People who go quiet when hurt
12 April 2026 02:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlode"People who go quiet when hurt" -- apparently this is a new piece of pop psychology. https://www.bolde.com/psychology-says-people-who-go-quiet-when-theyre-hurt-arent-shutting-you-out-they-learned-early-that-pain-leads-to-these-10-consequences-so-silence-feels-safer/
But the conclusions they draw just don't ring true to me at all. No, I don't 'reach out' when I'm hurt; I don't respond well to group sessions or psychotherapy, because my instinct is to shut up like a clam and I'm not just dying to tell the world about all the times someone humilated or cheated me (why would I want to expose my own failures?) In fact I know people who are never happier than when they are talking about how wronged they are, and I find it frankly uncomfortable to be around.
But that is *not* evidence that I suffered emotional neglect in my childhood, or that I was punished for crying. It's true that my parents didn't go round constantly moaning about unfairness or suspecting everyone else of being out to get them, but that's normal sane behaviour, not a broken 'map for what pain looks like when it's being handled'. (And in any case when you're handling it, you don't dump it on your *children*...)
Yes, I am aware that I'm emotionally damaged -- traumatised, if you like -- but not in that direction; my problem is not fear that no-one will love me if I show unhappiness, but the deep-seated subconscious lesson that *my* affections cannot possibly be a welcome gift, and that attention from me is likely to be experienced as an unwanted intrusion, and continued interest as offensive. But that has nothing to do with fearing that other people can't 'handle the weight' of vulnerability on my part.
It's quite simply that being happy makes me want to talk more, and being unhappy makes me want to talk less. I don't feel an urge to moan on and on about things that worry me; if it really worries me my instinct is *not* to talk about it but to pretend it doesn't exist and hope that it will go away, and what really causes me violent distress is being trapped between the irresistible force and the immovable object: the knowledge that I *can't* just do nothing, and yet the prospect of having to do whatever-it-is terrifies me.
But wanting to talk less isn't a consequence of having had my vulnerabilities used as weapons against me by those to whom I revealed them; it's simply a result of the way that excitement and a sense of achievement manifests itself in me as an overflowing of *words*. I talk more when I'm happy. I doubtless talk too much about things that interest me (but as I'm good with words, I can only hope that the result is at least interesting in its own right).
And I talk less about things that I'm worried about because, I suppose, of some sort of deep primaeval superstition that *saying* a thing will manifest it in reality; taboo has power. If I don't put my fears into words, and above all if I don't communicate them to anyone on the outside, then maybe they won't actually take form in reality. If I don't *tell* anyone then maybe it won't come true; a very childish instinct (burying one's head in the sand), but not anything to do with 'emotional abuse'.
A problem shared is not a problem halved; it's a fear broadcast and amplified by numbers of believers. I wouldn't confess a problem to someone unless I had reason to hope that they could fix it for me-- in which case, yes, I'm prepared to play the "oh woe, poor little me" card rather than have to do the thing myself. But I don't get pleasure or relief from spreading the misery; as I've said, I know people who clearly do, and they put my hackles up.
Besides, it's very noticeable that my instinct to talk comes out immediately when/if I've *fixed* the problem. Then I'm quite happy to go into detail about how I managed to come up with a way around the obstacle, and describe all the complicated difficulties that I had to overcome. But while it's still ongoing, or if the outcome was unsatisfactory or humiliating, that doesn't trigger off my inner monologue at all. I'm happy to vaunt my achievements; not so much, failure, which I would understandably prefer to suppress rather than to share with the entire world...
I'm quite happy to analyse in pitiless detail why I didn't like something, apparently, but not to 'express pain' in the hopes of receiving unconditional affection. And to be honest, that's at least partly because there are practically no circumstances under which I can see myself as meriting that sort of unconditional partisanship in response -- my mind can always supply a scenario in which I deserved what I got. Because if you blame other people for your situation, that's *what happens*; they will instinctively go into the defensive response that proves to their own satisfaction that it's totally not their fault, and unfortunately I seem to be lacking in that certainty of righteousness.
There is never going to be a situation where I acted absolutely correctly without a shadow of doubt, and therefore there is never going to be one where uncritical support is credible -- and I suspect that the point of complaining for most people is to receive assurances that you were right, or at least to prove to yourself that you were unassailably right whatever anyone else might think. Since by the time I am driven to ask for help I am likely at the very least to have been burying my head in the sand well past the point at which it would have been advisable to have acted, I am very unlikely to be able to see myself in that shining light of unfallibility :-(
So if I don't disclose all my hurts to you -- if I don't explode in violent ungoverned emotion if you personally hurt me -- it isn't that I'm 'rejecting' you or trying to 'punish' you, or that I am terrified of my own capacity for violence, or that I was punished as a child for showing weakness (although, to be fair, I was bullied as a child for doing pretty much anything that stood out from the crowd, and as it was a crowd I didn't care to belong to there were a lot of things -- and weakness *would* have been pounced upon at school). It's that I instinctively don't want to make bad things come to life by acknowledging them... and also, of course, that I suffer from a massive fog of existential guilt and inability to forgive myself for my own lack of perfection :-p
But the conclusions they draw just don't ring true to me at all. No, I don't 'reach out' when I'm hurt; I don't respond well to group sessions or psychotherapy, because my instinct is to shut up like a clam and I'm not just dying to tell the world about all the times someone humilated or cheated me (why would I want to expose my own failures?) In fact I know people who are never happier than when they are talking about how wronged they are, and I find it frankly uncomfortable to be around.
But that is *not* evidence that I suffered emotional neglect in my childhood, or that I was punished for crying. It's true that my parents didn't go round constantly moaning about unfairness or suspecting everyone else of being out to get them, but that's normal sane behaviour, not a broken 'map for what pain looks like when it's being handled'. (And in any case when you're handling it, you don't dump it on your *children*...)
Yes, I am aware that I'm emotionally damaged -- traumatised, if you like -- but not in that direction; my problem is not fear that no-one will love me if I show unhappiness, but the deep-seated subconscious lesson that *my* affections cannot possibly be a welcome gift, and that attention from me is likely to be experienced as an unwanted intrusion, and continued interest as offensive. But that has nothing to do with fearing that other people can't 'handle the weight' of vulnerability on my part.
It's quite simply that being happy makes me want to talk more, and being unhappy makes me want to talk less. I don't feel an urge to moan on and on about things that worry me; if it really worries me my instinct is *not* to talk about it but to pretend it doesn't exist and hope that it will go away, and what really causes me violent distress is being trapped between the irresistible force and the immovable object: the knowledge that I *can't* just do nothing, and yet the prospect of having to do whatever-it-is terrifies me.
But wanting to talk less isn't a consequence of having had my vulnerabilities used as weapons against me by those to whom I revealed them; it's simply a result of the way that excitement and a sense of achievement manifests itself in me as an overflowing of *words*. I talk more when I'm happy. I doubtless talk too much about things that interest me (but as I'm good with words, I can only hope that the result is at least interesting in its own right).
And I talk less about things that I'm worried about because, I suppose, of some sort of deep primaeval superstition that *saying* a thing will manifest it in reality; taboo has power. If I don't put my fears into words, and above all if I don't communicate them to anyone on the outside, then maybe they won't actually take form in reality. If I don't *tell* anyone then maybe it won't come true; a very childish instinct (burying one's head in the sand), but not anything to do with 'emotional abuse'.
A problem shared is not a problem halved; it's a fear broadcast and amplified by numbers of believers. I wouldn't confess a problem to someone unless I had reason to hope that they could fix it for me-- in which case, yes, I'm prepared to play the "oh woe, poor little me" card rather than have to do the thing myself. But I don't get pleasure or relief from spreading the misery; as I've said, I know people who clearly do, and they put my hackles up.
Besides, it's very noticeable that my instinct to talk comes out immediately when/if I've *fixed* the problem. Then I'm quite happy to go into detail about how I managed to come up with a way around the obstacle, and describe all the complicated difficulties that I had to overcome. But while it's still ongoing, or if the outcome was unsatisfactory or humiliating, that doesn't trigger off my inner monologue at all. I'm happy to vaunt my achievements; not so much, failure, which I would understandably prefer to suppress rather than to share with the entire world...
I'm quite happy to analyse in pitiless detail why I didn't like something, apparently, but not to 'express pain' in the hopes of receiving unconditional affection. And to be honest, that's at least partly because there are practically no circumstances under which I can see myself as meriting that sort of unconditional partisanship in response -- my mind can always supply a scenario in which I deserved what I got. Because if you blame other people for your situation, that's *what happens*; they will instinctively go into the defensive response that proves to their own satisfaction that it's totally not their fault, and unfortunately I seem to be lacking in that certainty of righteousness.
There is never going to be a situation where I acted absolutely correctly without a shadow of doubt, and therefore there is never going to be one where uncritical support is credible -- and I suspect that the point of complaining for most people is to receive assurances that you were right, or at least to prove to yourself that you were unassailably right whatever anyone else might think. Since by the time I am driven to ask for help I am likely at the very least to have been burying my head in the sand well past the point at which it would have been advisable to have acted, I am very unlikely to be able to see myself in that shining light of unfallibility :-(
So if I don't disclose all my hurts to you -- if I don't explode in violent ungoverned emotion if you personally hurt me -- it isn't that I'm 'rejecting' you or trying to 'punish' you, or that I am terrified of my own capacity for violence, or that I was punished as a child for showing weakness (although, to be fair, I was bullied as a child for doing pretty much anything that stood out from the crowd, and as it was a crowd I didn't care to belong to there were a lot of things -- and weakness *would* have been pounced upon at school). It's that I instinctively don't want to make bad things come to life by acknowledging them... and also, of course, that I suffer from a massive fog of existential guilt and inability to forgive myself for my own lack of perfection :-p