TRANSCRIPT
Someone recently asked if I could make a video on sitting quietly in the company of another. And I thought it was an interesting subject, and I’d like to tackle it. I don’t know if I’m going to tackle it exactly like I’m supposed to or how I was really being asked to tackle it, but I’d like to give it a shot.
I remember a few years ago, I was traveling, and I met a really nice guy, a guy who I actually really liked and respected. We spent some time together. We would go to this beach in the country of Georgia, actually. And he said to me at one point, we just sat on the beach. We didn’t talk for like a half an hour. And he said, “Part of why I like being with you is you don’t feel the need to talk all the time. You are comfortable just being quiet.” And I really appreciate that. He said, “Most people just talk a lot, and it sort of like invades me.” This is what I remember how he said it. And I remember feeling good about that, thinking, “Yeah, I guess I can do it in a way. I can just be quiet, sitting quietly in the company of another.”
Now, I’m going to get to some negative things in a minute, but first I’d like to talk positively, speak about the positive sides of just being able to be quiet and sit in the company of another, to be present.
Well, going right back to my childhood, I think about some of my best childhood friends, boys. When I was a kid, we would do things together, but a lot of times we didn’t talk very much. We would go fishing, for instance, and just sit next to each other. And I remember a lot of quiet time. We didn’t sit and discuss our lives. Didn’t talk about anything. And I really treasured that. Some of these guys I’m still friends with four, four and a half decades later.
I think it was just having a safe person there to be with me, a companion who had my back, who didn’t intrude, who wasn’t going to harm me in any way, who wasn’t a bully, who cared about my well-being, but also, to be honest, another little boy who was lost and neglected like I was. And both of us were not equipped in any way to speak about what we were going through in our lives. The horrors, the neglects, the pains, the abuses, the rejections, the abandonments—what was there to talk about? We didn’t have the tools or the language, perhaps, to talk about it, but we could be quiet with each other and have fun with each other and do activities.
And I think a lot of the things that boys do, maybe some girls too, just quiet, nonverbal things that allow us to show love for each other without having to delve into these worlds of hell and pain. Maybe in some ways it’s the same for adults. Sometimes I think of my time as a psychotherapist, where it was a job where I did talk a lot when I felt it was time to talk a lot. It was a question of timing. It was also a question of what the person sitting across from me wanted and needed. Sometimes verbalized, but sometimes it felt right to be quiet. Sometimes people wanted quiet, silence. Sometimes they would overtly ask for it. Just, “Can we not talk for a few minutes?”
Uh, I can give the opposite. I know therapists who use silence as a weapon, as a manipulation. Parents who do it too. Surely I saw it with my own parents. I remember my mom even talking about it with her own father, her parents when she would do something bad. Was it bad that she did? I don’t know if it was bad, but they—something bad that something that they didn’t like. Maybe it was something good that she did, but the punishment was the silent treatment, where they would boop, “You’re not going to be spoken to. You will not be acknowledged. You will be shunned for one day, two days, whatever it was.” My mom would do that to me. She hated the silent treatment when she was a child, and she talked about it.
Someone being quiet in the company of her, but using it as a torture device, a manipulative device. You are being rejected. You are being abandoned. You are being ignored. Your feelings, the whole thing that’s going on in our relationship is not being acknowledged. I’m pretending that nothing happened. We will not speak about it. There will be no healing, no growth, no acknowledgement. What’s sad is, as much as my mother hated it, she internalized it so much that she did the same thing to me in a million ways through her dissociation, through her pain, through her drug use, through her drinking lots of alcohol, just disappearing, numbing out.
And she would be there in my presence, but she wasn’t really there. Was she sitting quietly in the company of others? She was quiet sometimes. She was physically there, but she really wasn’t in my company. There wasn’t attunement. There wasn’t an acknowledgement, a nonverbal, unconscious, sometimes quick moment of eye-to-eye acknowledgement of “I know what you’re going through. I feel it. I honor it.” It wasn’t what I wanted or needed.
And I think that some people who are silent can be like that from the outside. It can look like, “Ah, these two people are sitting quietly in the company of one another.” But underneath it, there’s torture and hell going on. I’ve heard that story. I’m thinking outside of therapy, just hearing that story. Oh yeah, people saying, “Yeah, I’ve been having real problems with my partner, my romantic partner. We’ve actually haven’t spoken in two weeks. We’ve been living in the same house, but he or she hasn’t spoken to me at all. And I haven’t spoken to—there’s like this silence, but it looks like everything’s normal. It looks like these people are comfortable with each other.”
I’ve heard stories of people going months without speaking to their partner. And what’s the difference? I think sometimes it’s really, really hard to find the words to acknowledge what we’re feeling, what we’re going through, what we’ve done, what someone else has done to us. Sometimes we learn through hard experience that finding the right words and using the right words that might be easy to bring up, that are right on the tip of our tongue, only make things worse.
I certainly think of my parents and me when I was a little boy, me trying to acknowledge what was going on. “This is how I feel. This is what I see. This is what you are doing or not doing. This is what is inappropriate.” And learning through sometimes physically painful experience, certainly emotionally painful experience, that speaking about it only made it worse. And learning that silence sometimes was my only refuge.
But then I think of people, and I think this is probably more the case with my friend on that beach in the country of Georgia, what he had experienced and what I’ve experienced many times when I’m with people who are uncomfortable or insecure or are trying to divert from what they’re really thinking and feeling, that they just fill the interactive space. Fill the void with noise. Noise from their mouth. Words. Words that don’t have anything to do with anything. Chitchat, small talk. Um, talking about things that happened, talking about other people, gossiping, like an octopus squirting ink into the water so that nobody can find it, so that it can be disappeared, so it can hide. Using words to not tell the truth. And how annoying and invasive that can be.
I think of the opposite then. I think sometimes of being with a friend, being with a partner even, and just sitting alone, and we’re both sitting next to each other, and we’re both writing in our journals for 10 minutes or 20 minutes or an hour even, just being alone in silence, both doing a similar activity of having a powerful silent self-reflective relationship with ourselves. Not asking for outside input, in a way almost being hypnotized into this world of journaling, of self-exploration, self-seeking. Sometimes painful, sometimes wonderful, provocative, sometimes soothing. Sometimes not asking the other person what they’re writing about, letting them have their own experience and knowing that they are letting us have our own experience.
Maybe sort of an adult version of me fishing with my little friends when I was a boy. Just having a private encapsulated world with my own self, knowing that I am safe to be me.
With someone who respects and honors that and acknowledges through some intuitive way that I am also honoring their safety to be with themselves, that we are not entering each other’s boundaries.
Now, why did this just come to my mind? I think about people talking. I hear a lot of these stories of people going on these silent retreats, silent meditations, religious meditations, religious retreats. Some people living in silent communities for days or weeks or months or years even of just silence. Nobody talking, nobody interacting. Is this a good thing? Maybe. Maybe. Sometimes it is. Maybe it’s a chance for some people to grow.
But I’ve also heard sometimes of people going crazy in these silent retreats, losing their minds, feeling desperate and feeling an insanity coming up, feeling ancient historical memories coming up. And because of the rules of the place, the rules of the religion, the rules of the retreat, you’re not allowed to talk about it. You can’t talk about it. It’s socially unacceptable to talk about it. You have failed. If you talk about it, you have a problem. If you talk about it, when exactly sometimes what we need at our most desperate moments is to find somebody to talk about it with.
This is where my vote goes for flexibility, not the rigidity of “now is a time for silence.” Between 9:00 in the morning and 9:00 at night, no one shall speak. Well, what if someone needs to speak? What if someone desperately needs to speak? What if someone will go crazy if they don’t speak and feel so pressured to be silent by their world that it’s killing them?
I think of myself as a little child in school being forced in a classroom where maybe I had already learned everything that the teacher was teaching, and I hated the teacher, and the teacher hated me because they knew that I was bored out of my mind in there. All I wanted to do was talk and sing and make jokes and laugh and acknowledge how much I hated this environment that I was literally forced to be in. And yet I wasn’t allowed to talk because my job was to be silent and listen and learn, learn, and I was being made into a drone.
And I looked at all these other kids who some of them had actually become drones, and it was torture for me, and I hated it. I hated that silence, being silent in the company of others. And I made jokes and I whispered and I gossiped and I got in big trouble for it.
So, how do I wrap all this up? This subject of being quiet in the company of others, being silent, being present in the company of others. I don’t even remember what the original subject was ’cause I got worked up.
I think the key is yes. When both people in whatever the relationship is—teacher, student, therapist, client, friend, friend, partner, partner, parent, child—maybe not parent, child, maybe this is different, but in all these other relationships that are more equal, teacher, student, whatever, when people come together, there can be some mutual acknowledgement of what is needed in this relationship. And people can choose to be there or not.
And that there is a wonderful time for silence, a wonderful, beautiful, healthy time for silence. And there may also be a time for speaking, for acknowledging, for sharing ideas in the way that humans have been gifted by our great brains—the ability to formulate complex thoughts and share them—but also to feel when it’s time to be within and to let others be within and to be open to change.
To be open, to be flexible, to honor, acknowledge others, and to honor and acknowledge ourselves as we grow together in this crazy world.