the silent treatment

Spurred by my own broken response to two recent painful conflicts, as well as this recent essay from the delta discovery’s own Peter Twitchell (scroll down to the entry from 10/22/09), I’ve been pondering the silent treatment.  That is how I grew up responding to anger.  Especially the anger of a particular family member.  The other 5 of us all responded that way.  Or that is how I recorded it in my child’s brain, anyway.  I can remember that palpable, vibratory, suffocating silence.  Not at all like the silence I experience, say, out on the lakes or tundra.  One is serene and peaceful, kind of makes me thankful or gives me perspective and I talk to God and find my burdens falling away.  The other is a living, malevolent, worrisome thing.  Like a dog worries on an unraveling toy.  And in my family’s silent treatment recipe there was sound, just not talking–like highway noise, or forks clinking on plates.

In our family, the angry one always started it.  But the silent majority always ended it.  Like a mountain of baking soda dropped on an intense flame.  As an adult I have better eyes to see what a stupid way to deal with conflict that is.  And how hurtful, even abusive, that was to the angry one.  I could only see at the time that they had started it, and if they would just not get mad, everything would be fine.  A child’s response to negative emotions is generally “You shouldn’t have that emotion.  Make it stop.”  When Tammy or I are sad, Claire will say, tragically and sweetly “Don’t be sad…you shouldn’t be sad.  I love you!”  Pretending or suppressing isn’t a good prescription for health.  But sometimes a wound is so ugly, and we’re such cowards, that we can’t bear to look at it, let alone touch it.  And we don’t really believe we can change or be healed, “So why go there?” and we run with denial.  Naturallement it keeps coming back.

Other times we’re afraid.  I didn’t know what would happen if I confronted the angry one with anything other than silence.  Now I think I didn’t know them well enough, or I’d have known that they were not going to throw me across the room.  When I finally brought this up as a  young man, nothing bad happened – instead we had a healthy, humble discussion.  Following my family’s lead, I’d just lock up around volcanic anger, and for the most part I still do.  I turn stoic.  I counter all that emotion with an utter lack of it.  But actually I think I DO have emotion going nuts inside but it’s stuffed down, far enough that I doubt it’s existence.

So here’s the thing.  Most of the time now when I’m in serious conflict (I’m not referring to the everyday little stuff), silence is just really, really not what is needed.  Not just for the other guy but even for myself!  This protective mechanism (that always sucked but I didn’t know what else to do) has turned on me.  Why would I want to drive this person away??  But I don’t know how else to respond.  I feel like I might be out of control if I allow any response.  And we couldn’t have that.  In my child’s brain, anger is what tore my family apart.  And maybe it was.  But denial doesn’t fix it.

I still have anger issues.  Both in dealing with my own anger and in responding to others.  When someone is raging against me or those I love, I turn into some sort of a cold, calculating, emotionless mute.  On the other hand when they are angry and under control, like laying out their case against me, I’m obsessed with pursuing reconciliation, to an unhealthy degree.  Especially if its an email.  I can sit and revise an email over and over for hours over a trivial issue that came up with someone else.  I don’t even know if I really want reconciliation, or if I feel there was a misunderstanding and I want to be “understood” (which sometimes is code for “winning the argument” though I probably don’t realize it myself) or if like a kid I just want the anger to end.  Real reconciliation, at least in my view, is forgiveness.  Peace.  Love.  Kingdom stuff.  Fake reconciliation is ‘We both put our guns down and glare at each other and our relationship is in the toilet forevermore.’

So I’m asking God for help.  I can’t change my heart.  Jesus, please take my silence and anger, and give me healing, change, freedom, and love.  In a word, forgiveness.  It’s transformational, and I need to start using it instead of all the other junk.  Make me more like you God.  I’m sorry for the ways I’ve hurt people we love with my fear, selfishness, and unbelief.  Give me hope and faith to believe!  Good grief, what a torturous bit of gen-x navel gazing that was.  I told you this is MY blog!  : – )

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