There is a technique for dealing with hostile people that maps almost exactly on to the British national character. Do you know about this? I only recently discovered it, lagging behind followers of therapy Instagram and those seeking urgent strategies to survive the holiday season. It is called – with due deference to how Alan Partridge this sounds – “grey rocking”. But it might as well, for its evasive politeness, be called the “up to a point, Lord Copper” approach to neutralising aggressors.
If you’ve ever smiled blandly in the face of someone you violently dislike; if you’ve ever done a flat, “oh, wow”, or “right” to everything they say; if you’ve ever given the sketchiest details when they ask what you’re up to – then, along with millions of other Britons, you have probably been unwittingly grey rocking it like a pro.
Officially, the removal of an emotional response from someone who feeds off disharmony – for the sake of argument let’s call this person a narcissist – is supposed simply to bore them into retreat. Cut off their oxygen, deny them the drama even of refusing to engage, and you put them in an unbearable limbo. Through sheer force of blandness, the theory goes, you can transform yourself from a victim with responses that gratify your tormentor, into, er, a grey rock. You give them nothing, while being perfectly, mercilessly pleasant until they crack and stagger off to find a new target.
The difficulty with this, particularly for those of us who grew up in an era before these kinds of discussions were commonplace, is that the power rush can be almost overwhelming. Most people over 40 were not, I’d hazard, raised to identify “boundaries” or “gaslighting” or “toxicity” or “red flags”, words we now use to pathologise the people we hate. Much of it is legitimate and helpful. It puts an end to guiltily picking up the phone to the person who rings at 7am or 11pm and resentfully giving them 40 minutes to talk. It allows us to dispatch harassers in a fraction of the time it used to take. Access to justifications about boundaries can also, I’d say, be a thrilling and vaguely addictive way to act badly and still feel in the right.
Clearly, I’m not the first person to think about this. If you type “grey rock method” into a search engine, one of the first returns is, “Is grey rocking abuse?”. As a behavioural approach, it’s a form of withdrawal that can itself be emotionally damaging. Is the person I’m thinking of doing this to genuinely a narcissist, or are they just a bit annoying? Am I “taking a break” from a friendship because that person threatens my wellbeing or because I can’t be bothered – which is allowable, perhaps, but less so if I dolly up my laziness as something more profound. Is it greyrocking or is it being an arsehole?
I guess the bigger question is why, if you’re grey rocking (I’m slightly ashamed of myself for deploying this term as if it’s real, although the dynamic is one I recognise and use) someone close to you, why keep them in your life at all? Bland evasion doesn’t seek to fix a relationship, merely to recognise that it is unfixable and offer shelter while keeping the door vaguely open. Other schools of therapy would suggest that this is an unhealthy fudge: a skimmed-milk version of actually dealing with a problem.
But I recognise its uses. A toxic parent, say, whom it is too hard or too damaging to cut out of one’s life may be held indefinitely at arm’s length via this method. Or, at the other end, it may be a useful dodge when dealing with peripheral relatives too minor to go to the bother of excommunicating. Families are complicated, and it is a way of paddling safely around difficult people for long enough to get to the other side of Christmas.
For many of us the good, or possibly bad, news is that we’re doing it without even trying. As a piece of self-preservation, grey rocking is, I suspect, harder for Americans to pull off than for those of us whose cultural backgrounds incline towards passive aggression. For those of us who are happy for things to go unacknowledged and not confronted for as long as it takes, it’s the legitimisation we’ve been waiting for.
Right? Hmmm. Right. Oh, wow.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist and author
