Silent treatment

So I'll give you guys an example.

You may have had an argument with the narcissist and they ran into a silent treatment.

You're dealing with a covert narcissist.

They run into a silent treatment and they, they're not talking to you for a very long time, and then they come back, they contact you, and they don't even bring up the argument.

All right? Why? Because they know they're guilty.

They know that what they did was wrong.

By going into a silent treatment, they were emotionally trying to abuse you.

All right? The silent treatment is punishment.

All right? You-- Now you're afraid to even speak up.

So they do all this, and of course, they do the silent treatment.

All right? The silent treatment is to punish you.

Most of the time, they give you the silent treatment because they're gonna punish you for something you said or something y-you did, right? They're angry about something.

The silent treatment is a form of passive aggression.

Somebody said, "Can you please explain this?" A- And that's exactly what it is.

What they're doing is training you to never, ever open your mouth to them about something that they don't wanna hear.

So they just automatically run into the silent treatment.

And so when that's going on, your brain is offline.

You are in full fight, flight, freeze, fawn of, "How do I survive this situation?" So that fawning might be some of that people-pleasing that we were talking about, of, "Hey, let me take care of you so that I feel safe, so that you don't attack me." So that stonewalling, the emotional flooding could be, it might look like silent treatment, but it's typically, "I am just not in a head space, deer in headlights.

I've got nothing going on.

I'm just surviving this moment."

Absolutely

... feel like getting out of that situation.

In my first marriage, I got the silent treatment a lot as a way to punish me.

Okay.