As many of us have found out, silence can be violence when it is utilized to wound. It’s one of the most potent ways to cause deep suffering. And it is one of the most effective ways to delay someone’s development, particularly when used as a weapon at an early age. Many people that I have worked with have indicated that they would have prefered verbal abuse to silence in early life. Because when you are abused, you somehow know that you exist. When you are given the silent treatment, you aren’t so sure. Sometimes neglect is the deepest wound of all.
My childhood was a relentless mix of abuse and neglect. It was one of those childhoods where it was difficult to isolate specific traumatic events. My therapist would ask, and only a few stood out. One of them was unforgettable. I was 12 years old and my family had driven from Toronto to Niagara Falls to go to Marineland. Because my mother was angry at my father, she decided to stay in the car while the others went inside. I stayed with her, largely because she had refused to connect with me on the drive over. She just sat there stonefaced, while I did everything I could to elicit a response. I felt tormented and immobilized. So I stayed in the car with her for nearly four hours, seeking contact from the backseat. I talked, joked, sang, asked what I had done. Anything to get her attention. Anything to get a response. None came. Silent treatment was her specialty.
I remember this experience well, largely because it would return to consciousness whenever someone in my life went silent. It didn’t even matter why they went silent. The wound was so intense that it made it difficult to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy silences. If they went quiet, the triggers came roaring back to life. And I was suddenly right back there, sitting in the back seat of our white Pontiac Strato Chief trying to get my mother’s attention. Me and mom, living out the abandoning nature of our time together.
Over time, I worked much of this through. It wasn’t easy, because all of that early life silent treatment stayed with me on a myriad of different levels. There were the triggers, but there was also a tendency to bypass close relationships in the hopes of avoiding the pain of disconnection. If you keep to yourself, nobody can ghost you. And there was a kind of defeatedness that I carried within me. A deep well of internalized shame that prevented me from actualizing my abilities in early life. When I worked with Bioenergetics cofounder Alexander Lowen, we uncovered it. Birthed in the demeaning nature of my dynamic with my mother, it manifested as shallowed breath and armoured musculature. It was all over my physical and emotional body. And the only way to resolve it was to finally express the rightful anger that got buried at an early age. To roar myself back to life. And so I did, and much of it left me.
If silent treatment has been part of your life, here are some quotes that might validate and support you. There is a real benefit to healing the originating material, and to coming to understand the ways that it has impacted your lived experience:
“As many of us have found out, silence can be violence when it is used in an effort to wound. It is one of the most potent ways to cause deep suffering. And its very effective, particularly when utilized on highly relational beings.
Because highly relational beings are built for dialogue. They are ready, willing and able to process the material that comes up between them and those they are connected with. They don’t know any other way. When they are denied that opportunity, they suffer. And not just on an emotional level—they suffer immunologically as well.
They become more at risk of disease when the bridge to expression is blocked. Because all those unsaid words and unprocessed feelings congeal inside, risking their physical well-being. If you are someone who is still carrying the remnants of unresolved material that was denied expression by silent treatment, do your best to move that material through you. If you can’t do it with the silencing aggressor, do it with a therapist, or with another friend.
Don’t allow someone else’s silence to imprison you in a museum of old pain. Express it fully, move it on through. It’s not yours for the keeping...”
And…
“Using silence to express anger, particularly if utilized on someone knowingly triggered by silence, is a form of sadism. I'm not talking about going silent solely for the purposes of self-protection and self-regulation. I'm talking about the use of silence as a weapon, as a tool of passive aggression designed to cause harm. It took me a long time to realize that this is a very common wounding technique, one that often goes unnoticed by those triggered by silence. And it’s a deadly one. Because sticks and stones may break our bones, but silence breaks our hearts. It can disable us, permanently. So look closer at the intentions of any silencers you know. And if you realize that someone is using silence to shatter you, pick up the pieces and walk the other way. Make yourself so scarce that their silence falls on deaf ears.”
And…
‘YOUR CONSENT IS NOT REQUIRED’ PODCAST
Check out my potent dialogue with author/journalist Rob Wipond if you get a chance. Rob is a freelance journalist and creative nonfiction writer who writes frequently about the interfaces between psychiatry, civil rights, policing, surveillance and privacy, and social change. This guy’s got guts! His articles have been nominated for seventeen magazine and journalism awards in science, law, business, and community issues, and he’s the author of the recently published book Your Consent is Not Required: The Rise in Psychiatric Detentions, Forced Treatment, and Abusive Guardianships. That’s what we talk about in this week’s Enrealment Hour Podcast.
This may appear to be a topic that is only relevant to some of us, but given that the now broadened definitions of mental illness are such that every single person on earth will at one time fit within them, we are all at risk of being forced into treatment by an unimaginative and self-serving psychiatric system that has little understanding of the experiential underpinnings of emotional illness. Not only the underpinnings, but the ways in which they manifest in our thinking and relationality. I had assumed that the archaic approach that Rob details had faded away as we closed most asylums and became more conscious of psycho-therapeutic approaches and the adverse effects of psychotropic medications. I was entirely wrong. It is now a bigger problem than ever before. This is a horrifying turn of events that I believe we all need to be aware of.
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THE ENREALMENT METHOD COURSE is Coming Soon
On March 27th, I will teach my first Enrealment Method Course. The culmination of many years of hard work, this 7-week on-line course will support your journey to humanize your spiritual life. To clarify your sacred purpose. To convert your truth aches into true-path. To get real in an unreal world.
The first part of the course is focused on the quest for presence. Not presence as a dissociated way of being, but presence as a whole-being experience. The intention is to get so here that your purpose cannot help but reveal itself. The second part of the course is focused on clarifying that purpose and developing a blueprint for humanifesting it. It is my belief that at some point our presence and purpose become indistinguishable from each other. You are here and you know why you are here. And then life takes on an entirely different dimension.
I’m including this as a free course offering for anyone on the paid subscriber list of the Enrealment Newsletter. You will receive one audio per week, as well as weekly workbook prompts and exercises. And I will create an email path for anyone who wishes to connect with me with sharings and inquiries. So if you aren’t already a member, and feel called to the course, I invite you to join us. You won’t be disappointed. For those who are intending to participate, I will suggest some things that you can do to prepare in the coming weeks. To get a more precise sense of this free offering, here is a course description:
https://www.soulshapinginstitute.com/events/the-enrealment-method-where-presence-meets-purpose-3/
CALL TO ACTION!
It is all too easy for us to forget our offerings in this distracted world. There can be no doubt that a variety of individuals and systems benefit from our battered self-concepts and persistent state of overwhelm. If that is your experience, I invite you to remember that your birth is no accident. Whether you believe in the journey of the soul across lifetimes, or something that is more limited in time, I suspect that we can agree that residing at the heart of you is a web of callings and offerings that long to be lived. And that we need your unique blueprint, your one-of-a-kind gifts. We need your unique personality—your fiery hunger for truth, your longing for a better world. We need what you have to offer desperately.
Whenever you forget, read my CALL TO ACTION. Or, write your own. Pin it up on your bedroom door. Make your intentions so clear that they become your buffer against the madness of the world. And so real that they fuel you to live the life you were born for.
And never forget…
Treasure yourself, Jeff
🖤 The silent treatment is an all encompassing terrorization technique which produces the shame of deep abandonment wounds. As a child, you learn that that you must have done something so horrible, that is so unforgivable, that would make the one you love dearly, or whom you look to for survival, cut off communication and leave you without explanation. You were supposed to be able to read their minds, you know, “if you really loved them”! What is left is shame. There’s no redemption in this situation, because the only person who can lift that shame and provide reconciliation is the silent one. There’s nothing that cuts deeper than this technique, because it causes the victim to abandon oneself powerlessly in shame, seeking the “forgiveness” of the silent one. As one who grew up in a home with this challenge, I have spent my life searching deep within for the elusive triggering “nugget” that relives this painful wound of abandonment every time someone I love goes silent. 💔
I believe being shunned is the worst experience a person can have, the absolute opposite of being seen and loved. Shame is the result and it calcifies around our soul making spontaneous loving presence very difficult. Thank you for sharing your process and making hope real.