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What exactly is the silent treatment?

For many of us, we experienced this in middle school. Our best friend gets mad at us and stops talking to us. It’s a temper tantrum because we hurt their feelings or didn’t do what they wanted. “I’ll show you. I won’t talk to you anymore.” It’s a form of teaching someone a lesson. You no longer deserve my time, attention, and communication. You don’t deserve to be blessed with my presence anymore. It’s mean, arrogant, and cruel. It takes away the other person’s right to have differing opinions, to say something they could have said differently, and to simply be human.

 

The silent treatment is a shift from a regular, or at least somewhat regular conversation, to silence that lasts for longer than a reasonable period of time. It is a passive aggressive form of emotional abuse. It is punishing, controlling and painful. It is not blatantly abusive, such as yelling, swearing, throwing things or hitting. As such, it is much easier to deny or make excuses for.

“I just didn’t feel like talking. Nothing wrong with that. You shouldn’t take it so personally.”

“You are imagining that.”

“I was thinking about what I was going to say.”

 

This painful form of silence can be going for days and weeks without talking to you. You can be in the same room together and be totally ignored. Throughout the day, text messages go unanswered. Phone calls go to voicemail. This can also happen as intense moments of silence, deliberately held within the conversation itself. You feel completely invisible!