Emotional withholding is the least specific and talked about type of abuse, but nonetheless it can be extremely painful and emotionally damaging.

recognition:

I was holding on to you. When I wrote The Seven Deadly Signs of a Dysfunctional Relationship, I left out Part Eight: Emotional Restriction. One reader pointed this out in a heartbreaking comment. Sarah wrote:

What this discussion is missing is the kind of dysfunction that isn’t overpowering but quietly sucks at your integrity and self-esteem because there are no fights or fireworks. This is a negative death-dissatisfaction relationship where every dissatisfaction you express is completely ignored or is casually dismissed. Not with a bang but with a nag.

Wonderful. right? In my response to Sarah’s comment, I directed her to a post I made on my blog a while ago about emotional blocking.

It starts like this:

If you’ve ever lived with a dysfunctional partner, chances are you’ve experienced this.

Cold replaces warmth.

Silence replaces speech.

Turning away replaces turning towards.

Rejection replaces acceptance.

Contempt replaces respect.

I think emotional blocking is the hardest tactic to deal with when trying to create and maintain a healthy relationship because it plays on our deepest fears—rejection, unworthiness, shame, guilt, worry that we’ve done something wrong, failed, or even worse, that there’s something wrong with us.

Related: 5 Things People Say To Justify Staying In A Toxic Relationship

You’re locked in a meat freezer with upside down cow and pig carcasses, shivering, as your partner casually steps away from the giant steel door.

You feel so lonely, even though the person who could comfort you by sharing one kind word is there, in front of you at the dinner table, sitting next to you at the movie, or in the same bed with you, deaf to your words, blind to your suffering, and if You dare extend your hand, I despise your touch.

When you talk, you might as well be talking to the wall, because you won’t get an answer, except maybe, if you’re lucky, you shrug. And the more you talk about anything that matters to you, the more you try to emphasize that you matter, the more likely your reserved partner will ignore or ignore what you’re saying and leave you out in the cold.

Horrible but true – you actually wish for a fight, the fireworks Sarah pointed out don’t flash, because even a shouting match, and an ugly spectacle, might involve an exchange of words because even a physical struggle might constitute physical contact, because fire, even if it burns you is better of snow.

Imagine saying something three, four, or even five times to your partner and not getting any response. Or maybe you get a necrosis.

You ask yourself, am I here?

Do I mean something to this person?

do i care do i even exist If you were crying alone on the polar ice cap of emotional blocking, and there was no one to hear you, would you really have made a sound?

Your achievements go unacknowledged, your contributions unmentioned, your presence at best grudgingly acknowledged, and any effort to bridge the gap ignored. The rope you throw over the rift comes back to you, swaying in the winter winds.

You become pathetic — begging, begging, literally on your knees, apologizing for everything, offering you hateful things, promising to be better, just to re-secure your partner’s affection.

But you are like a dying Eskimo, wrapped in sealskin and set on an ice floe to float away in the greatest beyond. You just shout, “I’m not dying! I’m not sick! I’m healthy!” As your partner’s silence says the words, “You’re dead to me.” And death, death enters your consciousness as a choice. Death begins to feel like a viable alternative, a way to alleviate unbearable pain.

Withholding feelings is usually a reaction to your attempt to stand up for yourself, to assert your rights in a relationship.

And perhaps the deeper pain comes from your partner’s insistence that you deserve to be treated this way, that you deserve to be punished, and to paraphrase my old post, your partner’s ridiculous argument that if you just give up on your ridiculous idea of having a healthy liaison between equal partners and re-submitting to emotional domination and abuse Care, compassion, connection, connection, warmth and love will return.

And they can — for five minutes, five hours, or even five days — until you assert yourself again.

The truth is that care, compassion, connection, connection, warmth, and love should never be conditional and never intentionally withheld, unless the relationship is already over and you need to draw boundaries to establish your new life and maintain your own mental health.

Withholding these things within a relationship is abuse, a type of emotional blackmail, not unlike the other kind that threatens to hurt you where you are more vulnerable if you don’t comply with your partner’s wants or needs. But the harder you work toward creating a healthy relationship, the more your dysfunctional partner will refrain from the very things on which the health of the relationship depends.

This is how your relationship becomes the “passive relationship of death” Sarah mentions, feeling empty instead of full, hollow instead of sacred, sunk under the weight of contempt and silence instead of the upliftment of love.

Related: 5 Reasons Not To Start A Relationship With A Narcissist

recognition:

When your partner abstains from it, after a while you give in and start doing it too. This creates a death spiral in which both partners abandon the relationship, plunge into siege mode behind their castle walls, try to starve each other until someone gives in, and crawl forward with dry throats on their shriveled limbs, begging for a sip. of water and scraps of food.

There is only one way to effectively deal with a partner who abstains from you, and that is: You must make it clear that the relationship is over, for good, if your partner does not begin to acknowledge and connect with you. This is the only tactic that has a chance of working because the detained partner doesn’t actually want to end the relationship. Your executioner derives much satisfaction from being punished and seeing you suffer.

Why you might want to stay with Sadie is your own business, but if you want to try and save him, you have to threaten to leave and be willing to follow through on your word if things don’t improve quickly. And if they get better, insist that you get out the door if it happens again.