To Ghost or Not to Ghost
Ghosting is a power and control tactic that rebalances the autonomy in a relationship. Someone “ghosts” another person and suddenly they feel they have more freedom, room to breathe, and boundaries where they are not needing to respond to another person’s request at any given moment. There can be both benefits and also harmful impacts of ghosting.
The benefits of ghosting are clear for the “ghoster.” They feel in charge, they can decide when they want to engage or disengage from someone, a conversation, or from a relationship completely. They are taking back a sense of autonomy and basically sending a message that they are going to choose when they want to communicate with you. They may be busy, they may be forgetful, or they may be playing a basic power game. One that says, “I can choose when I want to talk to you.”
Even when ghosting happens at a subconscious level, it can be very harmful for the recipient, or the “ghosted.” Here’s why. At the basic root of the psychological impact of ghosting, you are depriving someone of acknowledgement as a human being. And unless someone is being overly demanding or pushy, most people deserve to feel recognized and valued. When someone feels the impact of being ghosted, the ghoster can easily say they forgot to respond, or were busy, and therefore gaslight the recipient into feeling bad about complaining about the ghosting in the first place.
Another thing that is often reinforced by ghosting is patterned avoidance. It is becoming easy to avoid tough conversations, reconciliations, and assertiveness communication. All things that people used to have to work through. Someone can easily dodge a topic they don’t want to discuss by simply not responding. However, the other person is often left alone in the dark, unless the subject matter gets brought to the surface again.
With ghosting it is also easy to intermittently reinforce someone. This is another pattern of operant conditioning used in behavioral control tactics. This might look like, “I won’t respond to you the first couple of times you message me, but by the third time….I will respond right away.” Leaving you to feel that the first two ghosting were “all in your head.” This can be a powerful form of manipulation, or it could be that the person simply forgot to respond after the previous messages.
In some cases, ghosting may be necessary, as when harmful abuse or stalking has occurred. But in most cases, ghosting is simply reinforced patterned avoidance, or a subconscious form of power and control.
Please feel free to respond with any comments or agree to disagree with my article.
