On Suffering in Silence
Almost everywhere we turn we are encouraged to express ourselves. Social media platforms extol us to share whatever is on our minds, advertisers promise their products will manifest our deeper-selves and reveal them to the world, our employers inform us we can ‘speak up’ about any issue without fear of reprimand, our friends remind us that we can tell them anything, and freedom of speech is one of our most cherished and highly valued freedoms. Despite all this (or perhaps, in spite of all this), we shut up (or shut down) those parts of ourselves that aren’t beautiful or readily marketable out of fear of rejection, judgement, or misunderstanding.
As with so many psychological problems, this likely has its roots in childhood. The parent who tells their child ‘you are driving me crazy’ or ‘you will be the end of me’, or who, perhaps, is going through enough problems of their own that the child sees that their own trouble would only add more weight to an unbearable load; sends a sometimes clear and other times implied message to the child to keep their sufferings to themselves.
As we grow up, we continue bottling up, and therefore perpetuating our suffering, so as not to annoy the people around us. We smile, appease, and do what we can to keep those around us happy; a poor compensation for an inner happiness we cannot have, or believe ourselves unworthy of. In this sense, we aren’t nice, but instead, scared. Our friendliness is not borne from choice, but from a fear of making others upset, just as we did our parents when we were younger.
What we need is two things. Firstly, we need to recognise how we do not want to speak up because we think the people we hold dear will find us broken, inept, and unworthy of their time; that is, we need to see how scared we are people will reject us for who we are beneath the thin veneer of false cheeriness we have carefully cultivated over the years. Secondly, we need to develop the courage and insight to open up and see that the people around us really care, and are here to accept us in all our hues; not just our best, but our worst too.
Just as we silently suffering around others, we also suffer silently within ourselves. Echoing Paul Goodman’s 9 Types of Silence, there is the ‘noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination’ a ‘loud and sub-vocal’ inner monologue of self-hate which drowns out the quiet whisper of the better part of ourselves that says ‘there are others here that love you and are here for you’.
There is another silence, the silence of absence. It is the suffering that has never been registered as suffering. It is not silent because it does not speak, but because it is not heard. When we act tough to avoid feeling pain, or run away from intimacy to avoid being hurt, we dress these up as acts of maturity in a turbulent and contradictory world. The suffering here is silent because the suffering has been dressed as pragmatic realism. If it is never registered for what it is, it cannot be acted upon properly.
Developing into the best versions of ourselves we can be demands that we begin to investigate and reflect on who we are and how, without our knowledge, we perpetuate our own suffering. Following this, we must then muster the necessary courage to share our suffering with those around us, knowing that they truly love us and we do not have to suffer in silence anymore.
Proper Candor 