They Didn’t Leave. They Disappeared - The Quiet Psychology of Ghosting - Episode 142

It depends on the intent and the pattern of the ghosting. There's different types of ghosting. In most cases, you don't get to know those things. In most everyday friendships, ghosting isn't a power play. It's more of a breakdown in the communication under emotional strain. When there's emotional strain, which by the way, if you're being ghosted, you might not know about that emotional strain. You might have an inkling and you might be able to justify, oh, they're overwhelmed, they probably can't handle me, which doesn't feel good, but it's not emotional abuse. It's more of removing yourself from something that you can't handle. Have you noticed that the world that we live in has been doing most of the thinking for you? That your beliefs, perceptions, reactions, fears, and doubts have been shaped by unsolicited outside noise? How easy it's been for you to slip into that default sleep walking mode and label it as life and reality. Yeah, that ends here. Welcome to the Make Sense with Dr. JC Podcast. This is your opportunity to start thinking for yourself, reclaim control, and step back into that role as the shock caller and dominant force of your own reality. It's when you change the way that you look at things that the things that you look at begin to change. So let's wake up, let's rise up, and let's make sense of why and how shift happens. Hmm, makes sense. Great morning friends, great morning world. This is your boy, Dr. JC Dornick, otherwise known as the dragon. And welcome to another edition of the Make Sense with Dr. JC Podcast. This is a wonderful, wonderful topic, and I think that it's extremely relevant to so many different people. They didn't leave, they disappeared. And this topic is gonna be about the psychology of ghosting, otherwise known as ambiguous loss. And why that silence that's associated with it hurts more than your average goodbye. So let's talk about this. They didn't leave, they just disappeared. And right there is the challenge with this whole concept of ghosting. There's no goodbye, there's no explanation, just silence. If you've ever been ghosted by a close friend or someone that you love, your brain probably didn't register that a breakup took place. It actually gets stuck when this happens. And it's stuck in a loop of what's called ambiguous loss. What it's doing is searching for closure that never came. That's kind of what our brains look for, closure. We have to understand, we have to give meaning to things. So today we're gonna break down the psychology of ghosting. And I've put a lot of work into this, so you're gonna really love this. Cause if you can learn how to change the way you look at ghosting and manage it differently, it's gonna greatly lessen the odds of you getting knocked off course and spending your whole day, your whole week, a whole month, a whole year, a whole life trying to figure these things out. So we're gonna break down the psychology of ghosting, why it hurts more than a normal breakup. When you get ghosted, you say, man, I would love to just go back to a normal breakup. And why friendship breakups can cut even deeper than your traditional breakup. And why there's silence is not a verdict of your worth. That's gonna be one of the big takeaways. So by the end of this episode, my hope is that I want you to see something very, very clearly. I shouldn't say I want you to see, I hope that you'll see something very, very clearly. Cause I'll be pointing it out. When you get ghosted, their disappearance is not a form of rejection, but one more of incapacity. I just wanna share quickly what prompted this. One of the downsides of being somebody that knows a lot of people, I mean, through my channels, podcasting and coaching and public speaking and writing books. And I just know a lot of people and I form a lot of, I'll say air quotes, strong friendships. As we get older, I feel like our filter that people have to pass through before they grab onto something that you would call a close friend or create some sort of a bond. It becomes a little bit more challenging, like a little bit more quality control. Because I've speak to so many people, I've experienced ghosting, like you wouldn't believe from family members, but also like best friends. More importantly, people that I would never in my life think would just completely disappear and just stop talking to me. And recently it happened again and I don't wanna share too much about it because that person might listen to this podcast and I don't wanna shed light on them in any sort of a way that would indicate that I have a problem with it. But that's what's interesting about ghosting is what you think about it. That's the only thing that we control. Once again, I had a beautiful, beautiful working relationship with somebody and I would even categorize that person as one of my favorite people to talk to. And one of the reasons why I probably loved talking to that person is because it probably gave me some sort of a sense of self-worth. You know, what's interesting about relationships is you can perceive what you get out of a relationship. But I think even more powerful is what you think you bring to the relationship. You know, I think all human beings wanna feel useful and we wanna feel needed and important. We wanna matter. So complete surprise, complete surprise. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, no exit, no explanation, poof, they disappear and then completely lock themselves out. So what happens in that situation, that would be what we call a ghosting. Whether you recognize it or not, you've been ghosted. You're the ghosted and there's been a ghosting. We all of a sudden start to try to figure out why. That's what's tough about a ghosting is there's no explanation. So the meaning-making machine in our brains tries to figure it out. I mean, that's kind of what we do with perception in general. You know, we know through neuroscience that we only see a very small slice of reality and our meaning-making sense-making machines have to make the rest of it up. So when you've been ghosted, you go through the same process. Typically looking at yourself, what did I do? I must have done something wrong. This is just a fascinating topic. Last man standing says, what others think of me is none of my business. Yeah, I mean, I love that saying. Sometimes it's hard to remember that saying when it's actually happening. So ghosting is one of the strangest human behaviors that we've ever normalized. That's what's interesting about ghosting is somehow it's been normalized. Let's say, oh yeah, I got ghosted. And I think we have to normalize it because if you look at it as an abnormal thing, you could probably make too much out of it. We have to get on with our lives, right? So we've normalized it. So what it represents is it's that moment when someone knows your whole story. So this is the person, your struggles, your inner world, and then poof, abracadabra, shazam, nothing. No explanation, no attempt at repair, no explanation. That's the hard part. And no final closing line or sentence, no thing, nothing at all. And here's the weirdest part about it all. The hardest thing about ghosting isn't that the person is gone. This is fascinating when you've been ghosted. It's that the story has no ending. That's what's tough about ghosting, is there's no closure, but there's no ending. There's no explanation. And it's only in that moment that you as a human realize how important that is to you. You'd like to think that you'd never do that to somebody else, but I'm almost positive that we've all ghosted somebody. Your brain is a meaning-making machine. And when something stops without an explanation, it doesn't shut down. The meaning-making machine doesn't shut down when something stops with no explanation at all. It starts searching. That's what we do. Replaying the last conversation, rereading every one of the last texts. Yeah, we go back to the evidence and check the facts and wondering why that person stopped texting. All of a sudden, no explanation. Wondering how long you should wait before realizing that you've been ghosted. I don't know what people think. Like how long before you realize that you've been ghosted? Because we go through this period and we make up all of these excuses and justify why it might be happening because there's a disbelief situation going on. But how long would you say, you have to wait before you can officially say, I've been ghosted? I don't know if it's harder to be the person that gets ghosted or ghosts somebody. And when there's no information, the brain feverishly starts to fill in the blanks. And that's where we get into trouble. So this usually begins with self-blame. Is it something that I did? What's interesting about looking at yourself, especially if you're someone that likes to take responsibility for yourself and take ownership, which you'll find if you're not the kind of person that takes ownership for your own part in things, when you've been ghosted, you are more prone to because you can't figure it out. You look at them and say, I don't know why they left because you don't know what's going on. There's no information. So you naturally go back to yourself and say, I must have done something. And you almost want to know what you've done, but you can't figure it out because there's no information. So it usually begins with self-blame. I must have done something wrong and it must be really, really fucked up what I did for someone that I built such a strong relationship to just completely drop me like a bad habit. But what did I do? And we just go on and on and on. So this is why ghosting often hurts more, as I said before, than just a regular relationship. So in a breakup, really fascinating about the difference between ghosting and a breakup. In a breakup, there's language. You'll never appreciate a breakup so much until you've been ghosted. So there's language, there's conflict. There's at least a reason why your nervous system can organize things around it. Like you can get mad at them or say, hey, that's really fucked up what they did and all that because there's a storyline to it. Ghosting completely removes the narrative. That's what's so fascinating about ghosting. It's almost like a magic trick. Puff of smoke and then the smoke clears, the person's gone, no reason why. And you never get to learn the trick behind the magic. So in psychology, and I heard somebody mention this before, in psychology, this is referred to as well as ambiguous loss. Now here's what ambiguous loss is. Ambiguous loss is a loss with no clarity, no closure and no ritual. It's ambiguous. The person is gone, but not gone enough for your body to release them. That's what another interesting component about ghosting is, it's much harder for your body, your nervous system, to release somebody because you don't know what the context is. And then there's this moment when you're trying to be good at being ghosted because if you do it wrong, then they'll have a reason to say, that's why I ghosted you, because you're acting like that. So it's very hard to release them. There's no funeral associated with ghosting. It's just a vanished friendship. There's no permission to grieve someone who is still alive. In fact, you don't even know if they're still alive, especially when they completely detach from you and block you and all of this stuff. You don't even know if they're still alive. So part of the game and part of the stitching and making up of a story is, well, I hope they're okay. Because I know that nobody would ever do this. So they have become a ghost, which is interesting about the ghosting, right? The loss just lingers, like a smell, like a scent. And while it does, the nervous system stays fully activated. So I find that's what's important. If you look at the interface response system, step one is to just be self-aware and understand how the brain works. And if you understand that even though somebody's dropped you like a bad habit, but that your nervous system is seeking meaning and seeking sense about it and it's fully activated, that's important for you to know because very often the subconscious components of our brain are in full action and we think that it's like something that we're consciously doing. So this is where attachment theory helps make sense of things. So now we're gonna get into a little bit of the sense-making component of it. So most people assume that ghosting is some sort of a form of cruelty. That's the visceral knee-jerk reaction. Some sort of cruelty, manipulation, or some sort of emotional abuse, like, hey, that's really fucked up. Sometimes we even say that's really sick. That's a sick person right there. And you're saying that about somebody that like hours prior was one of your closest friends in your inner sanctum. And you know what? Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is a little bit of a form of abuse. But the question is, is it intended abuse? Sometimes it could be. But more often, it's an insecure attachment style where individuals highly value independence in that moment. They suppress emotions and struggles with intimacy. So there's this thing about ghosting. When you're doing the ghosting, you have the ability to do it very well. It's very interesting to look at human behavior and say, I wish I could do that in other forms of my life, just completely let go of something as if it never existed. So it's a fascinating survival tactic. And that's what it is. And right there, there's a reframe. If you look and say, I wonder what this person is trying to survive through right now. The key is to just try to separate yourself. You're never gonna figure it out. It's about separating yourself from being the cause of it. It's a fascinating survival tactic that humans come pre-installed with. This is something that our mother, father, teacher, preacher, it's part of our operating system, the human intelligence operating system. When our emotional closeness exceeds someone's internal capacity, their nervous system doesn't say, hey, let's talk this through. It says abort, run and get out. Think about what that says. When our emotional closeness to somebody, so this is the person that's getting ghosted. When that emotional closeness that we have with that person, when that exceeds their internal capacity to handle it, their nervous system says abort, let's get the hell out of here. And they process it. And they say, should I explain myself? Should I let them know? But explaining themselves in that moment probably feels exposing and confronting things and creating conflict probably feels threatening as well. They don't wanna threaten you. They don't wanna threaten themselves. They're taking the easy way out, which a lot of us do. And also the idea of staying and working through things may very well feel overwhelming for them. So the system chooses its default mode and withdraws. Buck everything and run. That's a normal human thing. It's just that when it's happening to you and you don't know why, you don't see it that way typically. So this is an unconscious form of nervous system regulation. We're always looking to regulate our nervous systems. This is one of the reasons why we have overeating, social media problems. We're always trying to regulate our nervous system very often by removing the feeling that we don't like. And ghosting is one of those things that we rationalize as a remedy. So it's an unconscious form of nervous system regulation through avoidance, the strategy to disappear rather than explain. Ghosting someone is not a statement about one's worth. That's an important distinction when you get ghosted. It's not a statement of your self-worth. It's actually a reflection of the person's emotional capacity at that moment in their life. Even if somebody has a valid reason, like they really don't like you all of a sudden or they heard a rumor or unbeknownst to you, you said something that was over the tipping point, the fact that they're ghosting you, completely detaching with no explanation at all, means that in some level, it's a reflection of their emotional capacity at that moment that they can't handle explaining themselves. That's what's interesting about ghosting. So if anybody's ever ghosted someone and you feel good about it, that's not what this topic is about. It's really just about what is it that causes someone to just completely disappear. If you're ever blessed, and I have been, this is fascinating about ghosting. If you're ever blessed with one day, having a conversation with the ghost, they resurface. The ghost reappears and you somehow get an opportunity to reconnect and say, what the fuck happened? What happened? It comes back and you're just like, oh my God, am I gonna find out what actually happened? More often than not, and this might be correlated to the fact that they resurfaced, but more often than not, from my experience, what you find out is that they didn't leave because you mattered too little to them. That's not why they left. They left because staying would have required a conversation that they didn't know how to have or they didn't have the capacity to have. So that's a very different story. And I've been blessed with having a best friend, my BFF, completely ghost me, and then coming back to him one day and be like, I don't know what happened. I would assume that I did something really bad, and I didn't. I didn't. It was a capacity issue. And when you don't understand that, your brain, 95% of it doing its own thing without you being asked, your brain turns their silence into evidence against you or against them. So nobody wins in that scenario. So I like to remind myself about that no wins situation. And if you're gonna make up a story, I would encourage you to make up a story that suits you best, right? Because sometimes we make up a story that we think that it gives us closure and it helps us separate, but what it really does is it actually becomes like this backpack full of rocks on our shoulder. I wanna talk about something that one of our listeners, I don't know if he's here today, but if he is, he can chime in. One of our listeners from Substack said, in my Substack, I have a chat and I posed interesting questions in there. And I posed a question on ghosting in Barat, B-H-A-R-A-T-W. You can find him on Substack. Made a really cool distinction and I wanna share that with you. There's a subtle but interesting and important difference between ghosting and the idea of placing someone in a sealed container. The difference between disappearing and just completely poof, you're gone and recognizing something about that person that they did that you don't like, but then placing them in a container and maybe creating some boundaries. That's the, we're gonna look at the difference. So with ghosting, the power actually stays with the other person. When you ghost somebody, so if you really wanna get rid of somebody, ghosting is not always the best way because you're leaving some of the power with them. But when you put somebody in a sealed container, I have a dryer raceboard on my wall and that's where I put all my goals. I call it mission control. And a big part of it and all my goals have players in it. People that work for me, work with me, candidates and things like that. When I set my goals, I always identify who and what is gonna help me facilitate them. But whenever I meet somebody that rubs me the wrong way or says they're gonna do something and they don't follow through, I have this fun thing and I teach this in the Make Sense Academy and that's our private school community. Check it out, free seven day free trial. But I have on the bottom right, what looks like a jail cell and I put the bad people in jail. Now they don't know that they're in jail, but that's like a sealed container. So a sealed container is different. It's clarity, you know who you care for and what you're available for. You're making the rules and you stop orbiting the uncertainty. Forgiveness often shows up as a byproduct and you get to move on with your exploration. When you put them in a sealed container. Ghosting, here's the big distinction from Barat. Ghosting creates distance and erodes respect. Identify what happens to respect for the other person when they ghost you. For the most part, I lack respect for the person that they did that. Now there's ways of reframing it and getting over it, but that's the difference between ghosting and putting somebody in a sealed container. And I for one, if I ever put somebody in jail, if I'm gonna put them in a sealed container, if I wanna just get them out of my life, I for one have learned that I feel much better by approaching them and letting them know. So that's just my own. Is ghosting emotional abuse or is it just a form of avoidance? So the honest answer to a question like that, is it abuse or just avoidance? It depends, right? C'est de bon, French. On the intent and the pattern of the ghosting. There's different types of ghosting. In most cases, you don't get to know those things. In most everyday friendships, ghosting isn't a power play of some sort. It's more of a breakdown in the communication under emotional strain. When there's emotional strain, which by the way, if you're being ghosted, you might not know about that emotional strain. You might have an inkling and you might be able to justify, oh, they're overwhelmed, they probably can't handle me, which doesn't feel good. It's not like emotional abuse. It's more of removing yourself from something that you can't handle. And by the way, like the complicated art and science and philosophy of forgiveness, a lot of people struggle to forgive. Understanding that it's less about you and more about them, it doesn't excuse the behavior. The reason why we struggle with forgiveness is we don't wanna excuse their behavior. But what it does when you forgive or you let something go like this, what it does is it frees you from carrying the wrong meaning. Isn't that the challenge? How we are meaning-making machines, sense-making and meaning-making machines, and we very often give things the wrong meaning. And if we carry around the wrong meaning, which in many, many cases, I would even venture to say more cases than not, it's the wrong meaning. And if we carry that around, that's where the suffering begins. So once the wrong meaning loses its grip because you've let go of it or you've forgiven, we can move to a more manageable way to navigate it. And what that is is empathy. When somebody ghosts me, and I just went through this recently, I released from the wrong meaning. My knee-jerk reflex was that fucked up, what did I do, all of that stuff. I can't believe that they won't even explain themselves. And I went through all of that. I don't think you can avoid that. But when I released from that, I moved into a place that was more focused on the capacity issue and said, I hope they're okay. You know what? Even though they're doing this, I still care about them. I never stopped caring about them. Like this wasn't my idea. Did you move into a place of empathy? And there's a lot of healing with empathy, isn't there? So here's the part that nobody wants to hear. Closure, because we're all seeking closure. Closure is not something that ghosters give. So if somebody ghosts you, they don't give you closure. It's something that you create. So if you're kind of feeling entitled to some sort of an explanation and you're gonna hold your ground with your arms crossed, you'd better pick up some extra food and some extra clothes. Some sort of way of showering every now and then because it might be a while. Because the ghoster is not looking to give you closure. They're not even thinking about that. They almost like want you to bask in it. So you don't get closure by forcing a conversation that someone is unwilling to have or unable to have. You get closure by replacing a false story that's going on in your brain with a more accurate one. Now, accurate is a funny thing to say because it's probably more one that suits you. But here's the funny thing about creating an accurate story. You're gonna go through a process with me right now. We're gonna do the interface response system. We're gonna run it on ghosting. And this is the big, big distinction. I'm gonna be inviting a lot of you to my friends and family launch. If you wanna save the date and reach out to me, it's only gonna be for a certain amount of people. My book is Make Sense, How to Rewire Your Mind and Transform Your Life. And it's eight years of work. It's everything that I ever made a distinction about. I share in this book. But the flagship program in it and what we teach and what we work on in the Make Sense Academy is called the interface response system. So we're gonna run that four step process on ghosting right now. So step one of the interface response system is called perceive. They're all Ps. So the first thing that we need to do to recover and get back on track is take note of what actually happened. They stopped communicating and you don't know why. All you know is that they stopped communicating. So just grab onto that right now and accept it for what it is and what it isn't. Step two is a practice in cognitive distancing. You see it on my hat every day. It's the pause and we say, hmm, and hmm, as a reminder, stands for Haven't Made Up My Mind. We're just pausing our knee jerk reflexive conditioned ideas and story. And we're just saying, okay, hold one second and we're just gonna move into a curious space. Pause before assigning blame to yourself or to them. You can always come back to blaming yourself or them. That's what's funny about the pause. But pause it for a few. Take a secy, take a secy. Okay, so now that you've paused it, just like Victor Frankel says, now you're in the space in between the stimulus and your response. It's a very healthy place to be. You've put your conditioned knee jerk reflex survival mode response on pause and you're in this space where you can do step three and that is process. Now, while we're in the process stage of the interface response system, we get to process the behavior through things like attachment avoidance and nervous system overwhelm. We start to consider what might actually be going on in their world and not make it all about what happened to us. Consider some alternative scenarios and vantage points. Remember, hurt people hurt people. That's a great thing to remember. And this is probably not about me and I can't control it and all of those things. And they don't intend to hurt others. It's more about attempting to regulate themselves. I don't care what the scenario is, even if they're mad at you and you unknowingly did something to them, their intention when they ghost you is not to hurt you. It's about their own self-regulation. They're looking to regulate themselves and they've just chosen that way. So step four, after we've gone through all of that work and there's a lot of really cool stuff in the book for step three, the sorting filter, the bouncer, holographic vision, all these things that I made up. Step four is proceed. So now we're going to create a healthy response. We were in reaction mode and now we're gonna create a healthy response. Respond first by releasing the need for answers from this person who could not stay present. There's a fable called Waiting for Godot where these guys are waiting in a park for their friend, Godot. And if you know the story, he never shows up. And that's very often what's happening if you're waiting for someone to give you closure. So release from the need to get an answer or closure from them, recognizing that they, for whatever reason, could not stay present. Release and move on in recognition that you cannot continue to try to build an airplane in the sky. Drink water with a fork. Teach a goldfish to climb a tree. You cannot succeed at doing something that's impossible and that would be controlling something that's out of your control. So closure doesn't require explanation, my friends. If closure requires explanation and nobody gives you an explanation, you're in trouble. It requires facts and truth. Since there are no facts and truth and they're not providing any, you make up your own and acknowledge that for the most part, you don't know. So you want to fact in a truth about what happened? You don't know. Grab onto that. I don't know. One of the greatest things I learned how to say as a recovering know-it-all is I don't know. I'm not sure. I was raised to not say something like that, but I don't know. Embrace that unknowingness and go on with your life. Go on with your life's plans. They have not destroyed your life's plans. You still have them. So perhaps it's time to stop believing that true freedom, joy, happiness, and comfort exist out there rather than in here. Perhaps it's time to recognize that all of the things that you require to experience joy, happiness, and comfort are not outside. They're already inside. So we don't have to put so much weight on other people and other things. The truth is that your happiness and unshakability already exist. You already possess them in the here and now. That's why we always say unwrap the present. It's a great time to unwrap the present. And if those outside forces carry the strength to knock you off course, they sure do sometimes. I always do it first, at least, before I even attempt to run the IRS. If they have the strength to knock you off your course, it's not because they carry that power. It's because you perceive that they do. So if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at begin to change, don't they? So it's typically due to some sort of a wound that is still open inside of you, by the way. When you take offense to something, it's typically some sort of a wound inside of you. And what hurts is not what people did to you. It's what they activated inside of you. Try to grab onto that. If I feel hurt, my initial reflex is to say that they hurt me. But what I like to do now is say, what did that activate inside of me? Because that's what I really need to work on. Because if your goal is to become unfuck withable, unshakable in life, you gotta do self-work. Everything that comes from the outside only has power when it finds an echo inside of you. Become echo-less. Or at least have a strategy to find your way to it. So we can't control how the world treats us, only how we respond to the unpredictable events that occur beyond our control. That's the dichotomy of control. Developing a true deep relationship, to some extent, requires the vulnerable act of relinquishing control. You wanna hear something really interesting, one of my favorite paradoxes, is the ultimate way to gain control is to release yourself from trying to control. It's the ultimate form of control. Taking down your force field, not becoming a doormat or a heavy bag or something like that. It's difficult, by the way, to get ghosted. And that's why sometimes it leaves scars. You didn't get any say in the matter, and you feel vulnerable, and if you perhaps made a mistake in letting this one in. So we start to blame ourselves. Like, how could I be so stupid when I met my wife, she and I were single for a while before that, probably not really giving people too much respect, if you know what I mean, both of us. And when we met each other and we fell in love, it was very scary, because we had to relinquish control and we had to take our guards down and allow for that space of love. I mean, we're happy that we did, but it was a very scary moment because we're worried about this. We're worried about getting screwed over. So remember, one doesn't become unshakable from wearing armor. Becoming unshakable comes from acceptance of the stuff that we're talking about. So here's something to consider as we move to the close. Not every relationship ends with a conversation. I know that we think they're supposed to, but they don't. Not every loss comes with some sort of an explanation, and not every unanswered question needs to be answered by the person who left. Sometimes the real work is just in realizing that. I remember one time I was asking a mentor of mine, why sometimes my clients will just stop calling me. And he said to me, he goes, you wanna know why they stopped calling you? And I go, why? He goes, because they don't wanna. And that was it. He goes, I don't know why, but I can tell you they don't wanna call you because if they wanted to call you, they'd call you. So that was just a freeing moment. So they didn't disappear because you were unworthy. They did so because they reached their capacity. So that's a good place for that empathy. And that, my friends, makes more sense and carries the strength to, as Bob Marley would say, emance yourself from mental slavery. And that would be the mental slavery of ghosting. Make sense? That's it for today. To support the Make Sense with Dr. JC podcast, be sure to subscribe, like, and share, as well as follow the Make Sense sub-stack for free daily quotes, live streams, and blogs. And remember, learning without action is just another form of distraction. If something hit home and you learn something today, give it away. That's the only way it's gonna stay. See you next time. Hmm, makes sense.