This is a great article on the Silent Treatment and Borderline Personality Disorder
This is a great article on the Silent Treatment and Borderline Personality Disorder
I have recently come to the conclusion that my Narc is a male Borderline and this article confirmed it. This is him to a tee! He is definitely the Cassanova type who is alway the victim.
Borderline Personality - The Quiet Acting In Borderline and The Silent Treatment - Nons
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) has two distinct dysfunctional relational styles. The "acting-in" style of many with BPD is known as the quiet borderline. The result of relational style of the quiet borderline often culminates in the silent treatment. The best known and recognized style of many with BPD is that of the "acting out" or raging borderline.
A key thing to note about these two primary relational styles of presentation within Borderline Personality Disorder is that both the quiet borderline and the raging borderline are often experiencing similar aspects of borderline pathology. The only difference between these two relational styles or groups is the method of manifestation of the borderline traits. One style acts in the pathology of BPD and the other acts it out. Both are experiencing the same underlying issues and have the same abandonment issues coupled with emotional dysregulation and an inability to cope with that dysregulation, to soothe it, and to take and hold personal responsibility for it.
There is much more written about the raging borderline relational style. However for both the raging acting out borderline and the quiet borderline - the acting in borderline at the centre of their rage is feeling/perceiving or fearing abandonment, feeling/perceiving invalidation. The acting out borderline whose needs are thwarted or who doesn't get his or her own way aggressively and often abusively yells, name calls, and screams about how they feel and what they feel others have done to cause how they feel. While the quiet borderline, the acting in borderline, will give you an aloof stone-cold silence when he or she is enraged.
The stone-cold silence of the quite acting in borderline is often also used whenever a non borderline really wants and needs to talk, set boundaries, get some input about what is really going on in a relationship from the borderline. This silence is an abdication of personal responsibility.
Borderlines, whether they are quiet acting in borderline or raging acting out borderlines, often experience what they are actually feeling and/or doing as coming from the other person in an interaction because they essentially are living through other in the absence of a known self.
The "acting-in" borderline, when he or she experiences rage, is frustrated, experiences the thwarting of his or her needs, or simply doesn't get what he or she wants, more often than not passively-aggressively uses the silent treatment as a means of defense through avoidance and also as a form of punishment.
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It's big among cerebrals too...
This is my Narc to a tee!
SOI
Being ignored by one's teacher