I give my mother the silent treatment fairly often, but it usually only lasts a day or so. She’s very “look at me! look at me!”, and every couple of weeks something in her life has gone dramatically wrong and she hosts a pity party.
Perfect example: She called me all upset the other day about how she got a promotion offer at work. You’d think she’d be happy, right? Nope! She was complaining that now she had more work to do and didn’t want the extra responsibilities. Well that’s cool, so I told her she should just very politely turn down the offer . Allofasudden she’s firing off at me about why don’t I want her to succeed and be happy? WTF? :eek:
After episodes like that I don’t answer her calls for a couple days. She always knows why.
Oh, absolutely, and what you say is very true in my husband’s case (I have all the ego in our relationship :)). And even at the height of my anger, I always knew it wasn’t really because my concerns weren’t important to him - I know I mean the world to him - but it’s hard to remember that and act accordingly when your emotions are heightened.
I learned, the hard way, that the silent treatment tends to be a control tactic. The person who has shut down is trying to control your behavior. The first time my ex pulled that on me, it worked like a charm. I was trying to call him out on something he’d done to hurt me and he just shut down, left my house, and refused to speak to me for about 3-4 days. I blew up his phone trying to get his attention long enough to resolve the issue, which is what he wanted: me begging for his attention, so he wouldn’t have to be accountable or take responsibility for his actions that hurt me. I mentioned this to a friend and she told me about how he was trying to control my behavior by controlling the conversation.
Oh. Okay. I can play with that.
So, whenever I’d start feeling smothered or whatever and just wanted some peace and quiet, I’d pick a fight with him (insulting his religion was usually the quickest and most effective way to go about this). He’d get mad and refuse to talk to me. I’d delight in the peace and get a bunch of stuff done, going about my merry way, enjoying the solo time. Then he’d call and I’d feel like “aw, crap, he’s back.” Going through that pattern a few times is what made me decide to DTMFA. I was so much happier when he wasn’t speaking to me that I decided to make that permanent.
In the end, it totally backfired on him.
Not that my opinion should matter to you, but it sounds like you did him a favor.
I was raised in a home where people used their words as weapons to wound. I was schooled in
it, and am good at it.
Sometimes, being silent is the result of not wanting to cross over to a place I never want to go. In arguments emotions run high, it’s all too easy to get carried away. Sometimes the wisest thing to do is to choke back what’s on the tip of my tongue, literally biting my lips shut.
As I will later return, to take another shot at resolution, once I’ve calmed down and regained control, I don’t know if this strictly qualifies as ‘the silent treatment’, however for those on the receiving end it must surely seem so. There are times, at least for me, when it really is the lesser of two evils. Fortunately, as I’ve gotten older, it occurs less and less, even getting to where I can actually get out the words, “I’m sorry, I can’t continue!”.
It doesn’t. You don’t have anywhere near all the facts.
No doubt, and I’m sure you had significant grievances against him. My point was based on what you posted, you don’t come off well. Again, in my opinion.
Fair enough. The one example of my behavior I gave was pretty passive-aggressive, but at the time I thought I was fighting fire with fire. Straightforward, adult, mature, rational discussion didn’t work and the relationship was circling the drain anyway…
I didn’t get this impression at all, for what it’s worth. It sounded like a defense against a controlling partner.
I don’t much difference between “the silent treatment” and “pouting”. I don’t care for either, and therefore don’t respond to it. I’m not going to try to get you to talk - talk if you want, otherwise I will go about my business.
I have had people try this on me, but meh.
Regards,
Shodan
That was the goal: to react in the opposite way from what he expected – to take control of my choices away from him and back for myself. He thought that if he took Action A (Silent Treatment), then I would react by fawning and apologizing and falling on my sword to get back into his good graces (Reaction B). Instead, I didn’t let it bother me and used the time alone (or made the time alone by picking a fight) to do things like come up with a plan for how I was going to get out of an abusive, controlling relationship without him coming unhinged at the loss of control and beating the shit out of me or worse. He never laid a hand on me, but I don’t trust a controlling man to not lose his shit when his world (object of control) is slipping away from him. Dudes can get dangerous upon rejection sometimes, and I didn’t want to take any chances that he wouldn’t get violent. I made a plan to protect myself in the event that he did and then hoped for the best.
He did get a little stalker-y for about a year, but finally the Cone of Silence that I had to invoke got through. So there’s another data point. After we broke up, I refused to reciprocate any contact whatsoever. I didn’t respond to texts, emails, voice mails, notes left on my front door, nothing. Even when he tried to pick a fight with inflammatory communiques, I refused to budge or engage. I was afraid that any contact whatsoever would be viewed as an encouragement. Even a hearty “fuck off!” might be seen as “there is still some hope left as long as she’s talking to me”. So there’s where the Silent Treatment can maybe be healthy: when any contact at all could escalate into a dangerous situation. All the battered women and abusive relationship websites I went to recommended this. Make a clean break and invoke a Cone of Silence. Engage with a controller/abuser at your own peril. If you need a cite, go to heartless bitches international (dot com) and browse through The Manipulator Files.
This is completely and totally different from the examples upthread, where people are living together and one stops speaking to control how the conflict will (not) be handled. IMO, the Silent Treatment says the person doing it has trouble taking responsibility for their own hurtful behavior. They cannot accept that they, too, are equally complicit in what goes on in any relationship (not just intimate romantic ones), so they put up conversational roadblocks or shut down completely so they won’t have to face their own icky behavior or feelings.
“Disrespect is a weapon of the weak and a poor self-defense against one’s own despised feelings.” --Melody Beatty, The Drama of the Gifted Child
I think the silent treatment can be an immature way of handling an argument. Like someone else said, I have said “let’s talk about this later”, or even take a deep breath and count to 10 before I respond.
I think of ‘the silent treatment’ as a deliberate tactic of shutting another person out completely for an extended time: ignoring them, looking past them, not making eye contact, not responding to them if they speak, etc. What you’re describing strikes me as pulling yourself back from the heat of an argument before your high emotional state drives you to lash out more viciously than you want to. I say, good on you! That shows commendable self-control in challenging circumstances.
I think phouka nailed it on the first page – the silent treatment is a form of shunning, and as social animals who depend on the group for our survival, shunning is enormously threatening and frightening.
But we’ve had a number of different variations of the silent treatment mentioned in the thread so far. OP, could you let us know what you mean by it so we’re working off the same definition?
And Dogzilla, I think the way you handled your ex’s behavior was elegant and justifiably devious; not what I would suggest for a healthy emotional relationship, but you clearly didn’t have that with your ex anyway.
Well, since the OP never responded to several other requests to define what she meant, and seeing as how she’s now been banned, I do believe the OP is giving us the. . .
Oh, well played indeed! golf clap
I missed the banning. So, um, never mind, I guess.
I’ve never experienced this in a spouse-type situation. Thank goodness. I will say, however, that when dealing with someone who has become so obnoxious that interaction with them is completely counterproductive, the silent treatment works amazingly well. There’s nothing a bully or an attention-whore loves more than a good public argument, and when you fail to give that to them, ooh, they hate that.
As Dogzilla said upthread, some people take ANY contact as evidence that there’s still some hope you’ll be their girlfriend or their bestest buddy 4-evah. Why play their game? Some people believe that others are somehow obligated to respond to their every whim (“but she HAS to talk to me!”) and the sooner they lose that belief, the better. Some people get off on provoking reactions from as many people as they can and then playing the victim when their provocations bear fruit. So many people to avoid, so much time in your life gained by avoiding them.
Respectfully snipped by me for emphasis.
To me, this is “the silent treatment.” It was a specialty of my father’s; his were thorough and long-lasting. For instance, he gave my mom TST for 3 weeks. She tried and tried to figure out what she’d done, but finally begged him to tell her. Come to find out, she had 2 loaves of bread open at the same time! (Instead of finishing one, then opening the other.)
He then proceeded to give her TST for a month as a punishment for having to ask what she’d done, instead of just knowing!
Just to compound the craziness that is my parents, when she tells the story now, what upsets her the most is that she opened the new loaf so that he’d always have the freshest bread, and leave the other for her and us kids. :smack:
That’s not really the silent treatment, either. Part of the silent treatment involves making sure the person knows you are doing it to them, and has the intent of trying to get them to remedy the situation. When your goal is just to cut off contact, you are, well, just cutting off contact.
That said, I wouldn’t go out of my way to avoid anyone. It really doesn’t bother me if I told someone we’re not in a relationship, and yet they still think we are. And, so far, none of my relationships have involved people so crazy that I worry they are going to hurt me.
My brother needing some time out so he can calm down and “become human again” is not the silent treatment. Sometimes it isn’t even linked to something involving the rest of the family, but to their day outside; maybe Littlebro has just managed to hammer down a contract after some particularly nasty or complex negotiations, or Middlebro has fired a guy after finding him shooting up at work; in any case, he’s been relatively polite and pleasant at a time when he wanted to shout and needs some time to blow off steam on his own rather than blowing it on the family. It’s perfectly reasonable and adult behavior.
Mom not communicating for three days except for tossing the wallet and shopping list on my bed with a gesture that spelled out “I’d rather be throwing hammers at your head, pity I’m reasonably sure I’d miss”, on the other hand, was. It’s sort of a very agressive form of passive agression: she would have claimed it wasn’t agression since she wasn’t calling me names, but like hell it wasn’t - childish, too.