The silent treatment goes by many names: shunning, social isolation, stonewalling, ghosting. As I listened, the question that lingered most was How could these people do this to those closest to them? Each story that Williams, a psychology professor at Purdue University, told me was more heartbreaking than the one before. “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.’”Ī teacher.
Forty years of eating meals by herself, watching television by herself-40 years of being invisible. “She endured four decades of silence that started with a minor disagreement and only ended when her husband died,” Williams said.
“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.Ī wife whose husband severed communication with her early in their marriage.
“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.”Ī father who stopped talking to his teenage son and couldn’t start again, despite the harm he knew he was causing. “Her father died during one of those dreaded periods,” Williams told me. Kipling Williams has studied the effects of the silent treatment for more than 36 years, meeting hundreds of victims and perpetrators in the process:Ī grown woman whose father refused to speak with her for six months at a time as punishment throughout her life.
0 kommentar(er)
