Self-Silencing: Why We Avoid Hard Conversations

Send us Fan MailKaren brings the topic cold: why do we avoid the conversations we most need to have, especially when a life is on the line? She finished Crank by Ellen Hopkins and spent the whole book furious at the mother who watches her daughter unravel and never says a word, until she recognized herself in her. Karen opens up about her own teenage and college years of drug use, drinking, and a mother who never asked, and then about the two conversations she skipped with Jonelle: the self-harm she knew about in high school and said nothing about for years, and the letter she mailed after college instead of asking a question. Jonelle tells her what that letter actually did, and reveals that the cutting was never depression; it was autistic masking and a need to feel something. From there, the two of them take avoidance apart. Karen cites therapist Annie Wright on avoidance as a nervous system response rewarded by the body, and Audre Lorde's line that your silence will not protect you. Jonelle pushes back with a harder question: before you ask why you are avoiding a conversation, ask whether the conversation is yours to have at all, and if it is not, ask what in you is bothered by it. Karen lands on an epiphany midway through: that we may stay silent because we believe naming a behavior means permitting it. They close on what actually works: open-ended questions that invite self-reflection instead of advice that triggers defensiveness, and specific questions instead of a generic "how are you doing" that is too big to answer.CALLS TO ACTIONName one conversation you have been avoiding this week, and write down the actual fear underneath it. Not the reason you tell other people. The real one. Karen's turned out to be that all three of her reasons for staying quiet were protecting her, not Jonelle.Before you decide to speak up, run Jonelle's decision tree. Ask whether this is yours to say, and if the answer is no, sit with what in you is bothered by it. Sometimes the work is the conversation. Sometimes the work is the discomfort you are trying to hand to someone else.Swap one piece of advice for one open-ended question this week with someone you are worried about. Make it specific, not "how are you doing." Then notice whether they open up or shut down.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at [email protected] Notes: The line, "your silence will not protect you," is from Audre Lorde's 1977 essay, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action. The idea that niceness and love are not the same thing comes from bell hooks' All About Love. The nervous system research on why avoidance feels safer and why it gets rewarded as a woman as diplomacy is from therapist Annie Wright, LMFT.Support the show