Episode 168 - What is Your Silence Teaching Your Relationships?
We often think of relationships as something we have: a marriage, a friendship, a relationship with our parents. But relationships are more like living things—they have their own patterns and ecosystems that two nervous systems create together over time. Every conversation shapes them, and every silence does too. In this episode, we're exploring what your silence is teaching your relationships and how speaking more honestly can build the intimacy and connection so many of us want, instead of isolating us from the people we care about. Here’s what I cover:
How psychologist Carol Gilligan found that many girls grow up believing they have to choose between having a voice and preserving relationships
Why staying quiet was a brilliant survival strategy in childhood but can keep us from building intimacy as adults
How your silence quietly teaches people what does and does not belong in your relationships
Practical examples of how speaking up can strengthen relationships instead of damaging them
Questions to help you notice what your relationships have learned from your silence and begin changing the pattern
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Transcript
00:59
I was sitting in a training. I really at this point can't even remember where. I know it was about relationships when the presenter shared a piece of research from psychologist Carol Gilligan from her book, In a Different Voice, that was published now, I think over like 50 years ago, that just when she said this, it landed because it was one of those moments when something really simple kind of takes a piece of your experience and puts it into words.
01:27
And it was this. Carol's research found that many girls grow up feeling like they have to choose between having a voice and having relationships. Pretty simple, but pretty profound, right? They have to choose between telling the truth, telling what is actually happening for them and their experience, and belonging.
01:53
And they learn that if telling the truth risks the relationship, I better stay quiet. And it doesn't have anything to do with being weak or passive, but it's because preserving connection is more important.
02:10
And so you can have girls who are very outgoing and very gregarious and very, you know, this isn't just like shy, passive girls. It's all girls who learn that there is this tension between telling the truth and belonging.
02:26
And here's the part that I found really fascinating. Gilligan also argued that over time, that becomes a trade that we make over and over and over and over again. We trade the honest thing that we want to say for belonging instead.
02:43
And we don't think about it consciously. We don't think, you know what, I'm choosing to have connection with my friend instead of telling her how I really feel. We just start to think it's part of our personality.
02:57
I'm just easygoing. I don't like to rock the boat. I'm just not confrontational. I'm not good at conflict. And it begins to feel like personality. And that's the way we describe it. That's the way so many of the women that I work with describe themselves.
03:12
But it's not. It's a learned behavior. And in fact, it's a brilliant strategy that protected us while we were little. You may have heard me talk about this before. It's important to always remember when we are eight years old, the adults around us are the bigger, more capable humans that we depend on.
03:32
And our nervous system is designed to protect our attachment to them because we need them. So if staying quiet keeps you connected to the people that you depend on, not only is that brilliant because we need that, but it's also teaching us what to do and what not to do.
03:52
So if we learn there are some things I talk about and I'm rewarded, your brain says do that again. And if there are other things I talk about that I get punished for or I notice other people getting punished for, your brain learns don't do that.
04:09
And that strategy makes perfect sense for an eight-year-old. The problem is eight-year-olds and 30-year-olds, 40-year-olds, 50-year-olds have fundamentally different situations and different jobs. As adults, we are trying to build some of our most important relationships around intimacy, not dependence.
04:31
And intimacy requires something different. It requires being known. Which brings me to a question I want us to think about and talk about today. What is your silence teaching your relationships? I think a lot of us think about relationships as something that we have.
04:52
I have a marriage. I have a friendship. I have a relationship with my parents. But I think relationships take on a little bit of a different meaning when you think about them as like a living system.
05:05
They are patterns. They are ecosystems. They are something that two nervous systems create together over time. And every interaction changes them, informs them, gives the nervous systems there some information.
05:22
And every conversation teaches the relationship something. And every silence teaches it something too. I want you to imagine that each of your relationships, just think about the 10 most important relationships to you and imagine them sitting in chairs all around you.
05:40
And they each get to ask you four questions. Think about the relationship with your girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, spouse, maybe a romantic relationship. And that relationship is sitting in the chair in front of you and it asks you, is honesty welcome here?
05:59
Are my needs allowed here? What happens when we disappoint each other? Can we survive discomfort together? And think about how you would answer those four questions if your most important relationships were asking you with your children, with your siblings, with your parents, with friends, people you've known for a long time.
06:25
I'm not saying that all of those relationships should be your most important relationships, but for a lot of people they are. So just imagine that your relationships were asking you. I think this gets really interesting because if every time I'm disappointed in a relationship, I swallow it or I ignore it, then the relationship learns disappointment does not belong here.
06:48
If every time I have a preference, I keep it to myself, then the relationship learns, your preferences don't matter here. If every time I'm hurt, I pretend that I'm fine, then the relationship learns.
07:02
Hurt, that's something you deal with by yourself. It's private. So when we think about it this way, silence is not neutral. Silence trains relationships. It trains expectations. It trains nervous systems.
07:18
It teaches people what is welcome and what is not. And over time, the relationship starts reflecting back what we've been teaching it. Let me give you an example. I have a client named Jenna who travels every year with the same friend.
07:36
And in the beginning, it was really fun that this friend would plan everything, the flights, the itinerary, the restaurant. She would pick it all, activities and everything. And Jenna just got to go along on these amazing trips.
07:50
And then after a little while, Jenna had preferences too, but she just didn't feel comfortable sharing them because she didn't want her friend to think that she was ungrateful for what the friend had planned, and Jenna didn't want to seem difficult.
08:06
And as we were talking it through, she realized that every time she decided her preferences mattered less than her friends, she was teaching that relationship, her needs matter more than mine. And that realization helped her see that she was unconsciously building a relationship where one person's preference had a place and mattered and the other person's didn't.
08:34
So she wanted to change that. She spoke up, they talked, they planned the next trip together, and the friendship didn't actually get weaker, it just got more honest. I've told this story before about my dad not coming to my birthday party because it fell on a Sunday and he had church responsibilities that day.
08:53
But when I look at it through this lens of what am I teaching the relationship, I have a little bit of a different take. So background, my birthday fell on a Sunday. He is a very devout member of the Mormon church, which I love that for him.
09:08
I love that he's able to have something that really fulfills him. He had some church responsibilities that he had scheduled to take place on the same day as my birthday. When I brought it to his attention and asked if he was going to come, he said he couldn't because he had these responsibilities.
09:26
And what I had taught our relationship in the past was, I take care of dad's discomfort by not making a big deal of it. I don't require him to explain decisions that don't make sense to me. And I would have said, it's okay.
09:45
We'll celebrate another time. No big deal. I totally would have protected him from my disappointment. I totally would have tried to protect him from my disappointment by not making him explain himself.
09:59
But I also would have left thinking, man, am I important to him? Is the church more important than I am? So in that moment, I decided to just ask, Dad, are you willing to reschedule? And at first, he explained why he couldn't and gave me some more excuses.
10:17
And so I just said, Dad, I think everybody would understand if you had to reschedule for a family birthday. Are you willing to do that? And eventually he said, no. It wasn't the answer that I wanted.
10:29
I let myself have a good cry after that because I was disappointed, but I wasn't uncertain anymore. The conversation had taught our relationship something important. That conversation taught our relationship something important.
10:46
And it was this. We don't hide from disappointment. We don't try to protect each other from disappointment. We don't pretend that everything's okay. We tell the truth. And that gave me something that was really valuable.
11:02
It gave me clarity and it taught our relationship something really new and really valuable. We tell the truth about how we're feeling and we don't pretend that everything is okay and we can survive it.
11:16
Now, I want to add some important nuance here. I'm not saying that every relationship needs this level of honesty. Not every relationship is meant to be deeply intimate, right? There's all kinds of relationships that are fine at different levels.
11:32
Situations where keeping part of yourself private is actually pretty smart. But privacy isn't self-abandonment. But privacy is something you decide on purpose. And so it's not the self-abandonment that I'm talking about where you are editing and performing in the relationships that you do want to be intimate and vulnerable and have a high level of connection.
11:58
Of course, discernment is healthy and boundaries are healthy and you get to decide who earns access to the deepest parts of you. I am not arguing for more honesty everywhere. I'm arguing for more honesty where intimacy is the goal, because intimacy literally means you know me.
12:20
If my closest relationships don't know what disappoints me, they don't know me. If they don't know what I long for, if they don't know what my dreams are, they don't know me. If they only know an edited version of me, they don't know me.
12:39
And if we have relationships where all of us is not welcome, we eventually start wondering why we feel lonely inside of relationships sometimes that we've had for years. And it's because the relationship only knows the version of us that we've allowed it to.
12:58
So here's what I'd love for you to think about this week. First of all, just think about one conversation that you've been avoiding and ask yourself, is my silence actually protecting this relationship or is it preventing us from becoming fully known?
13:18
And second of all, just notice every time this week when it feels like you have to choose between telling the truth and keeping the peace. What are you afraid will happen if you have a voice here? What is staying silent already costing you?
13:36
And then I want you to think about one relationship that deeply matters to you. And I want you to finish this sentence. This relationship knows and then finish it. This relationship knows I'm dependable.
13:52
This relationship knows that I'll show up, that I'll help. But then ask yourself, is there anything that this relationship doesn't know about me because I haven't told the truth? Those three questions might change the way you see your relationships, and it might bring more sharply into focus what you are teaching those relationships.
14:15
Because every time you tell the truth, you're teaching the relationship. The truth belongs here. Every time you repair after a disagreement, you're teaching the relationship. We don't hide from disagreement.
14:26
We can survive it. We can learn from it. We can totally get through it and be connected. Those are the kinds of relationships I want to build. They're the kinds of relationships that I want for you to be able to build if you want, because for so long, that tension between honesty and connection meant that we were silent and that that silence somehow protected our relationships.
14:50
But it doesn't. It actually makes intimacy impossible to achieve. My favorite thing that Esther Perrell has ever said, the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our life. It is so true.
15:03
So if we want a deeply satisfying life, we also need to have deeply satisfying, connected, vulnerable, intimate relationships. And then the last thing I just want you to remember that speaking up is not a personality trait.
15:20
It's a skill. If this episode resonated with you and you want to learn how to speak up, I am doing a free workshop every single week called Speak Up. It's where I teach the first three things that have to be in place before you can speak without having to wait until the resentment is unbearable or the relationship feels like it's hanging by a thread.
15:42
Because again, remember, speaking up isn't just something you're born with. It is a skill. You can learn it. I would love to teach it to you. So if that is of interest to you, find the link in my bio and sign up for the next workshop.
15:56
It is happening next week and every week thereafter. Thanks for listening. See you next week.
