When Someone's Ghosting You, It Might Not Be What You Think || Escape As A Coping Mechanism

In trying times people have different ways in how they cope, handle or manage the stressful vibrations. These are called coping mechanisms, that can be divided into two main groups, which are the adaptive- and maladaptive coping mechanisms, which can again be divided into more sub categories.For more in depth information about the different coping styles, feel free to read this article that summarizes some coping mechanism.

For this post I'll be covering one maladaptive coping mechanism, which is escape. People who usually withdraw themselves from friends and/or family or even work and in extreme cases ghost others, use this coping style to engage in solitary activities like reading, watching movies and/or browsing the internet.

And I'm not saying that everyone who is isolating themselves from others, are inherently using escape as a coping mechanism. What I can say, from my own experience as someone who uses escape as a coping mechanism, is that we/I usually don't do this to hurt others.

It's more a means to protect oneself or maybe not wanting to burden others or in other cases it's someone who is used to dealing with stress inducing situations him-/herself. And I get the argument that people who need to retreat and isolate themselves, should give others maybe a heads up, because communication is key. Others might also be more understanding if they knew.

If I can speak from my own experiences, I also try to communicate as much as possible and as often as I can. Ask anyone who has worked closely with me or has extensively been in contact with me. Some might even say that I may communicate "too much" 😅.

But there are those rare occasions that I felt that I needed to "escape" from the outside world and wanted to deal with everything that came at me - sometimes all at once - on my own. I had to sort it out myself and figure out some possible solutions. Oftentimes, I just needed to retreat and set some boundaries that I maybe at the time didn't know I needed.

Knowing this about myself, I usually show compassion and will not draw any conclusions, as to why someone isn't responding to my texts or emails after a number of reminders. I even try to stay cordial when I encounter someone "ignoring" me.

Of course, experiencing stressful situations is no excuse to not respond and in no way or form am I exempting for example myself for past "escape" behavior. I only wanted to shed some light as to why some need to withdraw themselves. Also, I only wrote about my own experiences, so this might not be true for others. Please contact a professional for expert advice.