in the middle or beginning of a conflict, giving you no chance at understanding.

The ultimate end, or goal, or whatever, is that the person who is on the receiving end will eventually lose their cool and lash out.

This making the receiver of the silent?treatment?appear irrational, aggressive and unpredictable, for apparently no reason.

And the giver of the silent?treatment?has remained calm and rational. They have been well behaved. It will appear therefore that this person was in the right all along. It's a really sneaky, nasty behavior.

?Do you want to add a word or two?

When the avoidant feels that someone is making too many demands of them for intimacy, or overwhelms them with criticisms, pressures, or needs, they fight back with a passive, concealed strategy of psychological abuse (more on this later).

As a result, they get what they want by doing so very little: emotional space, control over another person, or the validation that comes from being called, texted, and chased repeatedly during the silent period.

It’s manipulative, highly effective, and easy to deny. Common tactics: refusing to speak to someone, distancing, avoiding someone’s company, ignoring a person’s expressed requests or needs, and any kind of behavior that makes a person feel invisible, unacknowledged or invalid.

If you’re on the receiving end of such behavior, you’re probably a securely or anxiously attached person. And for either, it can be torturous. You don’t know what the other person is thinking. You don’t know if they’re going to leave. You don’t know what their next move is.

The anxiously attached, whose greatest fear is abandonment whose greatest fear is abandonment, may engage in chasing behaviors. Occasionally, so, too, will the securely attached individual, who seeks out a rational conversation that provides answers to an illogical situation.

The reason that the silent treatment is so abusive and damaging?

It threatens an individual’s fundamental human needs: to be acknowledged, to be mirrored, to be treated with dignity and respect.

?Moreover, when a person is ostracized, the brain’s dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is activated — that’s the part of the brain that’s selective for physical pain.

That’s right: being ignored is physically painful.

If you’ve been getting the silent treatment, you might ask yourself why you engage with someone who treats you so carelessly. “The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference,” (Elie Wiesel).

If you have a good reason for staying connected with the stonewaller — they’re a family member, you’re in a marriage or committed relationship, you have personal history together, you have children together, they’re a business partner, teammate, or colleague — then you may wish to get to root of the conflict.

Take the time.

Something precipitated the withdrawal. Maybe it’s a bad behavior of yours, or a long-standing issue that would benefit from some introspection. Use the distance to take stock of things and reflect on yourself.

If you need to change, take concrete steps to do it, irrespective of the other person. If there’s an opportunity for self-improvement, that only benefits you and your future relationships.

Relax. Give up. Move on.

It’s natural to be upset. But like the devil's snare, anger and frustration are self-defeating. For one, it further pushes the other person away, while you sink into a negative headspace.

The right response is the counterintuitive one: surrender. If a person withdraws from your company, that’s their choice. Their departure creates space for others, both new people and old connections you may have been ignoring. If the situation warrants grieving, acknowledge the loss in a healthy way. Move on.

When and how to contact

If there’s a good or necessary reason to establish contact, wait until you’ve adequately cooled off and again, make sure you’re at a point where you’ve honestly reflected on your behavior. Have a conversation when the avoidant party signals, they are ready to talk. Don’t push.

Give and take feedback.

Tell the person constructively how the behavior makes you feel. Be positive. Mean what you say. Ask for a heads up before a future cooling off period. Honor their emotional need for space and time.

Maintain boundaries.

Avoidance patterns are deeply ingrained and extremely hard to break. The behavior, even with the best of intentions, tends to repeat. It’s not your responsibility to manage the emotions of others, though there are lots of people out there willing to let you do unpaid emotional labor for them.

Your priority is your well-being. Tell the person what you will and will not tolerate. Stick to it. Walk away if you need to.

Your comments .......

Love yourself.

Relationships are tides. They swell with energy, and then retreat through episodes of separateness and peace. Fighting the natural way of things drowns the people we love and prevents us from loving ourselves.

Don’t confuse the silent treatment with healthy separation, which is how human beings balance desire with fear, and intimacy with freedom. Aloneness teaches us to draw from and reaffirm what’s within, rather than take the energy of another. In so doing, you reconnect with your highest self and greatest purpose.

If you haven’t learned to love yourself, you can start right now .

All good relationships will ebb and flow. Some will carry us away to new places before retreating forever. Some cycle predictably through change and evolution. Others flow back to us when least expected.

“All of the rivers run into the sea. Yet the sea is not full. Unto place from whence the rivers come, tither they return again.”

The most difficult part of dishing out the “silent treatment” for me, is that this is EXACTLY how the narcissist treated me.

No compassion, no response, no acknowledgment –

Just pretending like I no longer existed despite all of the time we spent together and all of the “love”.

We professed to one another.

This is among the most painful, callous, and immature ways you can treat another person.

?It’s difficult to answer any question like this in the affirmative as one exception would be enough to make the answer no.

It’s safer to say that it’s a very common thing for them to do. It’s interesting to me that if you like at how narcissists behavior, although it’s very bizarre .

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?For more articles like this, check out my website at daydream.in

Here are some common tactics

*?Love bombing

*?Intermittent reinforcement

*?Silent?treatment?

*?Chaos manufacturing

*?Blame shifting

*?Projection

*?Gaslighting

*?Fake apologizes

*?Rude behavior (like leaving the room when you are talking with no explanation)

*?Blatant lying Those are a few manipulative tactics that come to mind.