Silence is a False Security Blanket

Your chest clenches. A drop of sweat begins its slow descent down the back of your neck. The throb of your heart pounds in a new, urgent rhythm.

You’re standing, silent, uncertain what to say, feeling waves of anxiety shut down your ability to speak because someone dared to bring up a subject or ask a question too complicated or too personal to address.

You’ve been there. I know you have. We all have. That’s our response to the tough everyday challenges of life.

Some of us freeze simply because we’re caught off-guard by the ask and fear fumbling the answer. Or we don’t yet know how we feel about the subject at hand, so we mumble something inane or shrug, hoping to avoid the subject.

But I want to talk about another kind of silence, vulnerability silence. Trauma silence.

I want to talk about answering, “I’m fine” when inside your heart has been shredded and you only hear hollow echoes of a life that used to exist. I want to talk about not being able to say your alcoholic husband was stopped by a cop for public peeing in an alley while drunk. I want to talk about not being able to acknowledge you were sexually harassed by your boss because he owned the company, HR was his sister, and you still needed to eat until you could find a new job. I want to talk about not finding the words to say my son is dead.

I want to talk about why we shut down our voices.

And yes, that paragraph above was me. I was the silent one in those situations and many, many more. Silence was my security blanket.

After trauma breaks us, silence is the glue holding us together, regardless of the severity of the trauma. We hold our truth close, thinking “speaking will reopen the wound” or “I’ll be judged” or “we shouldn’t air our dirty laundry” or “there won’t be any consequences so why bother?”

We’re silent because we fear speaking will shatter us further.

We’re silent because we no longer want to feel the pain.

We’re silent because we believe it will prevent the scab that has started to crust over the wound from being dislodged, wrecking us again.

And all of that is right, but it’s also all wrong, because the effects are only temporary.

Silence is short-term relief. Necessary relief. Don’t get me wrong, relief has an important purpose, but it is temporary.

If we bury our pain forever under a silent mantle of fear, the unexpressed pain from trauma will sit in our hearts, secretly rotting away our self-worth, our identity, and leaving us unable to feel or to love or to trust the way we once did. We may not know that in the moment we choose silence. We may not see it as a long-term consequence when the relief of not speaking works its magic, giving us a reprieve.

Relief, even temporary, lures us into a false sense that we’re doing the work and healing is happening.

And in the worst of our pain, relief is magic. Yet relief from pain isn’t the same as healed.

You’ve known someone who seemed empty or perpetually sad. Perhaps you have an awareness of something difficult in their past, but it’s never discussed. Or you have a friend who divorced never discussing why, who now shuns all men out of fear of being hurt again. Pain has left them diminished, specifically, the silence around their pain has left them diminished. It has left them restricted emotionally.

Silence feels right. Silence feels protective.

Silence lies to us. Silence allows us to lie to ourselves.

Silence feels like relief initially as we process complex emotions, but it will become an infection, deep inside if left unattended. It will leave us with a hole in our hearts. It will leave us empty.

Pain doesn’t evaporate because we refuse to talk about it. Trauma pain festers inside us like a pus-filled contaminated wound. It’s a foreign body. Like any deep wound, the infection needs to be irrigated for the wound to heal.

I’m not suggesting that speaking is easy or that speaking alone is the remedy.

And I can’t guarantee that speaking will fix you but, I can guarantee that if you don’t, you will stay at least partially broken even if you don’t yet see yourself that way.

Speaking, or writing, of your trauma is the antiseptic needed to transform your wound into a faded scar. We can’t fully heal from trauma if we refuse to speak it. The trauma stays buried, influencing our behavior until we reject it and choose to expel it with our words.

As someone personally well-versed in the security blanket of silence after my own traumas, learning to speak was the most life-changing, healing action I’ve taken. I chose me. I chose my own emotional health. I chose to fight to prevent trauma from leaving me empty by rejecting the security blanket of silence.

What do you choose?