If you do not do as they tell you, command you, they will withdraw attention from you as a punishment. They may stop talking to you, not look at you and talk to you through another person. They know how much this will hurt you and bring you eventually back under their control, as you try to appease them. The problem is that this withholding is usually due to their abuse and your reaction to this abuse.
Maybe you didn't arrange their food in the right way, spoke the wrong way. Or maybe you were just there, to take their anger. Whatever it was, to not engage with you, is a cruel form of abuse.
My ex's father used to not speak to his mother for two weeks or longer if they had fallen out. Two weeks! My own mother didn't speak to me for over a decade and only then after my own instigation.
I am guessing you have had this done to you too as a survivor of narcissistic abuse?
The looks that could strike you dead. The silences. The door slamming.
My ex used withholding all the time, I mean all the time. Unless we were with others he didn't speak to me. If we went to a restaurant, in the house, in the car, on holiday he didn't engage with me. Yet out with others he was a great joker and fun to be with. It took a long time to equate the man indoors with the man outdoors.
They withold many other things apart from love and attentions. Some narcissists withold money.
You may not even have realised what they were doing because you always thought it was you. You think while in the relationship that you are to blame. But no one deserves to be treated that way. It is an insidious form of coercive control. You see this after you leave. Then you wonder why you stayed so long.
If you recognise this form of controlling by a partner, friend or family take note of it. See it as abuse.
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