When protection becomes harm

Until relatively recently, I was rather proud of the idea that I did everything I possibly could to avoid hurting the people I care about, which is pretty much everyone in one way or another. It was therefore enormously painful to realise, at 51, that there is one very simple behaviour I have which can be extraordinarily hurtful to other people, but which for most of my life I had regarded as a virtue.

Sometimes I go quiet, and although there are several different reasons why, the one thing they have almost always had in common is that, from inside my own head, the quietness, stillness and withdrawn behaviour somebody else sees has come from wanting to protect them from something. Sometimes that is what I am feeling, sometimes what I am thinking, and sometimes simply the knowledge that my emotional response is much stronger than the response I actually want to have. If I speak too quickly, I may turn a feeling into a weapon, so I contain it.

From the inside, that has always felt like care. I am only now beginning to understand that, from the outside, it can feel like almost the exact opposite.

Valentina

Someone I was once very close to, and still care about despite the need for distance between us, recently sent me an article called The Psychology of People Who Go Quiet When They’re Hurt, written by Valentina for Psychology Stuff. The timing mattered because the person who sent it had recently been on the receiving end of exactly this behaviour from me. I had gone quiet for reasons which felt protective to me, while they experienced something very different. I hurt them without intending to, and since understanding that, I have apologised.

Reading Valentina’s piece in that context was slightly uncanny. She describes somebody who goes quiet because they are overwhelmed, need time to process what has happened, or know that speaking too quickly may hurt somebody they care about. She presents the silence not as punishment or emotional unavailability, but as an attempt to regulate something happening internally.

I recognise a great deal of myself in that description, but because I experience this behaviour from the inside, I am not convinced it is quite that simple. I do not know why Valentina has framed it this way, but there are two possibilities that seem plausible. She may have experienced the behaviour in somebody she loves and tried to understand it from the outside, or she may understand perfectly well that the reality is messier and have deliberately chosen the most benign interpretation because that is the useful one for her reader.

That second possibility matters. If somebody has spent years thinking another person’s silence means rejection, contempt or punishment, asking them immediately to hold half a dozen competing explanations in their head may not help. Likewise, somebody who goes quiet and has spent years being told that they are cold or emotionally unavailable may need the compassionate version before they can examine the less comfortable parts.

Sometimes simplification is communication, but it does flatten something which, from inside, feels considerably more complicated.

Several kinds of silence

Until recently I had tended to think of ‘going quiet’ as one behaviour because that is what it looks like from the outside. Whatever is happening internally, I become still, withdraw and stop communicating. Inside my head, though, those states can be very different.

Sometimes I am processing. Something has happened and I genuinely do not yet know what I think about it, so speaking feels dangerous because I may turn a first emotional reaction into a position I later discover I do not actually hold. At other times I know exactly what I am feeling but also know that expressing it in that moment will make things worse. Silence then becomes the response I have chosen instead of the one trying to escape.

Then there is the version where I am containing something more powerful. Anyone who has read Steve Peters’ The Chimp Paradox will recognise the basic metaphor of a fast, emotional and reactive part of the mind which can be extraordinarily useful, but which you probably do not want running the meeting. My chimp is kept on a remarkably short lead, and I have spent most of my adult life becoming better at doing that.

That sits close to some of what I am exploring in Raving Loonies, and I suspect the next book will go much further into the chimp and some of the places where I think Peters’ model can be developed. For now, the important point is that nobody else can see the containment. They only see that you have disappeared.

Having thought about this more, though, I suspect there is another kind of quiet which matters even more. Sometimes going quiet means that something in the relationship has already broken, or at least been damaged so severely that I no longer know how to carry it.

I do not consciously decide the relationship is over and then stop speaking. By the time I reach that point, I may already have spent a long time trying to understand what is happening, accommodate it, repair it, forgive things or carry more emotional weight than I should. The problem is that I do not always notice, or perhaps do not admit, when carrying something has become unsustainable. I keep going because continuing feels kinder than confronting the possibility that something may be badly wrong.

What appears from the outside as sudden withdrawal may therefore be anything but sudden internally. It may be the endpoint of something that has been happening quietly for months or years, and because I have failed to communicate how much strain is accumulating, the other person may have had no meaningful opportunity to understand how close the relationship was to breaking. From my point of view I have reached the end of a very long road. From theirs, the road may simply have vanished.

Apology, grief and closure

That is where the idea of protection becomes harder to defend. By absorbing something because I do not want to hurt another person, create conflict, or admit that I cannot carry it, I may deprive them of information they needed in order to understand what was happening and perhaps change it.

I wrote in The Power of Saying Sorry that apology matters partly because it keeps the learning loop open. Admitting a mistake allows us to examine it rather than defend it. I still believe that, but I now think there is another kind of apology sitting alongside it. Sometimes an apology is an attempt to rebuild. Sometimes it is an acknowledgement of sadness, responsibility and regret after the possibility of repair has already gone.

There are people I have known over the course of my life, perhaps ten, perhaps twenty, conceivably far more, to whom I may owe some version of that apology. Not because those relationships should be rebuilt, but because I may have allowed things to deteriorate far beyond the point at which I should have spoken. I may have carried too much, said too little, and in doing so done the other person a disservice.

Accepting that does not mean accepting responsibility for everything that happened within those relationships. It means accepting responsibility for my own pattern, for believing that enduring something quietly was kinder than saying clearly that it was hurting me, and for sometimes revealing the true scale of the damage only when I could no longer carry it.

I have written before, in What Cars Taught Me About Love, about valuing engagement over perfection. The same idea applies here in a much less comfortable form. Caring about somebody does not guarantee that you communicate well with them, and remaining grateful for what you shared does not mean they can always remain in your life. Sometimes gratitude and distance have to coexist, and an apology is not necessarily an invitation back in. Sometimes it is simply part of grieving what has gone.

What troubles me most is what this behaviour can do to the other person’s ability to find closure. If I choose not to speak because I do not want to say something cruel, I experience restraint while they experience silence. If I am trying to understand what happened before I respond, I experience care while they may experience absence. If I finally withdraw because I genuinely cannot carry the relationship any further, I may experience the end of a long internal process while they experience an ending for which they were never properly prepared.

Both accounts can be true at once.

By going quiet at exactly the point when something has become unbearable, I can leave somebody I cared about carrying questions I should have helped answer. For that I am extremely sorry.

I used to think my mistake was going quiet. I now suspect the earlier mistake was allowing things to deteriorate so far that silence became the only response I had left. The lesson is not simply that I should force myself to speak when I have shut down. It is that I need to speak much earlier, while there is still enough room in the relationship for what I say to matter.

There are situations where somebody can act with genuine care, cause genuine harm, accept genuine responsibility, and still conclude that the relationship cannot continue. Good intentions do not erase the damage, but acknowledging the damage does not make those intentions false either. Sometimes you accept the pain, learn what you can, remain grateful for what was good, grieve what was lost and move on.

When somebody can mean well and still cause real pain, particularly to somebody they care about, there is only one word I know that properly describes it.

Tragedy.