Why Silence Is Often the Best Response to a Verbal Attack

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tinybuddha/~3/-CxHS1383Gg/

Hands Over Mouth

“Have the maturity to sometimes know that silence is more powerful than having the last word.” ~Thema Davis

It all started with the forks.

“You need to return my forks,” my roommate demanded one morning as I sat in the kitchen attempting to get some work done.

“I have already said that I don’t have them. We told you that the other roommate has been hiding them,” I replied.

She began raising her voice at me, “I can’t believe you would accuse her. You’re just a mean, nasty person!”

I slowly turned around and said calmly, “Today is my birthday, actually. So I don’t really want to have this conversation right now.”

She retorted, “I don’t care,” and then began to attack my character with a spiel of all the various other things I’ve ever done to upset her.

Perhaps she felt some kind of underlying hurt, but she did not express this to me. She was not telling me these problems so that we could work on them together to fix the hurt. Instead, she was insulting and attacking my very existence as a human so that I could feel hurt with her.

I could already foresee that nothing I could say was going to calm her down, so I chose to respond with silence. I suppose my silence pushed her over the edge, because she en…

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