Biding one’s time during silent treatment

[2020]

I am in the midst of another silent episode. I had been staying with my partner from the 20th to the 25th of April. The day after I returned home I noticed she was feeling down by the tone of her messages. I had returned home to care for my son and take him to his therapy appointment. I had not even been home a full 24 hours and she was asking “When are you coming back? The retard appointment is over… which does nothing!” I told her, as I previously said, I will return on Friday. This was not good enough for her. She said I should not return until Sunday. I asked why and she said she is going to stay with her sister. She then sent me these concert tickets she bought for us for June and told me to go with my kids.

Today is now 3 days since the start of this current episode. What I am trying to do is NOT do what I normally do. I sent her a message the evening of the incident asking if she is around. Then after no reply I sent her another message asking if she had gone to bed. An hour later I tried to call her but no answer so I typed “goodnight”.

The next day I asked if she would like to talk to me about this? I tried calling her. No reply. So I then sent a message asking her to contact me when she is ready. Since then I have heard nothing. I have not called her or messaged her nor emailed her. I have just been biding my time… reading BPDFamily many hours a day.

I am just wondering why this happened. We had a better than average time together. It was my birthday and she was very nice to me. I suspect there is some correlation between a really great time and the flipside after the event. I know she doesn’t like me leaving. I have a complicated situation with my autistic son and he really needs time with me. I also want to spend time with him, more to the point. It is rather frustrating. If everyone could just calm down and find a middleground, life could be so much better for all concerned.

So my question is: Am I doing the right thing here? Waiting for her to come to me? I am determined this time, NOT to keep banging on her locked doors. What will the outcome of this be? Will she think I don’t care? Will it make her feel more abandoned? And what about me? I am having those waves of physical sickness from worry. I don’t know where she is for sure, or if she will ever be back. You know, it is difficuly being involved with someone not knowing when it will all be over just like that. Experience is telling me she will get back in touch. She’ll probably act like nothing has happened or give me a weak “sorry”.

I really feel I need to try manage these situations differently. I guess I am asking for some suggestions here. I just sit and wait, right? And occupy myself with other things as best I can…

Thanks

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[Chercher]

Hi 2020, your post about how to handle your partner’s silent treatment really resonated with me. I understand how infuriating it feels and I am sorry that you are experiencing this very painful silent treatment from your partner.

Setting limits is very challenging and feels painful too because you are trying to ultimately change the dynamic in your relationship by letting your partner know what behaviors you are willing to tolerate . You can’t control your partner’s behavior, just how you choose how to respond to her behavior.  

Based on everything I’ve read, setting limits are key, which is what you are doing for yourself. They are a way to help you feel some control over what you are and are not willing to tolerate. And they are intended to have some effect on having your partner face her own behaviors on some level.

Highly recommend reading “The High Conflict Couple” which will help you understand many of the conflict cycles you might be experiencing. This book will provide DBT strategies and tools and never uses the label “BPD” which makes the book more accessible if your partner ever were open to trying to work on some of these conflict cycles you both experience together.

The part I struggle with is how to set limits without causing further escalation and making things worse. Finding the balance between setting limits and validating my husband’s hurt has been very tricky for me. People with BPD need a lot of validating of their hurt and feelings. This is something a lot of the books regarding BPD talk about. A DBT therapist highly recommended reading “How to Love Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder”.

I am starting to understand that sometimes setting limits will escalate our partners’ emotional state and will make things worse at first, but that if we can tolerate that resulting escalation or distress, then we are in some way getting our partners to have to face their behaviors and perhaps some of their behaviors will change. We are holding them accountable and remaining more whole in the process by not allowing them to walk all over us or mistreat us.

Kells provided me in my post about silent treatment and ultimatums some helpful tips about not feeling like we have to constantly chase our partners for interaction or communication. So the idea is “communicate your desire to talk with your partner, put the ball in her court as to when she wants to do that, and then distract yourself with going about your day, taking care of whatever needs taking care of, and doing things you enjoy doing. This will help you feel stronger and less helpless.

Take care, and hang in there.

[2020]

Thank you for your thoughful reply Chercher. I really appreciate it.

Coming up to 3am where I am right now and still no contact from her. I have sent no messages or tried calling her either, so I guess somehow I am holding up ok. After 15 years of knowing her, I should be a veteran at this. I am just trying to change the recipe at my end.

I suppose tomorrow, after I get some sleep, I could send a simple message along the lines of, “just seeing how you are… message me if you’d like to talk”. I’ll have to think about this. One the one hand I don’t want to buckle in. She ought to contact me. On the other hand, part of me doesn’t want her to think I don’t care. Maybe she thinks this already?

I bought the High Conflict Couple in 2019? I had read about it here. So I took it camping with us and the first night I read to us and she said she enjoyed it. Second night, if I remember correctly, it ended up with the old magazines at the campsite composting toilets. Alcohol might not have helped. I rescued it and put it in my backpack. The funny thing is, every time I visit her, it is there in the back pocket. Maybe I should finish reading it tomorrow. Did you get through the entire book with your husband? What was his response? I must say, reading your posts, you appear to be better at setting boundaries than I am!

[Amina]

Hi, this behavior sounds like textbook BPD or emotionally unstable personality.  I have been with my partner for 3.5 years, and your description is very similar with different details. I have so many of these ignoring behaviors I could share, but a similar one is giving me a train ticket to visit him at his parent's house, and then weeks later telling me to tear the ticket up.   No matter how much I have studied and read about BPD, I am still intellectually astounded at the behavior patterns matching and utterly resembling all the case-studies I've read in books,  and the posts here. There is truly, truly something different with their brains and I know that's hard to remember as the more logical one in the relationship.  I've started trying to use LEAP with my partner, and it is very difficult, and definitely takes some practice and skill. 

[Chercher]

Hi 2020:

To answer your question about getting through “The High Conflict Couple” with my husband. No, we have not read the entire book together. We probably made it through the first 3 chapters together, but it has been very helpful at times for us and especially for me. I have read the entire book and often borrow the audiobook from our public library. It has especially helped us after big conflicts once things have returned to a better calmer place.

Since my husband has been resistant to couple therapy, I found that it was a good way for us to take a look at some of our cycles and work towards figuring out how to find more peace, love, validation and connection in our marriage.

Similar to your partner, my husband was extremely receptive to the book  at first, but it was always me looking to read through it together. I was the one having to initiate it. He would maybe sit down to read it with me on 4 different occasions after a big conflict. But, for me , this has been one of the more helpful books I’ve read, so you might find it helpful too.

Something that also works for me is to keep a log of my husband’s behaviors during our conflicts as well as how I am responding to these different behaviors. Once you start to observe the very common patterns repeat over and over, the predictability of those patterns will start allowing you not to personalize the hurt that she is causing you as much. You may start to even be more aware and mindful of your own responses to her different behaviors.  And that is important because as much as we wish we could get our partners’ behaviors to change, we just can’t. This part is still hard for me personally.  But it is true that we have a lot of power and control in deciding how we want to respond to our partners’ behaviors. And it sounds like you are choosing to respond differently now to your partner’s behaviors.

One thing I have been doing for myself lately is, after we have a conflict, writing down how equilibrium is eventually restored, what was said or done prior to allow for a reconnection.  This has been helpful for when there is a new conflict, to have something to go back to in order to remind myself of the patterns, to remind myself of how things eventually allowed for a reconnection.

Firm limit setting mixed in with validation statements like “I understand you are feeling hurt, and I am here to talk about it when you are feeling ready” might help your partner know that you are not abandoning her. The mistake I make here is feeling the need to repeat this too many times. So it is something I am working on too. Not easy, but I am really trying to distract myself away from it by doing things I enjoy doing and sometimes by putting more energy into work or other areas of my life. So that might be helpful for you too. Self-care is huge.

Take care.

[2020]

Thank you both for sharing.

There has been an escalation of the destruction of objects in recent months. In the following days I either notice regret and perhaps remorse from her for doing so, or her justifying her actions in some way, saying the object was  anyway! It is regrettable because we lost everything we owned in a flood a year ago. Trying to crawl back and repurchase things is really difficult; extra difficult when things are getting smashed up on a regular basis.

These relationships are a lot of work! I am starting to wonder what I am even getting out of it. I rarely feel appreciated. I drive huge distances to see her every few days and stay as long as I can. I always bring gifts; flowers, chocolates, dinner, potted plants. I repair things for her. Shoes, electrical appliances. It is like none of this even registers most of the time.

I woke up today and after a coffee I decided I would call her. She didn’t answer. I sent a text message: “I understand you are feeling hurt, and I am here to talk about it when you are feeling ready.” I don’t know what else I can do now. I guess I will just have to wait. It would not be so bad if she were stable. In the back of my mind I think she may be dead. A couple of years ago I found her on the bed in a pool of blood with what seriously looked like someone had tried to hack her arm off. I just can’t even think about that.

I can’t do much more today. She may have gone to stay with her sister, who knows. Perhaps her phone is at home? I am pretty sure if she wanted to speak with me, she would. I am not even sure what I have done wrong, in her eyes. I really need to not let this get me down. Experience has shown me these cycles come and go. Sometimes they last for months with no contact. I just wish it didn’t make me so ill.

[2020]

That last message I sent seemed to do the trick. The reply I received was “you don’t care about me. Never have. Talk about what?” I offered to ring her if she was wanting to talk and she told me to do what I want, so I did. I called her and clearly she wasn’t up to even light talk and was very rude. She hung up on me.

There was a bit of back and forth via messages until 3am. I tried to keep the discussion on topic and within the confines of the past week. She wanted to talk about ten years ago. I told her I would ring her today.

Looking back on her messages today is making me think that silence from her needs to be reframed in my head as a blessing. She can be so rude and cruel. Some of her sentences sound like a 3 year old trying to swear. I wonder if she can help herself? It is like she has no idea where these feelings are coming from, so lashes out and blames everyone else, mainly me, as well as my sons and her son’s girlfriend. I’m glad I wasn’t there last night. No doubt she will be in bed hung over today.

I think the answer is us. Surely it is easier to change the way we (re)act, than to change them?