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Ghosting is amplified and supercharged in the digital era.

Ghosting is a wound to meaning and certainty as much as to attachment.

A certain amount of ghosting is inevitable and perhaps even healthy.

In my clinical practice, many clients speak of their use of ghosting as an interpersonal strategy, or of the pain of being ghosted. In the former, ghosting can be a way of establishing boundaries without the dread of confrontation. In the latter, ghosting can conflates the pain of abandonment with the uncertainties and ambiguities of technology—are their emails just not reaching me?

Ghosting, in other words, may be worse than flat-out rejection because of the lack of relational closure. Our minds can fill the vacuum with all kinds of stories that can plague us because the lack of certainty and the potential fear of misinterpretation. If only they had not read my gesture in that way, they would not have been offended..

Winnicott and the ‘fear of a breakdown’

Winnicott’s idea about anxiety or fear is rooted not in a distortion but in real lived experience. We only fear what has, in some form, already happened. If I fret about security and safety, it is likely because at some point developmentally my safety was severely compromised. Our nervous system thus needs to remain vigilant to some extent to prevent what it knows can happen.

Many of us grow up with enigmatic messages from our caregivers. We fill in the blanks, especially when there is some kind of attachment or caring failure. To give someone the benefit of the doubt is easier for a young psyche than realizing that our caregiver may be incompetent, neglectful, or simply wounded in their own ways. Disappointment from someone we depend on can thus be mixed with a........

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