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Alice Elliott Dark's avatar

What a great piece, so visceral and painful. I remember when I first heard about shunning in the Pennsylvania Dutch culture—of course hardly limited to them, as you point out the history—and how terrifying I found the concept, how brilliantly cruel and coercive. There is nothing quite as effective as withdrawal with no explanation. Your school friends shunned you. I think of ghosting as a personal form of shunning, because I had that vocabulary first. Either way it is soulless and cowardly.

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Janelle Holden's avatar

What your friends did was emotional torture and inexplicably cruel Elissa. They’ve done psychological studies on leaving someone out of a game suddenly, for no good reason, and it’s very painful and confusing for participants of the study. They don’t know what’s going on or why.

Some exclusion seems punishing and cruel - like your friends and members of my own family. It’s a weapon used with deft skill. They know what they are doing.

The average ghoster in my life seems to be conflict avoidant to the extreme. They don’t know how to say no without causing offense. They lack the words or training to talk through conflict. I feel like that too at times. Some are absent minded. They get a text that gets lost in the weeds. Others just don’t have the words to say the truth of their feelings,

But as someone who has been deliberately left off family wedding guest lists, not invited to birthdays and anniversaries as punishment I feel like I can sense the difference. It’s hard, very hard to go through deliberate exclusion. Thank you for expressing it so clearly. It helped.

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