Narcissist: Your Silence, His Speech

Striking feature of relationships with narcissists: abrupt transition from speech abundance to pervasive silence, awkward and threatening

Narcissists use silence to communicate but also to manipulate, control, invalidate, and marginalize, sow uncertainty, confusion, and anticipatory anxiety.

Narcissist’s ominous silence can signify neglect, indifference, distancing, rejection, and abandonment and is a part of the devaluation phase of the shared fantasy. It disempowers.

Silence and a victim posture.

Victims use silent signaling to communicate withdrawal or avoidance, constriction, alienation, refusal to engage, resentment (passive-aggressive), resignation, resistance, mirroring (prism or lens), empowerment, self-protection, emotion dysregulation, reduced affect display (numbing), introspection and soul-searching.

Common mistake: we communicate more with silence than with speech (universe is mostly empty). The preverbal stage is formative (Vygotsky, 1962). Private speech is prevalent (Thorne and Lantolf, 2006).

Common mistake: silence is both self-regulatory and socially functional, interactive, and reactive (intrapersonal and interpersonal). Silence modulates other people’s speech (feedback loop).

It reflects caution (self-protectiveness), evaluation, discipline, self-control (resilience, “the strong, silent type”), humility/modesty, profundity (the unconscious is silent), wisdom, privacy and dignity of both interlocutors (respect), dissent or disagreement coupled with conflict-aversion (timidity).

Self-talk, inner discourse, soliloquy, psychic ear (Geva, 2018) and introversion

Silence is pregnant with meaning, it structures and contextualizes speech: the unspoken, hidden text, the unthought known (Bollas), it demarcates and enforces a boundaried space (“no trespassing”)

Body language is a language – yet it is silent.

Healthy silence: contemplative, polite, thoughtful, deferential, reflective, harmonizing, respectful, emphatic (encourages processing)

Meaningful vs. trivial vs. awkward vs. informed (educated) silence (which triggers an inner discursive cascade)

Silence triggers misunderstandings, is unsettling, especially when the individual juggles sometimes incompatible multiple identities, roles, and imaginaries

Silence: threat, trauma (freeze response), catatonia (association with death)

LITERATURE

Bao, D. (2025). A Systematic Review of Multifaceted Silence in Social Psychology. Behavioral Sciences, 15(9), 1220.

Find and Buy MOST of my BOOKS and eBOOKS in my Amazon Store