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...

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".

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Interesting that this language is gendered.