The Dark Side of Ghosting That Nobody Talks About
You must prepare yourself for an emotional ambush years down the road.
It’s surprising how much abusive behavior we tolerate for the sake of maintaining a relationship. When you finally arrive at the decision to cut ties with somebody, it usually comes as a result of a “straw that breaks the camel’s back” moment.
When that happens, the two conflicting parties go their separate ways.
You might think that years down the road, it will be obvious who was right and who was wrong. But it’s a mistake to expect recognition from an adversary.
More likely, the person you ghosted will stew in their own misery. Decades later, they might be inclined to blame you for the mess they made of their lives. It’s important, as a part of the maturation process, to learn to protect yourself from unwarranted retaliation.
The separation
For me, the moment that ended my relationship with my dad came in an email exchange after my grandmother died. I had just started a new job, I was under a lot of stress, and my dad had been combative with my mom since the divorce. I wasn’t in the mood for the extreme effort it took to communicate with him.
The distance in our relationship had been steadily growing for years. The minimal contact that remained was via email. Every time I saw his name in my inbox, I felt sick to my stomach.
The email exchange that finally made me want to block him was no different than thousands of others that I’d endured without complaint. It’s just that at some point in your life you achieve an awareness that you’ll never be happy until you cut the anchor loose.
That email happened more than fifteen years ago. Since then I’ve achieved a very high level of peace and satisfaction in my life. Ghosting my dad was definitely the right choice. It’s sad that he made choices that resulted in creating a less than productive relationship, but I had nothing to do with that.
Unfortunately, he hasn’t used our time apart for growth or self-evaluation.
When you ghost somebody, you don’t banish them from the Earth. Instead, you leave them to their own devices. In some cases, those people spend their time in unreasonable anger conceiving of ways to sabotage your life.
We’ll see who is right in twenty years
It’s a hard thing to live with somebody and establish your own identity. It’s even harder when the person you’re living with has a controlling personality.
My dad is a lawyer, and that power discrepancy was enough to stop many arguments before they even developed.
What was I going to do? Hire legal counsel to get myself on even footing? I didn’t have the money for that.
For many years, I did everything I could to get through to him. I made every effort to lead him out of Hell, but he refused to follow. Looking back, I endured a lot more than anyone has a right to reasonably expect.
The simple reality is that family life didn’t make him happy. He didn’t enjoy his time with us. There was nothing I could have done to change that.
You can’t teach somebody to find happiness and satisfaction from the simple act of hugging their child or watching them succeed. My dad settled for finding amusement in the cheap laughs he earned by mocking us when we failed.
Trust your instincts
Arguing with him was a waste of time because his only objective was to maneuver you into a moment when you’d make a concession. Once he had a concession, he had you. Anything you’d agree on after that point was irrelevant because he wasn’t going to do it.
It was kind of a comical interaction when you think about it.
He’d say, “Let’s talk.”
Then he’d force you to admit something absurd. You did it just because he wore you down.
After a while, I started not wanting to talk to him. That led to him blaming me for refusing to communicate.
Eventually, I decided that I’d just live my own life. The world is confusing enough without sharing the presence of individuals who stubbornly insist on being disconnected from reality. Those people make you doubt your own perceptions.
Under the best of circumstances, it’s hard to have the self-confidence to do your own calculations and trust your result. It’s easier to simply go along with what everyone else believes.
But look around.
Everyone is broke.
Everyone is divorced.
Everyone is an alcoholic.
Everyone is miserable and they blame everything else in the world but themselves.
You’re better off trusting your own decisions.
Fifteen years later, my dad is divorced for the second time. I’m happily married with two beautiful daughters.
I look at the scenario and think, “See, doesn’t this prove that the things I tried to communicate to you all those years ago were right? Now, do you understand?”
But still, he refuses to recognize the part he played in his own destruction. He’s more likely to say, “It’s unfair that you’re happy and I’m miserable, obviously your happiness came as a result of sabotaging my life.”
His most recent tactics
My father’s family life is a mess. I have two siblings who I rarely talk to though I speak regularly with my mother.
There’s been tension forever since there was no time of healing after the divorce. My dad blames my mom for everything that’s ever gone wrong, and he refuses to tolerate any suggestion that it might be otherwise.
This is a condition of being around him.
My brother and sister were willing to accept this condition. Over time, our relationship went from strained to non-existent. These days, they’ve joined my dad in blaming my mom for everything that’s gone wrong in their lives.
It’s always possible to take facts and align them in a way that suits your preconceptions. My dad isn’t a stupid person. In fact, he’s probably too smart for his own good. The thing he lacks is the humility to recognize his faults, but he’s perfectly capable of aligning his version of the facts in a way that seems convincing to others.
The facts, as I see it, are that the family that he raised, the family that he presided over, is broken. People remain in pain. People don’t talk to each other. There’s not even a base level of respect or courtesy.
That’s a tragedy.
That’s a failure.
He can look at it and blame others, but that doesn’t change the reality that he was unable to right the sinking ship. He couldn’t fix it. I’m not sure he ever even tried.
At some point in life, mature people begin to recognize that it doesn’t matter who was wrong. The only thing that matters is to stop the suffering of the people you love.
Better yet, you prevent them from ever suffering in the first place.
The thing they don’t tell you about ghosting
When I decided to cut ties with my dad, my ambitions were simple. I wanted 10 years of peace. I wanted 10 years to build the life I thought might be possible. I just wanted to be left alone to pursue happiness my way.
Now, more than 10 years have passed and I’ve succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. My life now is the tangible reality of what I advocated for, and could never get, when I was powerless.
But now I find that the fear I used to feel about never getting the life I wanted, has been replaced with the fear of losing that life now that I have it.
My eldest daughter is 11. She’ll be a teenager soon. Things are about to get complicated.
It’s true when they say it takes a community to raise a child. Over the next few years, I’m likely to have conflicts with my daughter. As a good parent, you should have conflicts with your children. Healthy conflicts. You have to tell them when they’re taking risks that are too big.
My fear now is that my father, who has never shown any interest in my kids, will try to swoop in and take advantage of those tough high school years. It’s easy for an irresponsible individual to misrepresent a good person as a villain.
He’s used this tactic before.
Growing up, he was the absent parent who showed up for a weekend every six months bearing gifts. “Oh, mom is the cause of all your problems,” he used to say to my brother and sister.
And there was my mom, working hard to provide the day-to-day necessities of life. Working hard to teach some valuable lessons. Among those lessons was accountability.
Kids don’t like that lesson.
It’s super easy to be the good time guy.
It’s nearly impossible to be a responsible parent when the good time guy comes along to undo all your hard work whenever you least expect it.
The festering malice
Sometimes ghosting people is the only choice they give you. Sometimes people are so toxic that you have to get away from them. Sometimes they don’t respect boundaries to the point where you have to put oceans and deserts in between you and them.
Left to their own devices, these people have the opportunity to embrace a productive path. They make the choice whether or not they’re going to be a positive or negative influence.
Their life is a result of their choices, not yours.
But the thing you have to be mindful of is that there’s a very good possibility they’ll never change. There’s a very good possibility that their resentment will grow and they’ll use their time alone to plot your destruction.
It’s unfortunate that people live lives of misery. All you can do is be an example of how to treat people correctly. You can’t force other people to follow your lead.
My strategy
I look at my family and I know that, in order to keep it, I have to strive for perfection. I have to do my very best.
I’m committed to my path, I’ve been committed to it for years.
If I keep my mistakes to a minimum, there won’t be a crack big enough for him to get his hands into. He won’t be able to separate us. He can lurk in the bushes and observe all he wants. He can hope for disaster all he wants. It’s up to me to keep that disaster from happening.
Fortunately, I don’t think of this as any extra added pressure.
I already want to be the best father and husband that I can be. The only tragedy is that when this next round of assaults has been proven to be futile, my father still won’t be able to recognize that he has to sit down and do some work on himself.
And he’s running out of time.
Honestly, I pity him.
But he made his choices, and I made mine.
