[oska]

This is the 'Grey Rock' strategy:

> So, how do we escape this parasitical leech without triggering his vindictive rage? Gray Rock is primarily a way of encouraging a psychopath, a stalker or other emotionally unbalanced person, to lose interest in you. It differs from No Contact in that you don’t overtly try to avoid contact with these emotional vampires. Instead, you allow contact but only give boring, monotonous responses so that the parasite must go elsewhere for his supply of drama. When contact with you is consistently unsatisfying for the psychopath, his mind is re-trained to expect boredom rather than drama. Psychopaths are addicted to drama and they can’t stand to be bored. With time, he will find a new person to provide drama and he will find himself drawn to you less and less often. Eventually, they just slither away to greener pastures. Gray Rock is a way of training the psychopath to view you as an unsatisfying pursuit you bore him and he can’t stand boredom.

https://lovefraud.com/the-gray-rock-method-of-dealing-with-p...

[dghughes]

One of the first things I recall my parents telling me is a bully wants attention. Don't react, don't engage, and they'll lose interest.

I did this at my old workplace where people would get enraged. I learned not to interrupt and not even try to be empathetic no engagement at all.

People are like cats they only react to stimulation.

Even for love today being Valentine's Day I recall a saying, "the opposite of love isn't hate it's indifference".

[mikk14]

I didn't know this, but I knew it as what I came to call the "Pattinson Defence": https://i.redd.it/yukn5zrxm9t31.png

It worker really well -- although not perfectly -- when I was being constantly annoyed by someone. I explicitly told them I didn't want to deal with them, but they kept coming. They stopped once, to their "how are you?", I replied with how I really was.

[jdc]

Sounds effective, but I wonder where the author got that definition of "psychopath".

[kubanczyk]

The author was concerned with true psychopaths (in the clinical sense), but I guess this timid tactic is as usable towards the narcissistic types.

[DanBC]

Psychopath doesn't have a clinical definition. It's strictly pop-sci bollocks. (EDIT: "psychopath" does not appear as a diagnosis in ICD10 or DSM IV or DSM V. Other disorders have some overlap with the concept of psychopathy, but there isn't any dx that has a clear mapping.)

That's a good thing, because it avoids stigmatising a real diagnosis that's given to a group of people who are already deeply stigmatised.

[oska]

Yes, agree that using the word 'narcissist' instead would have been better. Psychopaths don't necessarily feed on drama or crave attention.

[wastedhours]

Can confirm this worked with an ex-friend. She was such an emotional drain, that just not responding just generated more ire. In the end, just gave a lot of boring responses and she grew tired, eventually allowing me to no-contact simply and easily.

[hnuser123456]

Interesting that this language is gendered.

[justinjlynn]

> his mind is re-trained to expect boredom rather than drama

> he will find a new person to provide drama and he will find himself drawn to you less and less often

> he can’t stand boredom

Unnecessarily gendered language is jarring for the reader and also, (possibly) unintentionally, sexist. The singular they/them/their is generally acceptable to use in cases such as these.

[randomchars]

Should all previous content be rewritten on the internet to be PC? This is from 2012, and as far as I've noticed, this gender neutral thingy started coming up a few years after that.

[toxik]

In the same way that you wouldn't quote somebody on the whimsical nature of the feeble woman, you shouldn't propagate ideas that paint men as perpetrators.

In 2012, this was already well-known. The language is jarring and sexist for no apparent reason. It is not undue revisionism.

[winkeltripel]

> It is not undue revisionism.

Any level of revisionism is undue.

[DagAgren]

Perpetrators are most often men, though. That's not good, no! But you do not fix that problem by pretending it does not exist.

The point of not using gendered language is to compensate for discrimination, not to hide problems.

[Hnrobert42]

I disagree. I did not find it jarring nor did I perceive it as sexist.

[zadokshi]

Perhaps we need a browser plugin for people to detect when ‘he’ is being used as the default gender and convert it?

‘He’ worked as the default pronoun for a long time in many languages all over the world. (And still does in many languages) I find it curious how many people can be sold into the idea that a language can be considered sexist.

[leshenka]

> browser plugin

They exist. I'm not sure that they can de-gender language, but they can swap word A for word B

[hnuser123456]

It's not that English is sexist, it's that the passage is sexist. Using "they" as gender neutral has been around for decades.

[DagAgren]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_narcissism

[oska]

I noticed the same thing. Maybe I should have got a quote from elsewhere as it's not particularly well written. Nevertheless, it still gets the concept across.

[greendestiny_re]

I didn't notice the gender at all.

[corobo]

Yeah, sounds good.