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  [36]Family

What You’re Saying When You Give Someone the Silent Treatment

  Social ostracism has been a common punishment for millennia. But
  freezing someone out harms both the victim and the perpetrator.


   [37]Daryl Austin

  March 26, 2021
  A portrait of a woman with her mouth missing.
  Getty / Adam Maida / The Atlantic

  Kipling Williams has studied the effects of the silent treatment for
  more than 36 years, meeting hundreds of victims and perpetrators in the
  process:

  A grown woman whose father refused to speak with her for six months at
  a time as punishment throughout her life. “Her father died during one
  of those dreaded periods,” Williams told me. “When she visited him at
  the hospital shortly before his death, he turned away from her and
  wouldn’t break his silence even to say goodbye.”

  A father who stopped talking to his teenage son and couldn’t start
  again, despite the harm he knew he was causing. “The isolation made my
  son change from a happy, vibrant boy to a spineless jellyfish, and I
  knew I was the cause,” the father said to Williams.

  A wife whose husband severed communication with her early in their
  marriage. “She endured four decades of silence that started with a
  minor disagreement and only ended when her husband died,” Williams
  said. Forty years of eating meals by herself, watching television by
  herself—40 years of being invisible. “When I asked her why she stayed
  with him for all that time,” Williams said, “she answered simply,
  ‘Because at least he kept a roof over my head.’”

  A teacher. A sibling. A grandparent. A friend. Each story that
  Williams, a psychology professor at Purdue University, told me was more
  heartbreaking than the one before. As I listened, the question that
  lingered most was How could these people do this to those closest to
  them?

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  The silent treatment goes by many names: shunning, social isolation,
  stonewalling, ghosting. Although psychologists have nuanced definitions
  for each term, they are all essentially forms of ostracism. And the
  tactic is nothing new. Ancient Greeks [56]expelled for 10 years
  citizens who were thought to be a threat to democracy, and early
  American settlers [57]banished people accused of practicing witchcraft.
  Religions have frozen out individuals for centuries: Catholics call it
  excommunication, [58]herem is the highest form of punishment in
  Judaism, and the Amish practice [59]Meidung. The Church of Scientology
  recommends total “[60]disconnection” from anyone deemed antagonistic
  toward the religion.

  “My research suggests that two in three individuals have used the
  silent treatment against someone else; even more have had it done to
  them,” Williams said. Experts told me that although they need more data
  to know for certain, instances of the silent treatment have likely
  increased over the years as new forms of communication have been
  [61]invented. “Every new method of connection can be used as a form of
  disconnection,” Williams said.

  Ostracism can also manifest in lesser ways: someone walking out of the
  room in the middle of a conversation, a friend at school looking the
  other way when you wave at them, or a person addressing comments from
  everyone in a message thread except you. “Partial ostracism,” Williams
  told me, might mean monosyllabic replies—a terse period at the end of a
  one-word text message. But in serious cases, ostracism can take a heavy
  toll whereby victims become anxious, withdrawn, depressed, or even
  suicidal.

  “Because we humans require social contact for our mental health, the
  ramifications of isolation can be severe,” Joel Cooper, a psychology
  professor at Princeton, told me. “In the short term, the silent
  treatment causes stress. In the long term, the stress can be considered
  abuse.”

  [62]Read: The particular cruelty of domestic violence

  Although a perpetrator might use the silent treatment in many different
  scenarios, this is what every scenario has in common: “People use the
  silent treatment because they can get away with it without looking
  abusive to others,” Williams explained, “and because it’s highly
  effective in making the targeted individual feel bad.”

  The silent treatment is a particularly insidious form of abuse because
  it might force the victim to reconcile with the perpetrator in an
  effort to end the behavior, even if the victim doesn’t know why they’re
  apologizing. “It’s especially controlling because it deprives both
  sides from weighing in,” Williams said. “One person does it to the
  other person, and that person can’t do anything about it.”

  The silent treatment might be employed by passive personality types to
  avoid conflict and confrontation, while strong personality types use it
  to punish or control. Some people may not even consciously choose it at
  all. “A person may be flooded with feelings they can’t put into words,
  so they just shut down,” Anne Fishel, the director of the Family and
  Couples Therapy Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me. But
  regardless of the reason for the silent treatment, it can be received
  by victims as ostracism.

  [63]One study found that social rejection provoked a response in its
  victims similar to that of victims of physical abuse; the anterior
  cingulate cortex area of the brain—the area thought to interpret
  emotion and pain—was active in both instances. “Exclusion and rejection
  literally hurt,” John Bargh, a psychology professor at Yale, told me.

  But the silent treatment ultimately harms the person causing it, too.
  Humans are predisposed to reciprocate social cues, so ignoring someone
  goes against our nature, Williams said. The perpetrator is therefore
  forced to justify the behavior in order to keep doing it; they keep in
  mind all the reasons they’re choosing to ignore someone. “You end up
  living in a constant state of anger and negativity,” Williams said.

  Worse, the silent treatment can become addictive. The father who
  couldn’t force himself to speak to his son again suffered the way many
  addicts suffer—through repeating an activity despite knowing its harm.
  “Most people who start giving the silent treatment never intend for it
  to go on for as long as it does, but it can be very difficult to stop,”
  Williams told me. “It’s psychological quicksand.”

  [64]Read: How it became normal to ignore texts and emails

  The silent treatment is different from simply cooling off in the midst
  of a heated debate. One way to prevent a conflict from curdling into
  ostracism is to say out loud the exact amount of time you’ll be taking
  a break and to establish a timeline for when you’ll pick the
  conversation back up, Williams said. In some circumstances, it’s okay
  for unhealthy relationships to end abruptly, without notice, and with
  no expectation to resume—such as when a spouse or partner is physically
  abusive.

  But when someone is using the silent treatment to exclude, punish, or
  control, the victim should tell the perpetrator that they wish to
  resolve the issue. To “voice the pain of being ignored” is a
  constructive way of expressing one’s feelings, and may elicit a change
  if the relationship is truly founded on care, Margaret Clark, a
  psychology professor at Yale, told me in an email. Although a victim of
  ostracism should certainly apologize if they’ve done something hurtful,
  Fishel said, “it’s time to call a couple’s therapist” if your spouse
  uses the silent treatment tactically and often. “One of the worst
  feelings in an intimate relationship is to feel ignored,” she said. “It
  often feels better to engage in a conflict than to feel shut out
  completely.”

  If the perpetrator still refuses to acknowledge the victim’s existence
  for long periods of time, it might be right to leave the relationship.
  In the end, whether it lasts four hours or four decades, the silent
  treatment says more about the person doing it than it does about the
  person receiving it.

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