Murdering Without Feeling
Silence is golden. Or rather, it is a golden weapon when deployed by our kind. The use of silent treatment against our victims is a major part of our portfolio of abusive manipulations. Easy to implement, very low in terms of energy expended but capable of reaping such considerable rewards in terms of fuel, control, the assertion of superiority and the administration of power, it is little wonder that we use it regularly. The application of silence can be used virtually at any time and in nearly every situation.
This cold fury causes frustration, upset, fearfulness, concern, confusion and bewilderment. It is perfect at drawing fuel from our victims. It is astonishing just how it affects those it is used against, causing the emotional fuel to froth and spill from the perplexed and worried individual.
It causes anxiety and has a most unsettling effect which ensures that those who are subjected to it are unable to understand why it is being used. By maintaining a heightened emotional state, we ensure that you never manage to grasp what is happening and why this passive aggressive tactic is being used.
It plays to your desire to know what is happening and why, but you do not realise. You hover around us, asking what is wrong, why are you not speaking to me, what is the matter, please just talk to me. Every sentence you utter, ever plea you make and every beseeched demand just makes us continue it all the more.
In those instances, where the silent treatment is administered and we remain proximate to you, we will maintain a glacial mask. An impassive fixed expression which may be punctuated by the occasional baleful glare, but underneath this mask we are smiling and laughing at you.
Look at how upset she is, see the confusion in her eyes and wait for it, here comes another question, another plea, another request to be put out of her misery. How the fuel flows and we revel in what we see.
Even when the silent treatment is utilised against you from a distance and we are not physically with you, we are savouring just how you will be reacting. We can picture you frantically jabbing your ‘phone as you send text after text asking us to come home, to call you and just explain what the problem is.
We listen to your tear-infused voicemails as you ask us to just let you know that we are okay. Your sobbing promises to work things out and “whatever I have done, I am sorry, but please, please don’t do this to me.” Of course your failure to understand what you have done is used against you in two ways so that you are damned either way. Your admission that you do not know what you have done (which of course is entirely correct, how could you know what has happened when we just walked out of the living room when everybody was say quietly watching television?) just serves to underline, in our minds, that we are right to take this course of action.
Good Lord, why should we bother to contact you if you cannot even be bothered to work out what you have done wrong. All the more reason to keep this silence going for a while longer yet. Furthermore, because it is so effective at troubling you and keeping you guessing as to what the reason for this icy front is, we want to continue it.
The silent treatment is used for many reasons. First and foremost, as with all manipulations, it is used to draw fuel. It is to exert control over you. It is to keep you in an emotional place and thus paralysed, unable to see what is happening and unable to think clearly. It is to reinforce that we are powerful, superior and mighty, whilst you are useless and pathetic. You do not know how to please us, you do not know how to remedy matter and you cannot even work out what you have done. You are useless.
There is also a further reason why we use the silent treatment. This is our way of killing you. True enough there are those of our kind who actually do kill their victims. Those people are idiots. They lack control, function and competence and allow their knee-jerk response to override their need for fuel and the ability to do as we please.
By committing such an act, by losing control and killing, those of our kind who do this (invariably the lesser of our kind) not only destroy their primary source of fuel (often with no true contingency in place) but they then hand themselves on a plate to the authorities, a prison sentence and the attendance diminution in fuel gathering opportunities that arise from incarceration. As I wrote, they are idiots.
Those of us who exert control over our responses, those of us who are of a higher function, who plot and plan and calculate, do not go down such a route. No, instead we slay with silence and here are seventeen salvos which bring about that quiet death.
- Remaining in the room and saying nothing and not even acknowledging you.
- Remaining silent but staring malevolently at you.
- Talking to others in a social gathering but blanking you.
- Ignoring your telephone calls.
- Answering your telephone calls but saying nothing as we listen to you beg and plea before ending the call.
- Ignoring your text messages.
- Allowing you to know we have read your messages but never responding.
- Responding to everybody else’s comments on a social media post but not yours.
- Inviting everybody in a social group to which you belong, to an event, but not inviting you.
- Agreeing to meet for a date and not turn up.
- Sleeping in the spare room or on the sofa, anywhere but in the bed with you.
- Walking out all of a sudden and completely disappearing.
- Not engaging with you directly but acknowledging your existence through a third party – “John, did you hear something then? I thought I heard something squeak/whine/moan” used when you speak.
- Extending the silent treatment so it is meted out by lieutenants and members of the coterie.
- Responding to any written communication from you by writing “I do not recognise the sender of this letter/message/e-mail”
- We talk to you but only about our day, what we want to discuss and do not allow you to speak. We talk over you, ignore what you have to say and behave as if we are talking to ourselves in the mirror.
- You hear from other parties that we have been talking in terms as if you do not exist – “Yes, I am going to the wedding next week, I am happy to do so on my own, I am not being controlled then.” Even though you had no idea that we have such a plan in mind. Your existence has been eradicated and deleted by us and relayed back to you by proxy.
Yes, the application of the silent treatment is powerful indeed. It is regarded as a “death blow” against you.
Murdering without feeling has never been so damn appealing.
11 thoughts on “Murdering Without Feeling”
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To counter the silent treatment:
Ignore it and you will not fuel them.
Act as if you don’t even notice it, and be pleasant
and busy – to counter the game
Simply Know they are narcissists, and Know they don’t control you – key to dealing with them
Know they are the ones who have the inferiority complex and are trying to project it onto you
Ask them a question in front of others that they’re socially forced to answer nicely- do this just for your own amusement
If you want to tell them what you think of their silent treatment, then do it by talking to yourself out loud, by stating just a one liner – in a pleasant tone- that shames their silence in a mature and generic way (not directly aimed at them), and that brushes off their silence.
Brush off their silence and know it’s immature
Repeat to yourself, strongly, They don’t control me, I control myself.
Narcs Hate being Ignored too –
So give Them the silent treatment back – But
do it nicely and pleasantly – as if it’s Only because you’re so happy and busy you can’t even notice theirs- will counter the game and they will paint you white again in order to get your attention and will all of a sudden break their silence as if it never happened- until the next game anyway.
But really, it’s like being in a high school movie’s clique with grown up teenagers so –
Understand that you’re the adult in the room.
“Murdering without feeling has never been so damn appealing”…..
Yup, I can relate to that…..reminds me of ‘The Purge’ films…..hmmmm. Yet words can have ‘power’, it is just a matter of the right ones directed at the right people at the right time, eh, HG? I understand that even more now, especially after learning about your empath’s grenades, hmmm….Maybe, just maybe, Bonnie & Clyde had it ‘right’ 😉
The book that made this ‘acceptable’ was Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, in there he described men needing to go into their cave and that if we went in we would get burned by the dragon. I remember actually explaining this to my daughters, saying Daddy is like a dragon in there, don’t go in or he might breathe the fire out! He’ll come out when he’s ready. Often he would come out and only speak to them! Still giving me the silent treatment! Ughhhh….22 years!
Yes, HadEnough, I can so relate! So much bad information in that book, and in so many others like it also! I hope you are doing better now.
RE: ‘man cave’ (**the escape ‘room’), my father would have done this himself after a 9 hour ‘shift’ with the kids while muvver at office and that would have increased by another 2 hours after we moved homes. Doing this for around 8 years, effectively a ‘full’ job in itself. Some Aspies have a need to have a ‘break’ (to ‘switch off’) from distractions / noise. Hence his need to disappear into his den in evenings / nights – he was working in any case. So his ‘working’ days would have been longer than muvver’s. By the time he died, school days still freed up muvver to go out to work if she could be bothered (or ‘nursing’ hang-overs). Kudos to my dad.
**narcissists would ‘escape’ to do whatever they get up to behind closed doors ie further fuel sources via phone / computer etc, and also ‘become’ someone ‘else’, through their ‘facades’ and magical thinking to ‘escape’ what they are, with the majority of them not really knowing why, so in some way, they never really get to ‘escape’. Depending on the fuel sources quality and quantity, which can offer some degree of ‘escape’, yet the ‘unease’ is never completely “satisfied”.
Granted, there are possibly those who do not have Aspergers or narcissism that may also have an ‘escape room’.
Asp Emp, I think HG’s term for the “man cave” is “bolt hole”, my dad had one too. He was into computers, professionally, back in the 60s when they were new, we always had one in our home, from the time it was possible to have one.
I also always had an escape room, but my kids and ex were always permitted entry so it often became the social room, haha!
AV, I used ‘escape room’. HG used ‘bolt hole’. Same concept (well, it depends from what perception). Different words. My father created something unique and pioneering in his ‘escape room’. He was right. He used the word ‘robot’ instead of digital, before household appliances became digitalized. USA & UK were on different ‘times’ when it came to designing computers.
Every human, even children, need an ‘escape’ space, some need it more than others. It is not always about ‘control’ but giving someone the ‘power’ to ‘be’.
Oh, yes, I see, the different words, that’s all. I’ve heard “she shed” and “her spa” also, nowadays mine is just “my bedroom”, haha. It is my favorite place in the world. I hung up a hammock chair in here last spring, it is awesome.
It sounds like your dad was cool. We used ‘robot’ also, for some things, as a result of Lost In Space and the Jetsons.
Yes, the space to just be, that was all I wanted as a kid.
When we moved into the family home, sis and I shared a bedroom. Years later, after building work, we had separate bedrooms. Yet, that did not ‘solve’ the problem. It will always be ‘Star Wars’ for me.
I am sorry Asp Emp.
The new title rocks hahaha! HG, are you familiar with Yang Sanpaku eyes?