Fun for the Whole Family

[Lauren17]

I am quite used to the silent treatment. Usually, I'm on the receiving end of ST, but he still interacts normally with DD.
This time though, it's ST for the whole family.
We made a family decision and it wasn't the one uBPDh wanted. He's staying completely away from us, behind locked doors. He will join for meals but will only speak if spoken to and then it's single word responses.
What do I say to DD (both teens) about this? I've resolved not to pretend everything is fine. But I'm struggling to address the behavior without making negative statements about the person.
Has anyone else been in this situation? What did you do?

[Poison Ivy]

Lauren, my ex-husband has not engaged in silent treatment, but he did regularly ghost me and our children. I might say something like, "It's very uncomfortable to be treated like this. I wish it weren't happening. Let's try to support each other."

[Free2Bme]

Hi L17,

ST is so ridiculous and I can understand your frustration, especially in regards to the teen children.  I strongly believe that the goal with children is to point the way to healthy habits of communication.  I would not criticize your H openly or privately to kids.  However, I would frame his behavior as not healthy, in a neutral manner.  Help them to see that in relationships we have a responsibility to ask for what we want in a calm and respectful way, and that we don't always get everything we want.  When we don't get what we want, we don't have a right to treat others badly.  Privately, you can ask them to tell you how they feel and what they think about dad's ST.  Validate their feelings and look for ways to help them process what is going on.

It sounds like your family 'took a vote' on something and H is not happy with the outcome.  His response to disappointment is very selfish and childish.  He had a golden opportunity to show his family that he cared about the collective desires of everyone and be the hero.  Instead, he wants to punish you and kids for having an opinion/desire different from him.  My T would call this "King Baby" behavior.

I would ignore H bad behavior as much as possible, this teaches your children that we don't cater or reward this behavior, just don't be ugly about it because that makes you look bad.  I would do my thing, be light-hearted about it and it would be business as usual.  In the same way that I would step over my 2 year old on the floor having a tantrum, I would give no pay-off what-so-ever to H behaving this way.  When H begins to act like a civilized adult, then you can respond to him as such. 

stay strong and keep your cool 

[Cascade]

Yes, our family has experienced that. I don't recall if I said anything to our children or not about the silent treatments. My husband didn't have close relationships with any of our kids, so he often went days without talking to them, whether it was a silent treatment or not, so I'm not sure if they even noticed. I know that didn't really help with an answer, but with regards to other things my husband did to emotionally hurt our children, I almost always talked to them about it and I think it helped them.

[Lauren17]

Thank you to everyone who responded.  I agree that speaking with the kids about this treatment is the right thing to do.  I'm really focusing on not criticizing H in front of the kids.  So, I'm struggling with how to say, "Dad's giving us ST.  ST is a bad thing" without implying that Dad is doing a bad thing.  Does that make sense?

I did ask the kids what they thought of Dad not talking to us.  The answer was varying versions of "I dunno"

Poison Ivy, I like your suggestion of saying "I don't like how this feels"  I will try and think of more things like that to have on hand.

[square]

I focus on DD and her feelings rather than mine. "Did that upset you?" "Oh, that was so invalidating (of him), I'm sorry honey. You had every right to ask him that."

Sometimes I point out what's normal. "You know, if you had asked (friend's father/my dad/etc) that, how do you think they would have responded?" My goal being is to provide healthier behavior models so this doesn't seem totally normal.

I like to talk about healthy conflict, like "I'm sure my father would have been delighted to run that errand with you, but if he was busy right then he would have said he had to do paperwork now but could go around 6pm" (as opposed to just blowing up),