The Sunday News
Nhlalwenhle Ncube
SILENCE kills! The worst way to break a relationship is choosing to be on mute. When it comes to relationships, the silent treatment does the most damage and is a death sentence to romance.
I know there are some people who believe that silence is golden, but if you are one of the subscribers to this, be careful and know the times when this will work for you. It is not helpful all the time, sometimes it’s destructive. Not all silences are made equal. So whoever said silence is golden wasn’t at the receiving end of some ice-cold silent treatment from his or her partner.
In relationships, the silent treatment is when one attempts to express how upset or angry one is by cutting off communication with the other. It’s used often as it’s both powerful and easy to get away with. It may lead to a power struggle in the relationship where one partner may use it to control and manipulate the other, who may ultimately feel coerced into giving in to the demands of the one on mute. The behaviour that will break a relationship occurs when one partner criticises, complains, or demands constantly, causing the other partner to avoid, ignore and keep quiet. It’s the most common pattern of conflict in marriage or any committed, established romantic relationship and it does tremendous damage.
Failure in communication is one of the worst factors that break up healthy relationships, but the silent treatment also causes other emotional and physical harm. Because old habits die hard, breaking this pattern is also not easy to do. Partners get locked in this pattern, largely because they see each other as the cause.
Partners tend to blame the other as the problem, which causes further withdrawal. It does not matter who is demanding and who is withdrawing in the relationship. Regardless of the roles, the damage is severe.
But silence is insidious elsewhere too. It steps in between our friendships, trips us up with colleagues and even damages our family relationships. Relationships require that we invest ourselves, and if we can’t — or won’t — communicate, we can’t invest in the relationship.
The angry arguments don’t usually kill our relationships; the silences that stretch around them are the real killers. That kind of quiet is dangerous.
Silence as a game, as in the silent treatment, is passive aggressive and damaging to relationships. But silence as a coping mechanism is equally fatal for relationships, even when it’s motivated by self-preservation rather than manipulation. We don’t have to keep allowing quietness to be the silent killer of relationships. There’s a simple solution — even if it’s not always easy to do. Speaking up when you are in the kind of pain that shuts you down is never easy, but if you value the relationships at risk, you have to move past the pain and do it. To offer up an apology, admit to insecurities and open up on what didn’t go down well with you.
You need to communicate, especially in those moments when it’s the last thing you want to do.
Isolating yourself and shutting down won’t fix the problem. Trust me, the only thing that has any hope of helping is to speak up and talk with the people in your life about how you feel. Of course there is no guarantee they will listen, but anything has to be better than suffering in silence and hoping the problems will resolve themselves or disappear altogether. That’s not how problems work. And pain doesn’t disappear because you refuse to speak it into existence. That’s not how pain works either.
Being on mute is killing relationships. It’s not the comfortable silence stretching between two people comfortable in each other’s presence. It’s the silence of too much left unsaid. While you are busy trying to deal with your emotions, the silence is severing connections, relationships bleeding out. When on mute, you can’t get help for yourself or for the relationships. The relationship suffers. The atmosphere at home becomes unhappy and tense. It can lead to a disconnected, loveless relationship or sometimes even an extra-marital relationship by one or both of the partners. The dynamics of the silent treatment are such that both see the other as the problem; one partner typically complains of the other being emotionally unavailable, and the other partner, in turn, accuses his or her partner of being too demanding. The other partner may completely lose confidence, self-worth, and may have emotional outbursts. A partner may feel not understood, cared for and loved by the other. This can affect both and can greatly increase the chances of the relationship coming to an end.
Silent treatment abuse is a relationship killer, and that in a relationship, it causes the same sort of emotional damage as being physically beaten up.
