What Does a Silence Have to Mean?

All of us regularly have to confront silences where we might have expected responses. We sent someone a message two days ago… but nothing has come back yet. We are awaiting an email… but it’s still not arrived. They said they would call at five…the phone remains still.

It’s a feature of our minds that we cannot help but fill silences; we automatically develop notions of what an absence must signify. And, according to the particular architecture of our psyches, these significations will show radical variations. 

For some of us, it seems evident that a silence means something like:

— They have been delayed, they will get back soon enough.

— They are busy.

— It slipped their mind.

— They love us anyway.

But for others, it seems equally likely that the silence is a far darker omen:

— They’ve realised I’m awful.

— They have suddenly turned against me.

— I’ve done something wrong.

— They hate me.

We are catching in a minor area a central element of our emotional functioning, with deep roots into our life stories. What we imagine lies behind the other’s silence reflects in key ways what did happen to us around our caregivers in our early years. We are filling in the gaps with evidence unconsciously drawn from our own experience. We are presuming that the future will in key ways resemble the past.

If we take the silence to be benign, it’s because people close to us would have been – more or less – reliable and kind. There were, as we grew up, no sudden abandonments or changes of mind. We weren’t tolerated one minute, disdained the next. We felt safe. But if the silence is immediately taken to be a cause for alarm and a harbinger of persecution and loathing, it’s because we come from a place of pain. We will have felt, almost certainly before our eighth year, continually at risk of being thought to have done something wrong, we would have been mocked, someone would have turned against us. The sense of danger would have been constant.

We generally have no awareness that we are – as we look at our phones and wonder – relying on past experience. We no more remember how we learnt to feel this way than we remember how we learnt to ride a bicycle or speak. Our characteristic way of interpreting reality doesn’t reveal its personally-flavoured origins – and is therefore less open to question and recalibration.

If we suffer repeatedly from panic about silences, the next step is to notice what we are up to and accept that our minds were not born responding in this partial way, they were scarred and disrupted by specific events from which we have drawn unfairly harsh generalisations: that we are constantly bad, that we will always be in trouble, that we are permanently insufficient. We should with kindness interrupt our instinctual responses and insist on less punitive readings. The catastrophe we fear will happen has – many  years ago – already happened and we need to start to remember it, and feel compassion towards ourselves for having endured it, in the quest for a less frightened, fairer and more innocent future.