“The Silent Signals: Understanding Anxiety and Hidden Messages in Communication”
Exploring the power of silence and the hidden messages in our interactions, this post delves into how anxiety impacts communication and the importance of understanding underlying motives to strengthen relationships.
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“In time,” they say, “all good things happen.” This statement, of course, is not exactly true. After all, there are millions of people right now who’ve never had an opportunity to thrive. But without such phrases, we’d never fight through our sadness and pain. They are, for all intents and purposes, as necessary as good food and clean drinking water. What we are talking about is hope and faith, which brings me to the essence of this post.
Humans are interesting and somewhat difficult to understand. Often, it’s what they’re not saying that tells us all we need to know. Let me explain. In counseling practices, we use what we call the power of silence to elicit our clients to talk more. Wondering if it works? Try it and see what happens. Once we set the stage in the form of a subject matter, people will naturally want to fill the gap.
But there is another use for the power of silence. This is often the inverse of what a therapist might use it for: “When you ask me a really difficult question, I don’t want to answer it.” While this brand of silence can be frustrating, it can, in fact, tell you a lot about the person’s motives. For example, those who continuously go radio silent are telling you a few things: One, “I’m afraid to answer because when I was growing up, I was always ridiculed for expressing my feelings.” Or two, they are simply not good communicators. A poor communicator is very difficult to have a relationship with, whereas the person with an adverse childhood is not doing it to hurt you. In this case, if you love the person, offering support and giving them a lot of grace will go a long way to help them feel safe enough to fully embrace you.
Of course, there are many reasons why people are silent, and most of them are not straightforward. But then again, most of the code hidden in our responses is not easy to decipher. Yet, despite this truth, I think it’s really important to learn what one’s underlying message is.
Case in point: just the other day, I was out with a dear friend of mine. As always, our banter started out with hellos and small talk. However, my old friend suffers from a very high level of anxiety, so it didn’t take long for me to slide into the role of counselor (which I am happy to do, by the way). We all need someone, and I’m honored to be the one he confides in.
Like many of us, myself included, he has a habit of constantly interrupting — a result of a high-speed brain driven by years and years of an anxiety disorder being in charge. Having children, like he and many do, always running a thousand miles an hour in your head, let’s just say, you can miss out on a lot.
This can happen because anxiety and mental illness, in general, can consume you to a point where one always talks about themselves. And this is where my friend comes in. No matter how old we get, our children need us, which is very difficult to provide when someone is battling mental illness. One of the byproducts of this behavior is that our kids will get angry and feel like they are not being heard, for starters. But they do more than that. When incidences in their life happen that are so painful, like a divorce, they understandably need us. And if they can’t get you to listen, they will try other ways. For example, my buddy’s son tried to give him a modern cell phone — my friend is older now and is understandably timid of new tech.
He told me that his son, who lives a few provinces away, attempted to give him the phone so he could send him pictures of his grandchildren. He mentioned that he had a strong reaction to the offer, citing that he’s “too old” and he doesn’t want the “damn thing.”
But what was his son really trying to say? Was it really about sending the pictures? Probably not. What’s more likely is that he was attempting to communicate and connect with his dad and wants him to be more involved in his own family. Since it’s so difficult to have a conversation with his father, he may have been thinking that the cell phone was another way he could try to be heard and thus connected.
Anyone who’s read my work, like my blog, The Road to Mental Wellness, or my first book, also entitled The Road to Mental Wellness, will know that I firmly believe that behavior happens for a reason. In the case of my dear friend, his reason is anxiety, and in the case of his son, it’s wanting his dad to be more present and connected. Neither one is coming out and saying so, but they truly want to strengthen the relationship.
So, then, what’s the takeaway from this example? The words we speak and the intents we display aren’t always what we mean. What it takes to do better is to listen — really listen! — in the moment and beyond. “What are they really trying to say?” is a question that we should always entertain when we are having conversations of consequence.
Finally, we are not always being selfish; we are wrapped up in ten tons of mental pain and suffering. While there are people out there who are truly selfish, it’s vital — relationship-saving even — to learn the distinction.
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