Ghosting is the process of ending a romantic relationship by cutting off, blocking, or ignoring your former partner’s attempts to contact you. Ghosting can also happen with a friend or business associate. By ghosting someone, you’re ending a relationship without acknowledging, explaining or informing your partner of your intentions. To ghost a person is to completely abandon them. And when you abandon someone like that, they often assume the worst about themselves, especially if they’re already insecure.

Ghosting usually won’t have much of an impact if the person you were seeing wasn’t all that into you. Conversely, a person who really cared and valued the connection with you is probably hurting, experiencing a deep sense of loss and feeling this horribly empty void. You’ve ended the relationship with someone who had been a part of your life without any sense of warning, reason or explanation. They will find it much more difficult to process their loss or gain any sense of closure because you’ve left them to put all the pieces together on their own. And that will make it much harder for them to let go and move on.

Being ghosted can be extremely unsettling, leaving the person on the receiving end feeling confused, frustrated, devalued and discarded. Their self-esteem takes a hit as they’re made to feel as though something is wrong with them and that they're not even worthy of an explanation. They tend to obsess on every detail of what you and they said and did, spinning around in circles in their heads trying to make sense why you no longer care or want to be a part of their lives. The lack of proper closure that comes with being ghosted leaves them with a sense of incompletion. The hurt, loss, confusion and other convoluted feelings that they’re not able to process will remain trapped in their bodies.

The person you ghosted will very likely feel at fault and yet they don’t know what they did wrong. They tend to blame themselves because you’ve suddenly dropped out of their life. You’ve just ripped open one of their deepest of emotional wounds …that underlying sense of abandonment. All of that can be very damaging to their sense of self.

A person who is more resilient will be able to blow it off, realizing that you’re an incredibly self-absorbed, immature and possibly damaged individual by virtue of the fact that you’re ghosting. They will quickly get over their annoyance or disappointment and move on in their lives. But there are many who do not possess all the resources needed to cope with the resulting sense of loss or effect healing. Nor do they have access to the kinds of therapeutic interventions that would facilitate the healing that they are not able to do on their own.

Why you’re ghosting

Breaking off a relationship with someone is not a pleasant experience. You may be assuming the person you’re no longer wanting to be in a relationship with is going to make a scene or freak out, but that rarely happens. The person you’re breaking up with may feel hurt, sad and disappointed, but they would have at least appreciated the fact that you cared enough to let them know. You may be ghosting to avoid the other person or the issues you’re not willing to face. You’re only making matters worse by disappearing, because you’re ending the relationship with the other person in one of the most painful ways possible.

Most people won’t go to the extreme, but there are some who will be so confused and tormented by your abrupt disappearance from their lives that they will seek revenge by going out of their way to hurt you in return. But that’s the risk you’re taking whenever you ghost someone.

Maybe you think you’re saving the other person some hurt by ghosting, but in actuality, you’re causing a lot more harm. The relief you feel by running away from the person you’re ghosting is only temporary. You didn’t learn anything, which means you’re likely to repeat the same behavior again and again. It’s important for you to understand that relationships will bring your core issues to the forefront so they can be dealt with and brought to resolution. Are you so immature that you discard people every time you feel some degree of discomfort. You’re never going to learn to navigate the challenges of normal healthy adult relationships or other significant areas of your life for that matter if that’s how you operate.

If you’re like the majority people, you’ve never learned to work constructively with your own emotions. You make matters worse by suppressing or disconnecting from your feelings, physical body and the realities of your everyday life that you haven’t wanted to deal with. The resulting desensitization decreases your ability to experience love and compassion while making you oblivious to the needs, considerations and suffering of other people.

Shutting down or disconnecting from parts of your consciousness and life experience creates a deficit that prevents you from being truly intimate with yourself. You cannot be truly intimate with yourself, therefore you cannot be intimate with anyone else. You find that being physically or emotionally intimate with another human being difficult, because it puts you in touch with so many feelings and issues that you’re not willing to deal with.

It’s so easy to assume that silence is the best response when you’ve spent much of your life escaping from the issues that need to be dealt with and disconnecting emotionally. You’re assuming out of your own immaturity, ignorance, self-absorption and possibly stupidity that going dark on someone is the best way to tell them you’re no longer interested. Abruptly discarding people from your life is a form of avoidance coping in which you disconnect or shut down emotionally. And that will prevent you from maturing by stunting your cognitive, emotional and interpersonal development. And in doing so you are diminishing your capacity to truly care for other people.

The fear of hurting or disappointing someone, looking like the bad guy or girl and dealing with the anger and upset of the person you’re breaking up with can be very anxiety-provoking. What you need to understand is that the more you avoid conflict, the more your anxiety will build. The more your anxiety builds, the more your capacity to cope decreases. The more you back down from anxiety and avoid the difficult challenging situations, the more likely you are to avoid difficult or challenging situations that you encounter in the future. And that will leave you less equipped to deal effectively with the issues that arise within the context of your relationships and other realities of your everyday life.

Bailing out of relationships as soon as your feelings and issues make their way to the surface is an attempt to run from what’s inside of you. In this case you’re running away from another person who is reflecting back to you what you’re unwilling to face within yourself. You're not being honest with yourself or anyone else for that matter. And if you keep running away any time someone or something causes you to feel uncomfortable, you will never develop the maturity that comes with facing and overcoming your own fears and insecurities.

Ghosting prevents you from going through the critical growth processes that would enable you to adequately deal with the wide range of complex issues that are a normal part of being in a healthy adult relationship. Ghosting never gives the person you’re disappearing on the opportunity to share their thoughts or receive any feedback. And in doing so it causes you and the person you’re ghosting to miss out on many of the critically needed insights and understandings.

Breakups are not pleasant and yet they are an essential rite of passage to signify the ending of a relationship. The conversations you have while going through a break up help you and the person you’re breaking up with to understand what did and didn’t work in the relationship. You then take these understandings into subsequent relationships.

Showing up fully present as you go through a break up helps you to become more mindfully aware of the impact of your words and actions upon others. You become a more responsible, mature, conscientious and compassionate human being. That will enable you to be a better friend and companion.

When people become commodities to be acquired and disposed of

Spending so much time online via our computers and smart phones is leaving many of us are on sensory overload. The never ending stream of content that we’re ingesting on a daily basis is overwhelming our brain’s processing capacity. And that is causing the neurostructure of our brains to change in such a way that it’s impairing our ability to focus our attention. That’s why it’s so important to limit the amount of time we spend plugged into our devices. We also need to make a concerted effort on a daily basis to be fully present in all that we do.

Our ability to process our own emotional responses to what we experience in our lives is decreasing. We are less capable of tolerating our own emotions, therefore many of us are now afraid to feel. The inability to feel and process our own emotions prevents us from being as fully present to ourselves, other people and the world in which we live.

Technology is changing our relationship to ourselves, and in doing so it is changing the way that people relate to one another. Conversation is one of the most crucial aspects of relating to other human beings, and yet many people now are so resistant to it. Many prefer to text than talk on speak face to face or over the phone. Our inability or unwillingness to hold a conversation clearly denotes a lack of emotional and social intelligence. One of the most unfortunate consequences of our over reliance upon texting as a means of communication is that it is placing more and more distance between ourselves and others. As a result, we are less understanding of and less in tune with one another. We are also losing our capacity for empathy and compassion.

It used to be considered taboo to just disappear. Ghosting has now become so commonplace largely in part to our use of social media, dating sites and the technology that powers them. Dating apps such as Tinder, OkCupid and Match.com are providing us with a seemingly endless supply of potential partners to choose from. That only adds to the sense of disposability that enables people to carelessly discard someone once considered a friend or love interest. It’s hard to maintain the focus needed for healthy and loving attachments to form or grow when our attention is scattered by all these different people.

You no longer have to show up present, let alone hold yourself accountable now that you can hide behind the screens of your computer and smart phone. You may feel you can get away with ghosting because the likelihood of running into the person again is slim to none. And the probability of finding a new boy or girl toy within a matter of days or hours is quite likely.

Everyone and everything is so speeded up. People don’t really take the time to get to know one another anymore. In this age of online dating it’s become the norm for many people to sleep with a person and then maybe take time to get to actually know them to find out if there is much in common and if there is any basis for a relationship. There are lots of problems with this approach. Random hooking up greatly increase your risk of contracting herpes, chlamydia, HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. In many instances, you quickly realize that you don’t like the person you’ve slept with and then you feel creeped out by the whole thing. You also open yourself to all the pain, confusion, suffering, sickness, addictions, mental illness and other toxicity of the people with whom you’re fucking or getting fucked by. This is why it’s so important for you to be selective and get to know people before you become physically intimate.

Lots of people are now attempting to defend the practice of ghosting saying that it’s the best way to let someone know you’re no longer interested. You may attempt to justify your actions by saying that just how we do things now.

Our addictive relationship to modern technology and instant gratification of social media, dating apps and texting is producing a generation of self-absorbed, narcissists that are only concerned with what’s happening right now in this moment and nothing beyond. You, like so many others, may operate with the mindset of “I’ll do whatever I want” without any regard for how other people are impacted by your actions. You think nothing of ghosting another person who no longer holds your interest, viewing it as an acceptable means of terminating a relationship. You start excusing the behavior and then you convince yourself that it must be okay because so many other people are doing it. And yet you would hate if someone that you felt strongly about were to do it to you.

Maybe you’ve become so callous that you really don’t care about the impact you’re having upon others. You may even think that some of us are too sensitive for needing to have someone in our lives that we can love and be loved by and wanting proper closure and feeling hurt when that doesn’t happen. It’s this callousness or loss of sensitivity on the part of people such as yourself that perpetuates this never ending cycle of using and abusing others.

It’s so much easier to get away with being a shit head if you’re young and attractive because you’re perceived social value is much higher. You have a wider selection of friends and potential partners, therefore you’re less likely to appreciate those who are unfortunate enough to care or become involved with you. You may possess the physical attributes that attract lots of attention. You may also have a source of income that affords you an abundance of material comforts. But it’s all meaningless if you don’t share the deep and lasting connections with the people who touch your heart and soul along the way.

There will be a time somewhere down the road when you’re old. The beautiful or handsome face and firm body that once attracted so much attention will have withered with the passage of time. Your parents are dead and you’re no longer getting along all that well with your siblings. And by that time you may not even have many people that you can call friends. Who will be there to care for you if you failed to nurture the connections you made along the way?

The connections that we share with those who become a part of our lives are one of the most valuable treasures we have in life. The fact that you’re ghosting others demonstrates that you have a very limited capacity to appreciate the people who have played a part in your life or to form deep, meaningful and lasting attachments. And you probably never stop to consider that you may be burning important bridges. The person you ghosted could turn out to be a valuable friend somewhere down the road, especially in a time of need.

Actions speak louder than words. Ghosting demonstrates your unwillingness or inability to deal with your own emotions, articulate what you’re thinking and feeling and cope effectively with the realities of your daily life. You obviously do not possess the resources needed to develop or maintain a mature and healthy loving relationship. It just shows that you’re not a fully functional adult. Without realizing it, you may have done the person you ghosted a huge favor. You could have very likely done considerably more damage had you continued to be a part of their lives.

Is it ever okay to ghost?

After spending time with someone you realize you’re not all that attracted to them. After getting to know them better you see qualities about that other person that you’re not comfortable with. Or maybe you find it difficult to relate to them; therefore you no longer wish to continue the relationship. If you feel strongly enough that you’re not that into a person and you don’t want to see them again, then at least have the decency to let them know.

Everyone make mistakes. You’ll probably have second thoughts as you get to know someone if you find out they’re dishonest, unethical or that they engage in behaviors that are immoral and harmful to themselves and others. You may find other aspects of who they are to be unacceptable. As that happens you may come to realize that you want little or nothing to do with that individual.

You’re better off not having toxic people in your life. And you have every right to make your exit from a relationship with someone who poses a legitimate threat to your wellbeing. Aside from that there is little, if any, justification for discarding someone that has been a part of your life. The question you need to be asking your self is “Is this person really a threat, or are they putting me in touch with feelings and issues that I haven’t been willing to face?”

The person you ghosted may have said or done something that left you feeling uncomfortable. Maybe they were vulnerable or needy at the time. You could have let them know how you were feeling and given them a chance to course correct. Wouldn’t you want someone you valued or cared about to do the same if you were the one that said or did something that offended? There will probably by times in your life when you feel vulnerable. Imagine how you would feel if a person who meant a lot to you were to drop out of your life with no warning or explanation when you just needed someone to be there for you.

You may not see a future as a long term romantic partner with someone you’ve been hanging out with, but you do share some things in common and have been a part of each other’s lives for however long. At least have the human decency to show appreciation for what you’ve shared. And even if you’re not exactly right for each other, if you’ve enjoyed the time you spent together, then there is no reason you cannot continue a casual involvement, friendship or whatever connection is mutually comfortable.

You really don’t know how deeply wounded a person is

We live in a culture where people are so disconnected from themselves and from one another. Having someone in one’s life to love and be loved by is one of the most basic human needs. Most people need to have this connection in order to thrive. But many go for years without having a meaningful connection in their lives. That’s why many are so hungry, if not absolutely starving for love and affection. To fuck with a person in the place where they are most vulnerable by ghosting them is an act of cruelty that amounts to emotional torture.

Most people attempt to hide their pain behind the mask that they present to others. You really don’t know how deeply wounded a person is. Nor do you know how badly they have suffered in their lives. Many have been terribly hurt by the abuses they suffered as children and by the losses and cruelties they’ve experienced in their adult relationships. Having one romantic partner after another and another drop out of the picture with no explanation only adds to their devastation.

People who have been repeatedly abandoned often feel hurt, used and unworthy of being loved. They’re going to find it that much more difficult to know when to trust or feel safe to allow themselves to be vulnerable or open their hearts. By ghosting you are making it that much harder for them because they won’t know that in making themselves vulnerable to another person that the same thing won’t happen again. Feelings and memories of the hurt that you caused will very likely resurface whenever they start to connect with a potential love interest. These wounds may never heal. The hurt you’re causing and the existing wounds that you are contributing to may cause them to give up on the possibility of ever having a relationship. And that can prevent someone from ever finding the love that they truly need and desire.

Do you really want to be the one who plunges that dagger into their heart? Are you so heartless, self-absorbed and immature that you’re willing to cause that kind of suffering in another person?

Caught up in the passion of the moment

You may have been totally in love with this person, experiencing all these intense feelings of attraction and desire, consumed by the passion and planning for a future together. But then the bubble of romantic infatuation bursts and when that happens your feelings change. You’re no longer feeling that spark you did a few months, weeks or even days ago. You then realize that you and the person you’ve been seeing are not right for each other. Your feelings of attraction wane and so you just let it fade out. There is no continuity or stability on your part. And that probably has a lot to do with the fact that you don’t even know yourself.

Maybe you hang out with someone you find yourself attracted to. You have your fun, but then someone else catches your attention, so you stop returning their calls or responding to their messages. By ghosting, you’re just using the the person you were hanging out with for as long as long as it feels good or appears to meet your needs and then discarding them.

Feelings do change and sometimes you realize that the person that you've been seeing is not that special someone that you want to spend the rest of your life with. But that person is a human being. They do have feelings. And their feelings can be deeply hurt if they form an emotional attachment for you and then you suddenly disappear from their lives.

You may be so inconsistent that your feelings change like the weather, but that’s no justification for discarding someone. You, like so many others may have given out mixed messages, inadvertently or intentionally building up their hopes up and leading them on. You then realized that person has developed a strong attachment for you. The thought of someone having feelings that you’re not able to reciprocate may scare the shit out of you. It’s important for you to understand that it’s just feelings. Another person’s feelings pose absolutely no threat to your wellbeing. And if you weren’t so scared of your own feelings, you probably wouldn’t be running from other people and their feelings.

Taking other people’s feelings and needs into consideration

You made plans to get together and then you came up with some lame ass excuse and flaked out on a planned meeting. Or maybe you never responded at all. No phone call, text or email. You listen to their voice mails, read the texts and emails only to ignore their attempts to reach out to you. The person on the other end is waiting to hear from you and yet you open Facebook or Instagram and start scrolling down the page. You go back on Tinder and start swiping away. Or you find someone or something else to distract you.

Disappearing by ignoring the texts, emails or phone calls of the person that has been a part of your life is not only extraordinarily rude. It is also a very heartless and emotionally immature way to end a relationship. It’s important for you to understand that this person is now hurting because you’ve determined that they are no longer worthy of your consideration. Your total lack of regard for the other person causes you no grief, despite the fact that you have now become a source of pain for them.

Returning a phone call and responding to a text or email from someone with whom you have been involved is one of the most basic of human courtesies. If that’s too much for you, then you obviously do need professional help.

You’re probably ghosting so that you don’t have to deal with your own or another person’s emotional reaction. You may think it’s easier to just not return phone calls, texts, emails, and cut off every other form of communication. But do you ever stop to consider the feelings of the person on the other end who is faced with dead silence thinking obsessively about all the things they may have said or done wrong to cause you to abandon them? Maybe you’re just so incredibly self-absorbed that you feel you can completely ignore someone that has been a part of your life and leave it at that.

So maybe you realize you’re not all that attracted to the person you’ve been seeing and you no longer want to pursue a romantic involvement. But is it really necessary to completely delete them from your life? There are many possibilities for different kinds of relationships. Maybe you don’t want to continue in a serious relationship, but you can see the person casually and see other people. It may be a little awkward initially, but you can transition to a platonic friendship. Friendship is the underlying basis of any kind of healthy and meaningful relationship anyway. Because if you don’t have the capacity to be a friend to the people with whom you become intimately involved, you’re just another shallow, self-absorbed idiot that goes around fucking (with) people and then discarding them.

Do you ever stop to consider the feelings and needs of others? Or do you even care? Other people do have feelings and needs and in many instances they vary considerably from yours. They may form a strong attachment if you become emotionally and/or physically involved with them. And you may very likely end up hurting them if you suddenly discard them the moment you decide that you no longer want to be in an intimate relationship.

It’s important for you to take time to consider another person’s feelings and needs before you engage with them in a way that causes them to become emotionally invested. There’s nothing wrong with liking someone, feeling a strong physical attraction and not having a desire to be in any kind of serious relationship. Or maybe you do want to be intimate and yet you also want to be open to see other people. At other times, you may feel a strong connection, but no physical attraction. You may realize the other person has hopes and expectations that you cannot live up to. Being open and honest by letting the other person know how you’re feeling and then allowing the other person to articulate their feelings can prevent a lot of headaches, heartaches and other unnecessary discomforts down the road.

It’s important to slow down enough to get a sense of how you feel about the people with whom you become involved. You also need to develop a greater understanding of what you do and don’t want in a relationship. Mindfulness practices such as paying attention to to the feelings and sensations within your body while breathing softly and deeply as you focus your attention on them helps to increase your self-awareness. You also develop a greater awareness of how you feel about the people you become involved with and your interactions with them. You then need to practice being open and honest in your all of your interactions. Clearly stating what you want and what you don't want is an important part of establishing healthy boundaries.

Your responsibility to those with whom you become involved

To become emotionally and/or physically intimate with another person is to enter into their personal space. Entering someone’s personal space and then abruptly disappearing is an act of cruelty. Violating one’s personal space in this way can leave a person with deep and lasting emotional wounds.

The person that has been a part of your life made an investment of time, energy and emotion in you. They made themselves vulnerable by opening their mind, heart and soul to you. After all that has been shared, do you have any concern for their wellbeing? Do their feelings and needs matter to you? Are you such a shitty investment that you’re just going to abruptly discard them?

Being an adult means doing the right thing even though it can be difficult or uncomfortable at times. If you're mature enough to enter into a relationship and you feel strongly enough that you don’t want to continue, then you should be mature enough to end the relationship with kindness, caring and respect for the other individual.

You are not responsible for the care and wellbeing of another person in the way you are if you were to bring a child into this world. But you do have a responsibility to show basic kindness and consideration for the feelings and needs of the people with whom you become involved and to be honest in your interactions.

Relate to those with whom you become involved as you would have them to relate to you. And if you cannot do that, then you should just refrain from becoming involved with other people. In other words, stop inflicting yourself on others. Or at least warn the other person by saying something like “Hey, I’m a totally self-serving narcissist. And I will use you for only as long as you can hold my attention, at which point I will abruptly discard you.”

Facing the consequences of your actions

Ghosting someone that has been a part of your life does not come without consequences. It may seem like the easy way to get rid of someone you’re no longer interested in, until it comes back around to bite you. You may not be all that cognizant of the impact of what you say and do. Avoiding the issues that need to be dealt with or acting in ways that cause harm to others puts you at risk of being confronted with a series of ugly consequences that are beyond your control. And when that happens you may lose a portion of the sense of agency that enables you to take effective action or influence the outcome of your own life.

You cannot go around hurting other people without doing harm to yourself. You may have extricated yourself from a relationship that put you in touch with feelings and issues you weren’t willing to deal with. But you will forever have to live with the awareness that you have caused unnecessary harm to those who have befriended, showed kindness and that loved and cared for you.

Ghosting can be very costly for you in the long run because it can actually lead to ugly confrontations somewhere down the road. People who have been ghosted often track down and confront the ghost. And that can result in very awkward and embarrassing situations at work or in front of friends or family. When it does happen you may be faced with a lot more anger, hurt and other unnecessary painful emotions that you played a big part in creating. This kind of nasty drama can be incredibly destructive for everyone involved.

Ghosting can be very damaging to your reputation. There’s a chance that someone you know now or that you will become acquainted with sometime in the future knows the person you ghosted. And that can complicate your love life as the word gets around. People like to talk and the consequences of what they say are not going feel too good if a potential new love (or any other person that matters to you) learns that you’re someone that can be so grossly insensitive and hurtful by disappearing without saying a word. And those who learn of your actions are more likely to be sympathetic to the person you ghosted. Furthermore, your potential new love, if he or she has any sense about them, would be very reluctant to get involved with you when they hear that you have ghosted a former friend or love, and rightly so.

Ghosting can be especially dangerous in this age of the internet where anyone can damage your reputation by posting whatever they want online. Friends, family, other people in the community, co-workers and potential employers can learn things about you that you rather not go public with and react negatively.

Ghosting is truly reprehensible behavior and at some level you know you’re being a total shit. Do you feel guilty or remorseful? Do you even have a heart …or soul for that matter? Try seeing through the eyes of the person you ghosted and you may realize that what you did was grossly insensitive, hurtful and even cruel. Your own self-image could possibly take a nose dive because you’re not going to feel all that good about yourself as a person knowing that you’re creating a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering in others. At the very least you’ve going to be left with a lingering sense of guilt because you hurt someone by taking the cowardly way out of a relationship.

Relationships have a way of bringing the issues that need to be dealt with to your attention. Your first impulse may be to run as that happens. But at some point down the road you may realize there are things you do value about the person you ghosted and that you do want them to be a part of your life. You’ve done damage, but now you want to give it another chance. But you may never have that opportunity, because by cutting that person off you have very likely ruined any future possibilities. You can’t trigger someone into their deepest emotional wounds by abandoning them and then expect that person to take you back into their life with open arms. It’s just not going to happen …unless they’re especially needy.

And have you ever stopped to think that you might be missing out on something truly wonderful? You may be giving up on a connection that could prove to be especially valuable if you had the maturity to hang in there. Sadly, you never gave that person a chance and therefore you will probably never know what you’re missing out on.

Conclusion

You have a responsibility to those with whom you become involved that have invested time, emotion and effort into being in a relationship with you. Anyone who has done so deserves to know if you decide that you are no longer interested in them. If you’ve been with a person long enough to have to actually break up with them, then you owe it to them to communicate honestly, openly and in person. If you don't have what it takes to tell someone “Hey, I don't like you enough to want to continue in a romantic relationship with you” or whatever else you happen to be feeling, then you're obviously not emotionally mature enough to be in an adult relationship.

Why get involved with someone in the first place if you’re just going to discard them? Do you ever stop to think about how you feel about someone before you get involved with them. Do you not have enough of a sense of yourself enough to know who you like and want to be a part of your life? To just cut and run demonstrates that you’re either so emotionally stunted, that you have little, if any, consistency or that you’re a narcissist that uses people for your own selfish ends and then disposes of them. And if that’s the level of your maturity, then you should just refrain from becoming emotionally or physically involved with other people. Or at least warn them so they can decide if you’re worth the investment of their time, effort and emotion.

Step into the other person’s shoes and then imagine how it would feel to have someone you care about suddenly disappear with no explanation. Stop and imagine what it would be like to be on the receiving end of your words and actions. You may be so heartless that the thought of ghosting someone who’s life you played a part in doesn’t even faze you. But for a lot of people, the impact of being ghosted can be especially devastating.

The fact that you can just ghost someone who has been a part of your life shows that you are not loyal or trustworthy. You’re unprincipled, you lack empathy and you do not have what it takes to be a true friend or romantic partner.

By ghosting someone you’re setting a bad example. You’re actions are having a hugely negative impact upon society as a whole. Because as more people see that ghosting an easy way to get rid of someone, they are more likely to do so without ever stopping to consider the hurtful impact of their actions upon others.

Stop running away. And stop being such an interpersonal asshole. Start making a concerted effort on a daily basis to show up fully present by facing the issues and challenges as they present themselves to the best of your ability. Only then will you become a functional adult. Do yourself and everyone with whom you become involved a huge favor by seeking out professional help to assist you in addressing your own emotions and the issues that you’ve spent your life avoiding. You will live a much healthier and happier social, romantic and professional life, and so will the people with that play a part in your life when you address your issues to the best of your ability rather than running away from them.

The damage has been done once you’ve ghosted someone. You may offer an apology if something moves you to resurface in the life of the person you ghosted, but you cannot change the fact that you have caused unnecessary harm. Can you ever be trusted or taken seriously? Are you even worthy of any kind of emotional investment?

Just saying you’re sorry does little, if anything, to heal the deep emotional wounds. Words are meaningless if they are not backed up by constructive heartfelt action. If you’re truly remorseful then you will find it within yourself to make it up to them by demonstrating through you actions that you truly do care for that person and their wellbeing.

Nothing of value or significance comes without sustained effort. Healthy and loving relationships are about nurturing one another. They require presence, patience, honesty, openness, vulnerability and a willingness learn and grow. It’s important for you to understand that healthy mature adults definitely do not discard one another. They value the connections they share with the people that become a part of their lives. And they work constructively to address any issues that arise within the context of their relationships.

A special thank you to Brian James Hoffman for allowing me to use the image of his painting “Ghosted.” Be sure to check out more of his amazing work on his Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/OddLuckArtwork/