TRANSCRIPT
Someone recently wrote me and asked if I would make a video on the subject of selective mutism. That is when people, children or adults, also go silent in certain situations, silent in certain interactions. They literally cannot bring themselves to speak, can’t speak with certain people or certain groups of people.
The person asked me, “Have you ever had clients with selective mutism during your time as a psychotherapist?” I asked because I had it as a child, and it made for some traumatizing interactions with my parents. I’ve read it’s not a disorder that is caused by trauma, but I’ve grown rather skeptical of that claim, especially seeing as a lot of child abuse and neglect in society never even registers as trauma to people in the field.
It’s incredibly rare to see this disorder mentioned at all anywhere, so I couldn’t help but wonder if you have any thoughts on what could make a young child suddenly develop this disorder out of the blue. So I replied to this person as best I could, but I would like to follow his suggestion and make a video on it and share what I told him, but in more detail.
I did have a couple of clients over my time as a therapist who did have selective mutism. These were adult clients who talked about having had it as a child and how it somehow, in certain areas of their life, persisted into adulthood. And yes, those clients all had significant childhood trauma. I’ve actually never seen or heard of a case of someone becoming selectively mute where there wasn’t some sort of obvious trauma.
However, what is trauma? What is obvious as trauma to me or someone else might not be obvious to a lot of people in the mental health profession. I’ve certainly seen that a lot, that mental health professionals can strongly deny something as a traumatic experience. I know that there’s a lot of bad press for the mental health field, for mental health professionals who label everything as trauma, but I think actually the opposite is much more common—that mental health professionals deny things as being traumatic, pull away from trauma, certainly give parents who are traumatizing to their children a lot of liberty to keep getting away with what they’re doing and not labeling their behavior as being traumatic.
So I think yes, a lot of people who have a lot of problems can go to mental health professionals who say, “Oh, this is not connected to trauma, it’s connected to X, Y, and Z,” and that exists, that this, that some other problem, whereas actually the root really is trauma.
I’d really like to talk about the two cases of selective mutism that I know best. I will very briefly share both, and then I’ll get into detail about both.
The first case in my life where I knew someone very intimately who had selective mutism was a boy who I knew. He was a year older than me, and he was a very close friend of mine. He lived in my apartment building when I think I was about seven to eight years old. He lived there for a year, and we were very good friends. We played a lot, and I really liked him. He was a very normal boy, very gentle, very fun, always nice, never bullying, never nasty—really a kid who was a lot of fun.
But he never spoke to adults except for his mother. I remember he’d come over to our house, and he just do this whenever my mother would ask him a question. She was always trying to win him. I think she wanted to control him in a way, and I think he picked up on it instantly because he would even withdraw more, would say nothing. Sometimes he would do this if she would ask him a yes or no question that would be yes and that would be no, but literally that was the extent. I don’t think he ever spoke to my mother, which made her very, very insecure. I remember that—”Why can’t I win him? Why can’t I get him to talk?” She would try. She would do little manipulative techniques. I would watch her. It didn’t work.
Most people, though, actually didn’t respond to him. Most adults, that is, didn’t respond in the way that she did. Most just said, “Oh, he doesn’t talk, he’s weird. Ignore him, leave him alone.” I don’t know how it was in school because I never saw him in school, but I just remember accepting him because he was fun, and I liked him, and he was nice. A lot of the kids in my neighborhood and certainly in school were not nice, but he was friendly. He was fun.
But what had happened to him? Why was he this way? I probably did ask myself this question back then, but then I didn’t think about it for a long time. I didn’t think about it actually very much until this person asked me on the internet about selective mutism, and then I thought about it. I thought he had no dad in the picture. He and his single mom had moved from somewhere else. He never spoke to me about his father. Certainly, he’d been rejected at some very profound level by his father. Were his parents divorced? Had his father abused him in some way? I think neglect, actually. I know this—neglect by a parent is abuse. It is traumatic for a child to be neglected, to be rejected. It’s actually an absolutely horrible trauma for a child. Could that make him go silent? Possibly.
But what else happened? What else happened in his relationship with his mother that might have gone wrong? What happened in his relationship with his mother and father? What did he observe? Why did they split up? What had his father potentially actually done to him directly? I don’t have the answer to any of these questions. I really don’t know, but I do know that he lost his relationship with his father. It seemed like it was completely cut off. As far as I know, his father never came and saw him. He never went for weekends to his dad. His dad never came to visit. Maybe his father was even dead, but it doesn’t make sense in my life that his selective mutism, his silence around adults, happened for no reason. Was he transferring his relationship with his father onto other adults? These are all possibilities, but again, I really don’t know. I just do know that he had a single mom, he had a very isolated life, and he’d probably gone through quite a bit of pain that led him to behave the way that he did.
Then there’s the other case study—me. The thing, the thing I don’t remember ever having selective mutism as a child. I may have, but I don’t remember it. But I certainly remember it when I was 23 years old. I had it for several weeks. It was profound, and it was horrible, and I had it in relation to my father. He was the only one I had it with. I literally lost my voice, and I remember how it felt. I remember what led to it, both historically and right there in the moment where I was in a very confused and lost place in my life.
I wasn’t living in my city. My father was living in a different city. My parents had split up about two years earlier. My father was living with his girlfriend, with whom he had been having an affair when he left my mom. He left my mother for this new woman, and I was in transit, and I didn’t really have anywhere else to go. I crashed and burned for a while, and I was staying with them in a different city that wasn’t mine, and I was having a hard, confused time in my life, and this really threatened my father. In fact, it more than threatened him—he despised me.
My father loved me and liked me and praised me and was kind to me when I lived up to his expectations, when I lived up to his fantasies, when I was an extension of his grandiosity, when I was doing well in school, doing fancy dating, the right girl, doing some fancy grandiose traveling, and wow, everything is going great. But when I was lost, when I was depressed, when I was anxious, when I was confused, when I was sad, and worst of all, when I shared these things with him, he was enraged at me. And I think a big part of it was he was in such an insecure place in his life. His marriage with my mom had crashed and burned.
He was living with some new girlfriend who he admitted to me at various points he was quite ambivalent about for all sorts of different reasons. He was desperate. He was clinging on to some external structure in his life. And here I came into his world. Me being an… I was an extension of him, an extension of his narcissism, as it were, an extension of his grandiosity. And I wasn’t doing well. It threatened him. He was enraged. He was humiliating to me. He said horrible things. I mean, screaming at me in front of lots of people. And I couldn’t handle it. And I died inside in relation to him.
It was like… I remember my voice just went, and it just shrunk down to the size of a little walnut inside of me. My voice box just shrunk, and it shrunk even smaller in relation to him. And it went down. And I remember at that time when he was raging at me, other people heard it, and no one stuck up for me. No one said anything. Because what I’ve learned in the world pretty much is when abuse is going on, most people say nothing.
And what happened to me internally, it wasn’t anything conscious on my part. I think it was just my basic gut survival instinct said the only way you’re going to survive in relation to this person, who right now you’re so desperate that you have to live with, is just to shut down, lose your voice, go silent. In a way, I just blotted him out. It was like almost like he became just a sort of a cardboard cutout of a human being.
And part of me wanted to talk to him. Certainly everyone in the world around me, my family, the other people who were there, my relatives who came by, his girlfriend, they all wanted me to talk to him. They wanted everything to be normal and happy. But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. It was like it was some part of me that was a survival instinct that just said, “Dead.”
Shut down. That relationship vocally for me was gone. I had selective mutism in relation to him. Selective meaning it wasn’t to everyone, it was just with one selective person or, in the case of my childhood friend, a selective group of people. I remember this also with my friend. I do remember this feeling when I was little when he wouldn’t talk to my mother. He wouldn’t talk to my father either. My father kind of didn’t care, but my mother did care.
I remember kind of feeling proud and thinking, “I’m someone he’ll talk to. He trusts me. He doesn’t trust them.” Maybe it wasn’t fair that he didn’t trust them. Maybe it wasn’t fair that he didn’t trust all adults. But I think in some fundamental way, he learned that adults aren’t safe. But he knew that I was. And so I was kind of proud and privileged that I was in his safe group. And I knew I deserved to be. I was a good friend to him.
I’ve often wondered what became of his life. It would be very interesting if I could find him and talk about this subject with him now. Did he lose this? Did it go on in other ways? Well, for me, I got pressured to speak with my father, and I tried again. I tried to talk to him. At this point, it’s like I fought against my selective mutism and some external part of me that didn’t honor my inner self, my inner need to be silent around him.
Some part of me externally just said, “Okay, do it. Come on, talk with him.” So I talked to him, and right away, boom, he was back on me and attacked me again. I shut back down again, and I disappeared in myself. And finally, you know, it helped. You know what saved me and brought my voice back fully to myself and gave me back my conscious power to speak in a logical and loving and authentic way? I got away from him. I escaped.
And that was the boundary that I needed to feel safe in myself. Because in a strange and sort of honest way, if someone really does have selective mutism, maybe it’s metaphorical. Maybe they’re playing it out with someone who didn’t actually do something to them, or maybe they are playing it out with someone who actually did something to them. But regardless, this is something to be honored. This is something to be studied.
I also have to look into the root of my relationship with my father, the history of my relationship with my father, the way he treated me, the verbal abuse, the threats, the nastiness, the humiliation, the rejection. This didn’t start when I was 23. This started a long, long, long time ago. So his behavior toward me at 23, when I was at that vulnerable stage of my life, in between things, lost, confused, his way of behaving, this was an old, old pattern that went back certainly into my teen years, certainly before that, when he despised me, when I couldn’t behave in the way he wanted.
But back when I was younger, I think I didn’t have so much choice. I had to be who he wanted me to be, and I tried so hard. But when I was 23, I was becoming an adult. I was living more in the external world. I was beginning to work, beginning to pay taxes, beginning to become a quote-unquote functional adult. And I couldn’t just be the person he wanted me to be, the shut-down little zombie robot that made him happy, that he could project all his positive qualities onto.
And so I think that’s why I then had to shut down. I had no other option.
Does This Apply to Other People?
Does this apply to other people? Does this apply to other people who have involuntarily lost their voice? I think in some way it really does. I think anyone who has lost their voice has lost their voice for a very good reason. If they can’t speak, somebody did something to them, hurt them in some way, maybe violated them in some horrible way, maybe rejected them in some horrible way, taught them that their voice wasn’t valuable, didn’t listen to their cries for help, their cries for love, for the love that they needed and deserved and wanted and hoped for and prayed for.
They learned that their voice wouldn’t help them, wouldn’t save them, wouldn’t get somebody to change their behavior, to wake up. I think if somebody loses their voice, it’s a sign of just how helpless they are in the world, how hurt they are, how desperate they are, and how they are using a last-ditch effort to save themselves, to protect themselves, to go within, to maybe find an inner voice that is stronger, that does love them, that tells them that some deep subliminal way that they don’t have to speak, they don’t have to keep trying to win love from the impossible, that they’re not responsible to talk to anyone or everyone, they’re not responsible to behave as a normal functional person, a happy person, that they can follow their own path and be their own kind of person.
In a way, sort of be like a wild animal, the wild animal that their soul knows that they are. I think of wild animals. They have selective mutism. They trust some people, they don’t trust other people. Sometimes they don’t trust any people at all. Maybe they’ve learned very smartly people will hurt them. They don’t have to interact. They don’t want to interact.
And I think in a way, when people stop talking, stop interacting with a certain person or a certain group of people, they recognize in themselves that they don’t trust, they don’t want to trust. Maybe there are good reasons for this, and so I honor that.
I’ve actually been thinking about this as I was talking. It was crossing my mind. Sometimes in my travels, I’ve been around certain people, certain groups of people who just can’t talk around me, that maybe they’re too shy or whatever. And one thing I’ve noticed for myself is even if I’ve never done anything wrong to this person, the most important thing is if someone doesn’t want to talk to me, maybe a child, even an adult, sometimes honor that. Respect them.
If I ask them a question or I try to engage them in some interaction and they can’t do it, immediately stop. Don’t pressure them. Let them be. What I’ve seen, actually interestingly, is sometimes people like this, people who might have selective mutism with me, instantly register the message, “Ah, this person…”
Is respecting me. This person is not pressuring me to be anything. Maybe I’m nervous about to be around this person or to talk with this person. You know, maybe sometimes these people, even who I’ve seen who have difficulty talking to me or find it impossible to talk to me, can’t even physically be in my presence. But when I respect them, they can actually be in my presence. When they don’t feel pressure to talk, I’ve seen sometimes people’s parents even say, “Oh come on, talk to him, say something to him, he’s our guest, XYZ.” And I tell the parents, “No, no, no, don’t pressure this young person to be anything other than who they are. If they don’t want to talk to me, that’s their right. Respect it.”
What I’ve seen with some of these people is if they appreciate this, even if they’re still not safe enough to have their voice to interact with me, if they feel safe to not feel forced, they can be with me. I can see sometimes they even watch me. Sometimes I can say they even like me, even if they haven’t found their voice. And sometimes a week later, a month later, a visit one year, two years later, they can have their voice again.
And sometimes it’s small and it starts slowly, and they’re anxious, but they can test the waters with me. And sometimes I’ve seen parents even say, “Oh, there are other adults with whom they never get their voice back or haven’t gotten their voice back. Oh, you’re good practice. You have respected them. Oh, we should listen to what you’re saying about not pressuring them.”
Because I think a lot of times parents, even other adults, are embarrassed when someone they feel responsible for isn’t behaving perfectly, isn’t talking, isn’t being normal. Well, what I think is if someone doesn’t want to talk or can’t talk or isn’t able to talk in certain situations or with certain people, that is normal. That’s expectable. That’s understandable if we really understand their history.
And I think the problem is all too often in the world, people, adults, parents, mental health professionals often aren’t too interested in a child’s history. And I think that’s really the problem.
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