The Silent Treatment is a Form of Abuse

You declare war on your intuition and everything you know to be true. Once your identity has been sufficiently eroded, the psychopath can use this final technique without any chance that you’ll leave them. Instead, you will torture yourself, carrying out the remainder of the abuse for them.

They will leave you alone with your thoughts, planting subtle hints and suggestions over social networking to encourage your paranoia. You will run through everything you’ve done in the relationship, blaming yourself for your feelings & emotions. You will wake up in the middle of the night, heart racing as you hope for a text from them. Nothing. You log into Facebook and see them chatting away with friends and exes.

They’re not unavailable—they’re ignoring you.

You will be expected to understand that they cannot talk for days on end, despite texting you hourly at the beginning of the relationship. You may become passive-aggressive, drafting long emails about their changed behavior and complete lack of contact. You might even feel strongly enough to suggest a break, but you will never follow through with it for more than a few hours. You will think you can out-ignore them, remaining calm and collected like nothing is wrong. But they will always win this game. Because they do not need your attention—they have already found someone else.

The truth is, we serve an important purpose in narcissists’ lives (providing sex, love, attention, money, clothing, shelter, a job, food, or prestige, etc) — so much so that they do treat us well or with kindness and “love”… but it’s not the kind of love that lasts throughout the ages. It’s not the kind of love that makes dreams come true. Rather, it’s a fake love, one that they most likely don’t feel in the same way we do. We are satisfying a need for them.

And that is what makes it so difficult to believe they are cold-blooded planners!