Silent treatment
refusal to communicate verbally with someone who desires the communication
Silent treatment refers to not talking to someone, possibly following conflict, hurt, anger, or emotional distress. It can take many forms and have very different motivations and meanings. It may range from just sulking, to a self protective response or a coping mechanism, where one may withdraw because they feel overwhelmed, hurt, inadequate, or unable to express their emotions safely, to a form of deliberate psychological manipulation.
According to couple therapist Figs O'Sullivan, it is not necessarily abusive or even malevolent, and might range from protective silence as a survival mechanism, to a learned behavior, not necessarily malicious, possibly stemming from growing up in an environment where openly expressing anger or disagreement was discouraged or unsafe, to an intentional, sustained manipulation designed to break down the other person in order to dominate them, which gets into emotional abuse territory.
In educational settings, a practice known as planned ignoring may be used by teachers to address minor attention seeking or disruptive behaviors. Rather than engaging with the behavior, the teacher temporarily withholds attention while continuing to maintain appropriate classroom expectations. According to Sally Scollay Booth this is a highly utilised and valuable tool.. In social groups, according to the social psychologist Kipling Williams, prolonged silence or exclusion can also function as social rejection or ostracism, effectively communicating that an individual is being excluded from the group.
Origin of term
The term originated from "treatment" through silence, which was fashionable in European and American prisons in the 19th century, such as in the Auburn system. "In use since the prison reforms of 1835, the silent treatment was used in prisons as an alternative to physical punishment, as it was believed that forbidding prisoners from speaking, calling them by a number rather than their name, and making them cover their faces so they couldn't see each other would encourage reflection on their crimes".
“Silent treatment” enters the record as refusal to communicate verbally with someone who desires the communication. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Silent, treatment and refusal can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q21156277. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1835.
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This entry incorporates text from “Silent treatment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.