Episode 160 - Staying Quiet Is Already Jeopardizing Your Relationships
There’s one sentence I hear more than any other from the women I work with when we’re talking about hard conversations. It usually sounds like, I know I need to say something… but what if they get upset, what if they don’t like it, what if they push back? Underneath all of it is the same fear: what if I jeopardize the relationship? In this episode, we’re looking at where that fear comes from and how it’s really impacting your relationships, because resentment, anxiety, and disconnection don’t go away when you stay quiet; they just build over time. Here’s what I cover:
Why the relationship is already being affected when you don’t say what’s true
The different ways fear can show up when you have something difficult to say
Why staying quiet creates an edited version of you in relationships instead of real connection
How loneliness builds when you’re in relationships where you aren’t fully seen or known
A practical way to begin speaking up in your relationships, including a phrase to open the conversation
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:58
Hi, happy Wednesday. Short episode for you today because the constant avalanche of bullshit that we are living through right now, whether that is politically, especially in the United States, perimenopausally, if you are in my same demographic.
01:16
Yeah, it is a lot and it has made me appreciate small bite-sized things that are meaningful, that are simple, that work, that I can just take and think about. And so I want to talk today about the one sentence that I hear almost more than any other from the women that I work with when we are talking about how to have hard conversations, how to address things that hurt, things that don't work, things that need to change.
01:46
And it goes something like this. The person will say, I know I need to say something. Like I can tell in my body, I'm anxious, I'm angry, I'm resentful, I'm lonely, I withdraw. I find myself going to Netflix or shopping or just collapsing and kind of shutting down.
02:08
And I know I need to do something about it. And then the second part of that sentence, it varies a little bit, right? They'll say something like, what if they get upset? What if they don't like it? What if they push back?
02:20
What if it doesn't work out the way that I want? What if my emotions come up and I can't control them? What if the person thinks I'm too much or they misunderstand me? And so all of that is kind of the same fear as, what if I jeopardize the relationship?
02:41
What if, you know, this relationship is at this certain level right now, or it looks like this certain way? And what if when I say something, it changes and I'm not able to handle how it changes? It's just a kind of dread and fear mixture and the sense that something bad is waiting on the other side of you saying that honest thing.
03:08
And so the smartest move is to just stay quiet and continue to internalize everything. And I just want to spend some time with that fear today because it is real. It is very understandable. And it is also not telling you the entire truth because that fear wants to move you away from the quote unquote danger of the hard conversation, but we don't pay a lot of attention into where that fear is actually moving us.
03:39
Like what does it look like to live in the fear of, I can't speak up because I'm afraid of what it might do to the relationship. So first, let's just break it down a little more specifically because the fear isn't just one thing.
03:55
It shows up in a lot of different situations and maybe wearing different costumes. So specifically, though, what if they don't like what I say? What if they get mad? What if there's pushback? This usually is the woman who's already mentally run the conversation 27 times in every single possible version and tried to guess at every single possible reaction, the other person's face, their body language,
04:24
what they say, what they don't say. And they've already imagined that there's a look on their face of disapproval or the relationship gets cold or the other person says something that confirms her worst fear, which is, I'm asking for too much and I shouldn't have said that.
04:41
So that's one way that the fear shows up. Another way, what if they push back? And that's actually a little different because this means that the person is at least willing to start the conversation, but she's afraid of not being able to hold her ground once it starts.
05:02
That the other person will have whatever objection and push back a little bit. And she knows that the moment someone else pushes back, something in her is just going to collapse and cave in. And she'll end up either just apologizing for bringing it up at all.
05:20
And she will spend a lot of time berating and criticizing herself for bringing it up. And neither one of those sound like great options. So I'm just not going to bring it up at all. And then there's another version that is the most common.
05:36
It's the kind that just doesn't have words to explain it yet. It is just stuck. It's just like I feel this low level anxiety all the time. I'm walking on eggshells. I am really kind of trying to figure out what I could or might say, but it always just feels terrible.
05:56
And so I don't even really think about it much after that. It's just a quiet, chronic sense that something needs to be said, but I also can't say it. And I don't know exactly why. And these are all rooted in the same fear.
06:13
They are all different versions of I might lose something that I can't afford to lose, or I won't know how to deal with the loss of. And here's what I want you to understand about this fear. It did not come from nowhere.
06:32
It came from a very early, very rational calculation that most girls make before they're even old enough to know that they're making it. The research on this is crystal clear. Girls learn early that there is tension between honesty and belonging, right?
06:51
That you can't always have both. They learn that telling the truth can put relationships at risk. I want you to think back to your earliest memories of when you knew that someone was not happy with you.
07:06
An adult that you depended on for survival, that you needed to be able to safely navigate something, school, a teacher, a coach, a religious leader, a parent, and how your experience of that interaction with them taught you, oh, I can't tell the truth here.
07:30
Telling the truth about what's going on for me actually gets me in trouble. I don't, I'm not rewarded. I'm actually punished. And the punishment shows up in I'm separated, I am talked about, I am blamed, or I feel that the other person withdraws a little bit.
07:49
And so most of us, when we have that interaction, we learn to choose the relationships that we depend on for our survival. It's a no-brainer, right? Learning that the people in your world need you to be a certain way.
08:10
We learn that. And so that's how we accommodate and make ourselves smaller because the alternative, the loss of the relationship to a four-year-old or five-year-old or 13-year-old or 17-year-old or even 25-year-old, right, is so catastrophically dreadful that we're just not going to go forward with anything that would threaten that relationship.
08:36
And that makes so much sense. We go quiet. We smooth it over. We learn that the version of ourselves that is most likely to be loved is the version that asks for very little and manages everything and everyone without complaint, without need.
09:01
And that makes so much sense. I always want to start here. How does it make so much sense? We learn that when we're young and then we grow up. And now the threat is no longer like our survival, but it still feels like it.
09:18
That is the thing about conditioning this deep. It's not usually one event. Sometimes there can be one event, right, where you clearly remember, but it's like death by a thousand paper cuts. It is the hundreds and thousands of times that your human nervous system picked up on other people's disapproval and shrank back to the version that would get love and safety.
09:45
That is your nervous system doing what it is supposed to do. The one issue we run into as adults when we are talking about conditioning that is this deep is that your nervous system doesn't update automatically, right?
10:00
It doesn't update just because you grow up. Your nervous system is still running that old software that says, you know what? Silence is how you stay safe. Silence is how you stay loved. Editing, performing, like keeping myself this size is how I stay loved.
10:20
And here's the part that I want you to sit with. The fear says when we're older, right? If I say something in this relationship, I might jeopardize it. But here's what I want you to think about. What happens next?
10:39
So then you retreat, make yourself smaller, you swallow whatever it was that you were going to say or do. And where does that go? It goes into your body and it goes into your nervous system as proof that you can't or shouldn't say something.
10:59
And so what while our nervous system doesn't update to let us know, oh, you know what? Sara's an adult now, right? Sara doesn't depend on the same adults for belonging and security in the same way.
11:14
So we don't have to have this fear anymore. That doesn't happen. But what does happen is that every time I make myself smaller, every time I edit, every time I collapse, my nervous system takes that as proof that it needs to still run that same fearful program.
11:33
So that's the first thing that happens. It doesn't go away. It just gets buried. It doesn't get resolved. It just goes into this file folder of false proof that you need to stay the same small, edited, curated way.
11:51
The second thing that happens is that has an effect on the relationship. Think about it this way. If you've been holding back what you actually need and what you actually want, what you actually feel, your opinions, your dreams, your desires, if you've been holding that back for months or years, which is typical, then who exactly is in that relationship?
12:20
The other person isn't in a relationship with you, who you really are, what you really want, what you really desire and want to be, your dreams, your opinions. They're in a relationship with the curated version of you that has to be carefully managed so that they never feel uncomfortable.
12:44
And we don't think about that. We don't think about the fact that that actually isn't a relationship. It's a performance. It's not intimacy. It is a carefully curated version of that that has consequences.
13:02
And two of the biggest consequences are resentment and loneliness. We resent that we cannot be who we really want to be. And sometimes it comes out sideways. Sometimes it blows up when we try to get close to having a conversation.
13:19
And so it's the reverse. We want to make sure that we can have a conversation without all the resentment coming up, but it's the resentment that leaks out anyway, even when we don't feel like we can have an actual conversation.
13:33
So it's going to happen no matter what. The loneliness that comes from being in a relationship where you're never fully known is its own kind of jeopardizing. It's just quieter. It happens more slowly.
13:49
It doesn't ring loud bells and tell you, hey, you know what? This loneliness, this is because you don't really let anybody see or hear you. It just quietly hollows you out from the inside and weighs on you year after year after year.
14:06
And so here's what I want you to hear. The relationship is already at risk because you haven't spoken up. Not because you spoke up, but because you haven't. And there's one more relationship that is the most important.
14:25
And it is the relationship with you, your connection to you, your authentic understanding of who you really are. Every time you swallow the thing that you want to say, the true thing, every time you talk yourself out of asking for what you need, every time you decide that your honest experience is too risky to put into words, you are teaching your nervous system that it's not safe, but you are also disrupting and damaging the relationship that you have with you.
15:03
And the message is you can't be trusted with your own inner life, right? I can't even be honest with myself about what I need and want and that those needs aren't even safe with me, right? That is the relationship most at stake.
15:22
The self-abandonment that happens when we don't speak up creates internal disconnection. And so no wonder we have a hard time knowing what we want. No wonder we have a hard time knowing what a yes is and what a no is, because in trying to protect external relationships, we sever the one that we rely on the most to know what we want and to know what we want to do.
15:51
And that is the one with ourself. Okay. So how might we gently and practically begin to turn this around? A lot of times the question is, how do I know if the relationship that I am wanting to have a hard conversation about or this person that I want to bring something up with, how do I know that they might be receptive to that?
16:20
And how do you start feeling like, okay, I think there's something I can do here that isn't the equivalent of lobbing a grenade into the middle of the conversation. And I want to tell you about something that I've been navigating personally because I think it illustrates the real decision point better than, you know, any list of steps I could hand you.
16:43
Over the last several years, I've become increasingly aware of a dynamic with a family member that has started to not feel great. In our interactions, I've noticed that they like to talk over me, like to interrupt me with their own opinion.
17:02
They are not particularly curious about me, my life, my experience, my perspective. And when we would talk, it seemed like this person was more interested in showcasing what they knew and what they thought and their experiences.
17:19
And they weren't even aware of how I was going quiet on my end of the conversation. There was not a lot of reciprocity and we would spend time together and we would do things together and I could feel myself just, I couldn't wait till it was over, right?
17:37
I couldn't wait until I didn't have to feel the pressure of wanting to have a conversation, but I didn't think I could. And so I started to notice myself. I started to notice how I was responding to this.
17:54
I got quieter. I stopped talking as much. And then gradually I've just stopped reaching out and not wanting to spend time together. The relationship was already being affected, not because of anything like super dramatic, but because this slow, quiet withdrawal had been happening inside of me that is very normal to happen when we don't feel seen.
18:21
And so I want you to think about if this is something you notice in yourself, when you don't know what to do, you just kind of shut down and withdraw. It's very common. And so for a while, I just decided, you know, it's fine.
18:34
I don't need to say anything. I actually don't think there's anything wrong with what I call the slow fade, which is like, you know, gradually stepping back from a relationship that doesn't meet your needs anymore.
18:45
It's a completely valid choice and you are allowed to decide for any reason at any time that you don't want to continue to invest in a relationship that isn't working for you. There is no rule that you owe every relationship a conversation or even a hard conversation, any conversation at all.
19:03
And sometimes the smartest thing that you can do is just not show up. But when I thought about what I wanted to do, I have decided, and I haven't done it yet, that because of the sadness and the resentment that I was already feeling and kind of I had started the slow fade.
19:24
This person is always going to be my family member. And so I will continue to see them and interact with them. And I knew that the sadness and the resentment were going to start coming out eventually, probably sideways, probably in a moment that I didn't choose.
19:39
And I know myself well enough to know that saying nothing wasn't actually going to protect this relationship. It was just going to delay the inevitable while adding more weight to what I was already carrying.
19:55
So I'm going to address it, not to fix this person, not because I am sure that they are wrong or bad, but I'm going to say, hey, this is how I have been feeling and what I have been noticing. And I wonder if you can share your thoughts with me about that.
20:12
Because I'm open to the fact that I have a story going about this person and I'm interested in their feedback because the cost of staying silent, I'm already paying. I'm already dealing with the heaviness and making myself smaller and the dread and the guilt.
20:34
And so that's how I have decided to handle this. And I want to use that story as an illustration. First of all, my sense is that this other person would want to know how I am feeling. And so that's the first question that I would ask you and that I ask my clients is when you're thinking about saying something, and if you're trying to figure out if the relationship could be open to more depth, what's your best guess?
21:07
That is usually pretty spot on. And because we are not in charge of what other people decide to do, depending on the circumstances, sometimes that's enough. Like, for example, I've talked in previous episodes about how my relationship with my parents has really gotten smaller over the years since I decided to leave the church.
21:27
And I know that because of their particular makeup and how they think about the world, that's not going to change. And so I'm just making the best of what we do have. But sometimes there is the sense of, you know what, I do think this person would be open to hearing my experience.
21:48
And so look for openness, not perfection, because you're not looking for a guarantee that it's going to go your way. You're looking for small evidence that this person is capable of hearing you. Have they ever acknowledged being wrong about something?
22:04
Have they ever asked how you were doing and actually waited for an answer? You don't need them to have a perfect track record. You just need the sense that you matter to them and that if there were something wrong, that would concern them and that they would want to know about that.
22:23
And second, start with an invitation, not an indictment, right? One of my favorite ways to open a hard conversation. I said it just a few minutes ago. I'll say it again now. I've had something on my mind for a little while and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
22:41
That phrase does a lot of work. Number one, it signals that you have been thoughtful and not reactive. And by the way, when we are angry and resentful, right, the thoughtfulness kind of gets erased when our anger takes over.
22:58
So this is a conversation that you want to have when you're not activated and when you're not upset from a calm place. Hey, I've been thinking about some things or I noticed something the last time we were together and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
23:14
It signals that you're being thoughtful. And number two, it positions this as a conversation. You are interested in hearing their thoughts and it's not an ambush. It's not a, it's time to hold you accountable for this.
23:27
It opens a door and we just need to see if the other person will walk through. Next, start somewhere small. Don't go to your hardest conversation. If you have a group of girlfriends who go out to dinner and you never feel comfortable picking the restaurant because you feel like it's, you know, inserting too much of yourself, that would be possibly a great place to start, not with your boss or your partner that you've had,
24:03
you know, this resentful loneliness buildup for a long time, because it does matter to start somewhere smaller and safer, because that's how confidence gets built. Small victories and small wins really matter here because what your body will begin to notice is that, oh my gosh, I had this conversation in this small place, somewhere that felt safer, and I didn't die.
24:37
I survived. And that begins the collection by your nervous system of some different information, right? Then you can sit with what happened and hands on your chest, taking some deep breaths. Congratulate yourself.
24:53
We did it, right? We said what was true for us in this small way and nobody died. Here's the takeaway that I want you to sit with for today. What if I jeopardize the relationship makes a lot of sense?
25:09
And here's what I want you to know. It is already jeopardizing the relationship. The way that you have to perform and make yourself smaller and shut up when you can't say the thing is already having an effect on your relationship with that person and your relationship with yourself.
25:26
So if you have any questions about this, please send me an email, hello at seraphis.coach, or send me a DM, because here's what I know from working in my own life and with every woman I've worked with.
25:41
You deserve to have relationships where you are truly seen and known and where you don't have to present the managed version of yourself. Is that going to be every single relationship in your life? No, that's not how it works for humans, but one or two of them, yes.
25:58
And in your less important relationships, you deserve to be able to speak up and to show people more of who you really are and not just the managed presentation. And it decides with acknowledging that, you know, I have this fear that I'm going to jeopardize the relationship, but the truth is it's already happening.
26:19
Have a great week. See you next Wednesday.
