There has been such a great response to my post Games People Play, I thought I would expand on it. So let’s explore The Silent Treatment. I am an expert at this one!

There are many silly little games we play with our lovers, friends and family and this one is a classic. Rules of the game are as follows:

1. Someone pisses you off so you withhold all forms of verbal communication .

2. You may communicate your anger and crankiness with disapproving looks, scowls, and snarly facial gestures.

3. You many not break the silence until you feel the receiver has suffered enough from the painful absence of your sweet voice and loving nature. Very important rule!

4. When you do break your silence, it is with full volume and speed. All that pent-up anger is allowed to come out with the force of a hurricane. Don’t hold anything back.

5. Accept apologies and allow the receiver to kiss your butt.

Isn’t this the rules of The Silent Treatment game? Yeah, whatever…

As I said, I am an expert at this game. I was trained by one of the best…my Mom! She would get angry over something and not talk for days. In the mean while, we would try and figure out what she was upset about. When we thought we had a hit we would ask her. She would just stare us down, toss her head and walk away.

I remember one particular time, Mom had not spoken to Dad or me in over 5 days. It was getting to be a bit silly. Dad and I were trying to figure out what she was angry over and we started to laugh. THEN Mom was really cranky. But at least she started talking to us. Alas, this was not the first or the last time we played this game.

Being a product of your environment, I too played The Silent Treatment game. With my family, friends and with Ole. That first year of marriage was such a great learning tool in so many ways. But it was the hardest year we spent together.

I have said in the past when you are angry to walk away and come back in 20 minutes or an hour when you have calmed down. Then you can talk more rationally and not out of anger. That is not the Silent Treatment. That is defusing a bomb and marriage management.

Nothing is solved when you don’t talk. What happens is there is distance created between you and the other person. If left long enough, this distance becomes greater and more difficult to cross over. Then you are left alone and hurt and still angry.

But the answers come when you can talk about what is troubling you in a calm manner. Absolutely the anger can still be there when you talk but by allowing yourself time to be still inside, you can communicate better about the problem.

I am the youngest and my sister is 16 years older than me with 5 boys in-between us. I loved our family. Well I still do but I miss having a family. We had so much fun together and when the grand kids started coming, it was wonderful.

I don’t know what happened. It has been so many YEARS since one has spoken to another and so on and so on. I keep asking my family to have an intervention. Yes, it has come to that. But they won’t have any part of it. How sad is that? The Silent Treatment game has produced a riff the size of the Grand Canyon in my family.

Is it my Mom’s fault? No! I am sure she learned to communicate this way from someone else. And, as with the rest of my family, they have never explored other ways to express their anger and problems. The Silent Treatment is their game of choice. They have gotten used to the pain and learned to live within its boundaries.

What I was very grateful for was that I woke up and realized that it is not a useful game to play with my husband or anyone else for that matter. It solved nothing. It only added to the problem and created a chasm between us.

I thank the heavens that I/we overcame playing such a stupid game. I have never in my life been so close to another person. There were times when we would hug that Ole and I could literally feel our bodies melting into each others and we were one entity.

THAT WAS THE MOST INCREDIBLE FEELING!

Do you think we would have experienced this if I would have continued to play The Silent Treatment game? I think not.

“When you talk, you get understanding and understanding is peace. When you don’t talk, you get misunderstanding and misunderstanding is fear.”         - Ole Poulsen 1973-2006

Keep your lines of communication open and clear. The connection you will have with your lover, friends and family will be such a reward.

Then you really will have won the game.

Passionate regards….Brenda

I have had so many comments to the post Games People Play. Thanks for taking the time to read my posts and comment on them. I am so happy that our marriage, love and ideas are helping other people find the love of their dreams.

What worries me is that there must be many people playing stupid games with their lovers. Why? What does this accomplish?

Are we really programmed to look for the negative in our lives? Do we believe someplace under our surface thoughts that our loving relationship will never last? That all good things must come to an end? Then we do something to screw it up to make sure we were right in believing that?

And of course, the destruction of our relationship is not due to any actions on our part. It is ALWAYS someone’s  fault other than our own that our love life fell apart (my heart is hurting just writing this).

Why can’t we look for the good in what we have? Ole and I held a couples seminar and one woman told us that she gets suspicious of her husband when he brings flowers home. She wonders if he has been out with another woman, something to hide, or make up for. YIKES!

I think it’s sad that her first thought wasn’t, “How sweet! You are so loving and kind to think of me.” Nope! Jump to the negative first. What a shame and possibly a waste of precious time because this will surely end up in a ‘discussion’.

We can retrain ourselves though. That is a fact. We can begin to focus on the good in our lives and our relationships. This is especially true for times when your mind wants to take you on the slanted slopes of mental slavery into the negative.

Ole and I had a book beside the bed.  Every night we would write in 3 to 5 things we were grateful for about each other. I was and still am always grateful for his love. We retrained our thinking patterns to look for the positive in our lives.

Eventually we found that we would only use it if we had been arguing because when you are upset and angry it is absolutely important to acknowledge the things you love about your partner. It is imperative to know that you can be angry with each other but still love one another.

And when your mind wants to jump on the ski hill to negative slavery, STOP! Stop the thought immediately. Don’t even go there because then you start slipping and before you know it you are at the bottom of the hill and angry. About what? Your own assumptions, beliefs and ideas about what is going on. These dangerous thoughts do not help in the truth of the situation.

If you start looking for all the nasty things, you will not have the vision to see and experience all the wonderful, loving adventures in your relationship. OK…Do this RIGHT NOW! Look around your room and count all the things that are red. You have 10 seconds. Hurry! LOOK NOW!

How many things did you see that were green? When all you want to see and focus on are the red things, your mind can not pick up on the green that is surely right in front of you.

It is the same in our relationships. Look for the love. Feel the love. Take a pleasure cruise on the Love Boat your whole life and leave behind the slippery slopes of mental slavery into the negative ( I’m just having a little fun with the imagery ).

Look for the good things in your life and relationship. With every day that passes, comes new and wonderful adventures in our lives. Even in the midst of heavy and sad times there is always something good.

I don’t have my husband here with me now but I can sure remember the love and good times we had. That brings me a lot of happiness knowing that we had such an incredible relationship that others always noticed and commented on.

And I still have my girls…2 dogs and a cat. They make me smile every day.

Look for the good in your life. We have so much to be thankful for.

Passionate regards….Brenda