This pattern repeats itself over and over again: you meet someone new, start talking/chatting/corresponding, the person behaves like they’re interested in a relationship with you, then they make an arragement with you – and then, without any sensible reason, they just disappear. Not only don’t they show up for the arranged meeting, Zoom call, or date – they stop returning your texts, stop taking your calls, and ignore your emails. They start acting as if you don’t exist, as if they never knew you in the first place – and if you happen to meet them in real life and hold them accountable publicly – they go to epic lengths lying and distorting reality, only to make it look like you’re the crazy one here.

Sounds familiar?

Abrupt cessation of communication – a.k.a ghosting – becomes an increasingly normalized behavior these days, especially in online contexts, and it effectively represents a form of emotional abuse. Most often, people told me stories about this shit happening to them on dating apps – but I’ve had just as much of it in my professional life, over the last few years of looking for potential agents, representatives, and producers for my book’s project. The dynamic itself, and its devastating effect on your mental health, is largely the same: be it from someone who sends you romantic signals or from someone who fakes interest in your work and promises collaboration in a project that informs your only opportunity to get out of oppression and trauma.

Because in any case, what people do here is they encourage you to open up emotionally (i.e. to be vulnerable) with no intention to treat your vulnerability with honesty, value, and respect.

Ghosting can happen after two days of online communication, just as it can happen after three months of dating, having sex, and planning a marriage/family together. While timing can vary, ghosting is especially toxic when, after following their trust-building signals, you practice some real vulnerability with them. In romantic context, it’s often the first act of physical intimacy. More generally, it can be you telling them a story of trauma from your past, coming out with an oppressed identity, or communicating your need for help. Then again, you don’t do this with strangers – they consistently make you feel like they’ve earned the right to see your vulnerability, and not just with words but often with actions that make them look trustworthy on the surface.

And then, they just cut you off, without any clarity or closure. They make you feel like your vulnerability repels them and that it makes you unworthy of connection. The tragic irony here, of course, is that they’re the one who consistently encouraged you to be vulnerable. It’s that they brainwashed you about the value of vulnerability and authenticity – only to then annihilate you emotionally for practicing it.

So after being ghosted, you sit there for weeks, months, and possibly years, trying to make sense of what happened. You keep asking youself: “Where did I go wrong? What was the mistake I made in this relationship – a mistake so fatal that it ended this way?”

These thoughts haunt you for weeks, months, and sometimes years because no matter how hard you try, you can’t find the answer. And the reason you can’t find it is that, in reality, it doesn’t exist. You’re trying to find the right answer to the wrong question. In reality, you never made any mistake in this relationship. Because if you did, and it were the true reason for that person to break up with you, they wouldn’t be any point for them to stay silent about it. If they made a choice to not continue a relationship with you, and at the same time they had a minimal respect for your humanity, a minimal level of empathy, and a minimal level of honesty, they would create clarity and closure. And, they chose not to.

Because the underlying message of ghosting is not, "You made a mistake." It is, "You are a mistake." It is, "You're such a piece of shit you don't even deserve my explanations."

Importantly, this traumatizing message is fed to you by the person who has already gained some level of emotional influence in your life. Neurobiologically, it’s not experienced the same way as receiving an insult from a stranger or an anonymous hater on Twitter.

That’s why people fall into the murky hole of shame, and in some cases even major depression, in the aftermath of ghosting. It is a very real form of emotional abuse. It’s a clear insult on your sense of self-worth, just as it is a huge attack on your sense of reality.

And the problem here is not that you "just perceive it this way". Abuse is designed this way. If you feel like shit after being ghosted, it's not by chance. It's by design.

But what if we look at ghosting through the prism of critical thinking? The fact that people don’t give you clarity and closure, and instead leave you gaslit, confused, unable to make sense of what happened – it boils down to three things: their cowardice, their ego, and their shame.

A couple years ago, my best friend told me after I shared another story of ghosting from my professional experience: “So how can you expect closure in this situation, Jorge? Closure requires honesty. It would be for them to say, Look, I’m an asshole. I saw your vulnerabiltiy, and I’ve just been playing with it from the start. Or, Look, I’m a hypocrite. I just don’t give a shit about the values I eloquently profess – the values whose profession attracted you to me in the first place. So who would like to admit they’re an asshole or a hypocrite? That’s why you never get closure. It’s amounts to them saying out loud that they’re full of shit.”

His words rang true for me given what I’d already learned from shame research. People who are unable to separate their most harmful behaviors from their sense of identity will never admit the reality of those behaviors. In other words, when people see no difference between “I made a shitty thing” and “I’m a shitty person”, they will never acknowledge their mistakes, no matter how much harm those create to others. They will invariably lack the courage to tell the truth, to apologize, and to make amends – because real courage can only operate from the platform of solid self-worth.

Not having this platform – and instead having the inflated, fragile ego reeling from multiple unacknowledged insecurities – is the reason why these people engage in abusive behaviors like ghosting, destroying the self-worth of those around them as a result. Lack of self-worth is also the reason why they fake interest in relationships, jobs, and projects they aren’t really interested in, why they profess the values they don’t give a shit about, why they make commitments they have no intention of making good on – they hustle to look good, instead of actually being good.

As someone on the receiving end of emotional abuse, I don’t think it’s your job to delve into the psychologic intricacies of their behavior, let alone try to help them.

But the bottom line here is that you can't expect closure, clarity, honesty, or anything that involves courage from a person who's been capable of ghosting. Ghosting isn't just cruel and cheap — most of all, it's chickenshit. It's avoiding telling the truth at all costs, even when the truth speaks for itself.

In fact, you don’t need closure or clarity from them to establish the truth, to put your reality back in place, and to move on through pain towards healing. Because abusive dynamics in a relationship are always observable and measurable over time – even if they look blurred and unclear to you because of the gaslighting exercised. The inconsistency between words and actions is a big one. How could a person enthusing interest about your work or complimenting your personality just disappear and start acting as if you don’t exist? Isn’t the ghosting itself enough for you to see that there’s been no truth involved on their part right off the bat?

Additionaly, here are five facts to help you build ghosting resilience – and rise strong every time you experience it.

1

You’ll want to remember these facts far too many times – because ghosting is becoming an increasingly normalized behavior in our culture, in both personal relationships and the business world, particularly in online spaces. Many people who employ ghosting as a way to end relationships were themselves ghosted at some point – and although they may understand it’s not good, they choose to pass down the abuse instead of stopping it. For better or worse, online communication makes it so easier to avoid accountability for any toxic behavior – because unlike in real life, there’s little chance you’re gonna meet and confront that person at a friend’s party or at a business meeting next week (and if you happen to, be prepared for a shame-driven shitshow: Hall-of-Fame level gaslighting, blaming, lying, or playing a fool).

2

When you’re getting traumatized by ghosting or any other form of emotional abuse, be careful about the places and people that you seek support from – because instead of helping, they may wreck your reality further. Social media, coaches, poets, and self-proclaimed ‘relationship experts’ way too often represent the culture of toxic positivity. In this culture, driven by the typically American, compulsive need to find a silver-lining and a ‘spiritual meaning’ to everything, ranging from a blown tire to genocide, bullshitting prevails over critical thinking and poetry trumps over mental health science.

In this empire of toxic positivity, there’s a big department of abuse apologists – and I don’t think these people understand the magnitude of harm they’re creating. A few years ago, I saw the author of my once favorite TED talk, the television writer Tracy McMillan, talk about ghosting in a one-minute Instagram video – where she, with a nice middle-class American smile, said that when people ghost you, they thereby “communicate respect” for you. According to Tracy, people just understand that they’re not your person and by ghosting they save you time which you’d otherwise waste on the relationship that wasn’t going to work.

What a cute, positive way to look at emotional abuse, isn’t it? I don’t think Tracy realized how twisted her logic was – but American people often think and preach this way, because positivity is more important than truth in the American culture. In this country, most of us just don’t have the skills to own the uncomfortable reality: some things in life have no silver-lining and no meaning to them whatsoever. Trauma is one of those. When it comes to ghosting, and other forms of emotional abuse underpinned by people’s cowardice, dishonesty, and ego – misportraying their intentions as “respect for you” is the wildest form of gaslighting. And, in the wake of emotional abuse, with your critical thinking struggling to get back on its feet, you can be very susceptible to such false messages, delivered from everywhere in the American “self-help”, “personal development”, and “positivity” culture. I bought a lot of that BS starting out in my journey.

Look, neurobiologically we’re all hardwired to make sense of our lived experiences, including the most traumatic ones. The impossibility of making sense of abusive relationships is the reason why people get stuck in their aftermath for months and sometimes years. Making sense is what enables you to heal, rise strong, and move on. But making false (although easy) sense doesn’t do any of this. Like a narcotic drug, it temporarily alleviates your pain – but then the severity of the pain catches up, because its root cause hasn’t been addressed. However palatable and plausible the messages of spirituality and toxic positivity sound, when they don’t reflect the reality of your lived experience, they can’t effect meaningful and lasting change in your life and your personal development.

In the same vein, if some of the people you share the ghosting story with tell you “to not take it so seriously”, or “to just accept that this wasn’t your person”, then, aside from revealing how much they suck at empathy and critical thinking, this is a huge red flag indicating that a) this person trivializing your experience is probably capable of perpetrating the same on others – and then, comfortably thinking they didn’t do anything critically bad; and b) this person doesn’t take human relationships seriously – so whatever commitments, values, or interests they profess, they don’t attach meaning and responsibility to their words. Instead, just like the person who ghosted you, they do it for impressing, looking good, or getting something from others.

3

Ghosting is not the same as going no-contact with a toxic person. If you cut off or block a friend, a parent, an ex, or a colleague who’s been constantly diminishing you, violating your boundaries, exercising passive aggression, failing commitments, gaslighting you – it’s not the same as ghosting them. Evidence? Before cutting them off, how many times did you try to talk to them about the problems you were experiencing? How many arguments or therapy sessions did you go through together? How much effort did you put forward to save this relationship – and how clearly does this effort reflect the value you attached to the relationship? Now, ghosting is a whole different ball game. With ghosting, people never communicate that there’s a problem in the relationship – because the real problem is their dishonesty. There’s no communication and no attempt to mend anything – because the impression they consistently create is that everything’s going just fine.

By the way, ghosting and abuse-wise, be especially cautious with people who throw around the word “fine” and other niceties. With people who, from the first days of knowing you, call you “dear”, “babe”, “precious”, and “send you hugs”. Niceness has nothing to do with kindness, and in America, it’s often the opposite of honesty. It’s a tool of manipulation and ingratiation. People with solid self-worth have boundaries instead of niceness. If they don’t want to meet you for a lunch next week, they don’t invite you. Kind people mean what they say, and hold themselves accountable when they make a mistake. Nice people don’t mean anything say – and avoid accountability at all costs.

4

There’s an ample kit of tools, rhetorical lines, and gaslighting messages that ghosters can deploy to rationalize their behavior – if you somehow get to expose it in front of those they want to look good for.

One of the most common lines is, “I don’t owe you anything.” I cannot tell you how many times I heard this phrase in my professional experience, and how many clients reported the same to me from their abusive romantic relationships. “I don’t owe you anything” is the ghoster’s go-to, first-line defense. And here’s why it’s quintessentail bullshit.

In the theory of logic, it’s called the straw man fallacy. By employing it, the person creates an impression of refuting your argument, while in fact they’re refuting the absurd argument they’ve substituted for your legitimate one – because on the surface, those look alike.

By employing the I don’t owe you anything rhetoric, the abuser manipulates reality, creating the impression that you’re the crazy person trying to get some unpaid debt back from them. But in fact, the reason for accountability is not them owing, and not paying back, anything to you. The reason is them owing to their own words. Them owing to their own values and their own statements. Just because these words, values, and statements involved you doesn’t change the fact that they were theirs to say – and that then they didn’t act in accordance. That’s where the problem really lies – in attaching no meaning and no responsibility to their own words, and then creating the impression that the problem is not about their dishonesty, but your perception and your expectations.

Well, don’t ever buy that shit. If you walk through life believing that most of the time people mean what they say, you’re normal. If they don’t, they aren’t. Their I don’t owe you anything excuse is just as cheap and chickenshit as the ghosting itself – it stinks with shame, ego, and hypocrisy.

5

A huge piece of fast-food psychology and Western “personal development” culture is the rhetoric about “not taking things personally”. There’s an entire episode of my podcast #TruthWarrior calling bullshit on this, along with four other key pieces of toxic positivity. But when it comes to ghosting, this “encouragement to not take things personally” is particularly pervasive and particularly damaging: here’s why.

Studying abusive relationships over the years (and boy, did much of this data come from my own professional journey), I observed one consistent pattern: in people who survive abuse, the majority of the pain, and the inability to move on, do not come from the damaged self-worth – feeling not enough and and less than. Instead, they come from the long-lasting effects of gaslighting – the person constantly questioning their own perception of reality. From the person’s acquired disbelief in their most basic notions about life, relationships, and human connection – those that had been cornerstones of their identity before. Patients describe this quite literally as “a sense of wrecked reality – wrecked way too much, beyond repair”. That’s why, without professional help, survivors of emotional abuse can remain so traumatized that they will avoid seeking relationships for years and decades. Not only do their stop trusting others, they stop trusting themselves. That’s the price of any emotional abuse, including ghosting – someone’s cowardice and comfort permanently damaging someone else’s mental health.

Therefore, in helping abuse survivors, one of the key goals in therapeutic practice is putting a person’s sense of reality and self-trust back together.

The job of a therapist, or a friend, or anyone supporting a survivor, is not "to make it better" — it's to make it make sense, painful as that sense may be.

It’s looking at the situation from the outside and saying the truth about it, in all its enormity, instead of making up a palatable, ‘positive’, ‘spiritual’ silver-lining. Because only truth – communicated and validated from the outside – allows people to move through shame, rise above gaslighting, and heal.

And the truth is, you should always take ghosting personally because it's always meant personally.

With ghosting, this person in fact communicates: “I know you’re gonna go crazy, but my comfort is more important than your sanity.” Isn’t this message personal? Hell yes. And what does taking it personally specifically mean?

Well, it doesn’t mean believing that something is wrong with you. That you have somehow had it coming. That you suck and are a failure. That you’re so broken/stupid/ugly that people will only want to play with you but no one will ever be interested in a real, meaningful connection with you. All these are messages of shame and scarcity. They’re what any act of abuse, including ghosting, is designed to make you feel and think.

But taking it personally doesn’t mean believing or validating these toxic messages – instead, it’s simply acknowledging the reality that they were targeted at you, yes, personally. That, regardless of the ghoster’s intentions, those messages were real. And, they were personal, untruthful, and toxic.

Why is it essential to focus on it? Because if you fall for the bait of fast-food psychology and “don’t take it personally”, then there’s no way for you to acknowledge the realness and the abusive nature of these messages. And this denial, instead of healing, is exactly what will effectively get you stuck. The pain from these messages will not be denied anyway – but when you deny their source, their nature, and their existence in the first place, there’s no way you can reality-check them, spit out the venom, and move on. The pain is here – but when you deny yourself the recognition of its source, you will never fully own it and move past it. Instead, you will have this pain own you and keep you mentally tortured and going higher and higher on the self-doubt spiral.

Taking ghosting, or any form of abuse, personally is also crucial so that later you don’t fall into the trap of trusting this person again. Lack of closure is exactly what abusers rely on – because this way, they can creep back into your life again anytime they need a new amount of supply (love, attention, help, sex, etc.) and manipulate you into believing that nothing was wrong in the first place. In more elaborate scenarios, they may even offer fake, although very plausible, apologies.

Don’t ever buy that shit. I do believe people can change, but it’s just not realistic to expect that a person who chose their individual comfort over your sanity will suddenly value a meaningful, authentic connection with you. The problem, again, isn’t about you. It’s about their priorities stacked in a way fundamentally different from yours. It’s about the radically different way you and they approach relationships. These things rarely change, and if they do, that takes years if not decades of committed work with a helping professional. It can’t be them “just realizing they made a mistake” or “just recognizing your value”.

Finally, if you or your loved ones have been affected by ghosting, or any other form of emotional abuse, don’t stay silent about it. It doesn’t matter if you feel hurt for one day or drown in clinical depression for a year, talk about it to those you care about. Also, when you hear someone else sharing an experience of ghosting, support them by saying the truth out lou: that it’s a chickenshit, toxic, and increasingly normalized form of relational behavior. Trust me, people need to hear this from someone else in order to get out from under the huge gaslighting effect that ghosting inherently entails.

Also, act on social media – because that’s where ghosting becomes especially common. Help spread awareness about emotional abuse and its effects on mental health by sharing this post and the resources below. Let’s remember about the power of words and connection. When we go through an emotionally damaging experience, we’re often unable to find the right words for what we’re feeling and why we’re feeling it. Our ability to see and verbalize the truth may be largely blocked by gaslighting. But our reality snaps back into place when we see someone else expose the truth about what’s happened to us – in a real, honest, detailed, and uncomfortable way. Unlike with silver-lining, that’s where true healing begins. As Brené Brown says, by owning the truth of our story, we get to pick up the pen and write a brave, fair ending to it. By turning away from that truth – in order to “be positive” or “spiritual”, we remain characters trapped in the false story manufactured by the abuser’s need for comfort.

Now, which option do you choose?