Communication is one of the most important aspects of a healthy relationship, yet the ‘silent treatment’ is something people do without considering the destructive results.
Let’s examine what happens when one is ignored.
Everyone wants and needs to be recognized. Being treated with silence, facing your partner’s back, or being looked straight in the eye, plunges a knife into the deepest part of our soul, the part that needs to connect, the main reason for being in a relationship.
The greatest need of a human being is companionship. Feelings of rejection in the face of silence can generate a deep sense of pain that we must face or ignore. Either way, both people suffer in the short and long term.
The silent treatment is intentionally causing your partner pain at the deepest level. It’s just evil and a knife that cuts them both.
There are two emotional reactions we can have to silence. The first is the most obvious, frustration, which can turn into anger. There is nothing more irritating than talking to someone who ignores you or doesn’t respond, especially when looking directly at you.
Everyone knows it, and that’s what makes it even more infuriating. When one gets angry and the other is silent, the anger grows because your pain is giving even more pleasure to the silent one. That’s a snowball rolling into an avalanche.
The next stage can go in one of two directions. The explosion of this bomb leads to a break or a retaliation of silence. The last one is the most dangerous, because to do that, basically ignoring the silent treatment, requires a total shutdown of your emotions.
When you close off all of your feelings from the maddening pain, those closed windows and doors in your heart may not open again for your partner for a long time, if ever. Love dies for that person.
It’s the only way to deal with the pain of frustration. If you watch yourself when you submit to silence, you can feel the pain in your head, in your brain, in your whole body, building up the urge to explode. Or, you may feel totally numb.
It could come out violently, making you want to hit something, and dangerously, hit your partner or child. But before you feel horrible about that thought, which of course you should feel, you should keep in mind that a human being is part animal and that when emotions take over you, all common sense and ‘humanity’ can be overwhelmed.
Of course, if you are a decent person and you feel the need to hit something, you would never hit another person, but that pain must be released or stifled. Either way, a very bad result.
It is clear, the ‘silent treatment’ guarantees mutual annihilation, in this case, love and emotions are the victims.
Communication is at the core of a healthy and loving relationship. Silence is the polar opposite and, as we all know, destroying is much faster and easier than building.
Don’t waste your life and your love, and all the time it takes to build love on a childish moment when you deliberately exclude the person you love. That guarantees the end, if not today, then definitely in time.