The silent treatment is such an immature and manipulative way to express your feelings. Teaching your child to utilize the silent treatment is cruel and downright degrading. When you teach this, you install a feature into your child’s mind that they are capable of expressing their emotions through the lack of expression. It’s showing them that silence and obedience is above sharing, understanding, and comfort.
[T]hey couldn’t speak to me because I was upset.
“Don’t talk to her, she’s mad,” is a phrase I heard well into my adulthood. My parents used it so much I thought it was natural to not speak to people when they were upset. It’s not the silent treatment if it’s the other way around, is it? Spoiler alert: it works both ways. Telling people, I was mad, not just family members, friends, but literal strangers, people in the grocery store saying hi to me, the waiter trying to take my order, that they couldn’t speak to me because I was upset, isolated me in my feelings even further. I went from a child who needed to be taught to understand those feelings to a child who was told not to feel those feelings in any way other than silently and alone.
I know, sweet, dear, internet friend, that you haven’t learned the full scope of my dread father and mother dearest, but I promise you, the two of them had full range of negative emotion in front of me with zero recovery or even acknowledgement of recovery in front of me. As a parent now, when I have big, loud, negative emotions I try to acknowledge them in the moment, or hopefully someone calls me out on it. “I AM SO ANGRY RIGHT NOW and I am not angry with you; I am angry at the situation.” Then I exit the situation and try to calm myself down. I say this to my kids when Jamison openly, and in front of the kids, acknowledges to me, yeah to my face, that I am not behaving appropriately. We don’t consider this undermining each other like my parents did, this is tag teaming parenting like bosses. We do this to make sure we don’t act like fools and traumatize our kids. We also do this so our kids can see what to do when they feel an emotion that seems too loud or too big. We also show them what comforting those emotions looks like. When I will sit with Jamison or he will sit with me when I’m upset. When I’m crying and I need someone to be present with me, if a kid walks in, he explains to them what’s going on and usually we all end up in a group hug. It’s important to show your kids there are ways to process these emotions other than just ignoring them. Anyway, I tangent. I do that a lot. Back to the trauma!
I was a child feeling things that a child would have felt when faced with parents who emotionally neglected and shut them down.
Most of the time, when I look back, what I was feeling wasn’t even anger or upset, it was sadness, embarrassment, loneliness, frustration. I was a child feeling things that a child would have felt when faced with parents who emotionally neglected and shut them down. When doing the wrong thing was shamed so much, it becomes embarrassing when you mess up even the tiniest little things in the view of someone else. Even now, my OCD is fueled by this mindset that was driven into me as a child. I spent years being told it was so embarrassing and such a bad thing to do something that wasn’t the most perfect exact thing that I now must have the perfect exact instructions, or I literally won’t do the thing.
I spent 4 minutes sitting in front of my friend’s apartment because I didn’t know which one was hers and this apartment complex was new to me. I refused to get out of the vehicle without being told exactly which building it was and exactly which apartment. I didn’t want to get out and wander or have to look at the building number for longer than needed to recognize which one it was. Having to second guess myself in public is so horrendously painful, even thinking about it now is bringing tears to my eyes. I’m tearing up thinking about being perceived having not known where I was going the first time I was going somewhere. I feel like if I don’t know then I can’t go because no one will include me, or even worse, I need to isolate when I get there because I feel like I fucked up. If I fuck up, I can’t talk to anyone because why should they talk to me? They can’t talk to me, my parents said so.
If I fuck up, I can’t talk to anyone because why should they talk to me? They can’t talk to me, my parents said so.
It’s a vicious cycle that’s haunted my everyday existence since I was a kid and those 4 words were drilled into my memory. “Don’t talk to her.” Don’t talk to her. Don’t talk to me. I feel something, don’t fucking talk to me! YOU CAN’T TALK TO ME! I feel something! I have to run! I have to be INVISIBLE! I have to FACE THIS ALONE. I have to do it alone. I have to do this in silence. I have to be alone. I am alone. I can’t talk. I can’t share. I can’t be comforted. I can’t express myself. I have to be with my feelings alone. I can’t let people in with me. If I let people in, they’ll see my emotions and emotions are bad. They’re so bad, they’re wrong. Emotions are so fucking wrong. Fucking up and having emotions and feeling and being perceived is so fucking wrong that it’s painful.
It hurts to be seen.
Don’t talk to me, I’m sad.
Traumatized Viridimere 