The Sound of Silence
“Though her soul requires seeing, the culture around her requires sightlessness. Though her soul wishes to speak its truth, she is pressured to be silent.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
Silence screams internally and slowly poisons everything around it in a colorless, odorless haze, like carbon monoxide. Silence is the hidden co-conspirator to all forms of abuse, it is the background fuel that keeps cycles of abuse running. Abused people are discouraged from speaking up about their abuse at all times. Victims of abuse have to always tip-toe around their abusers. The abused has to always be the bigger person, they “just shouldn’t go there”,”always bringing up the past”, “so sensitive”. So that, regardless of the dispassionate and rational tone with which the abused is speaking their truth, it becomes a personal attack on the abuser.
The truth, then, becomes “not nice”, the truth becomes a weapon in the eyes of those invested in maintaining a lie. The continual silencing of victims by the abuser and the community, serves to maintain the abusers warped version of reality. Not allowing victims to speak, maintains the abusers reality as the dominant reality so that everything remains as its always been. You can apply this to to all forms of abuses, from small micro-abuses in interpersonal relationships to large macro-abuses such as racial profiling. The message that you see everywhere is ‘SHHHH! be quiet, or else…’
