Shhhh…The Power of Silence.
Several pigeons frequent our backyard. I have never threatened or attacked them. I don’t shoot at them or express any anti-avian sentiments. I don’t butcher their language saying “Cooo” to them.
But no matter how nice I am to them, how much seed I leave out, four metres is the closest they’ll let me get. Then they fly off and away.
It’s instinctual, it’s for their own protection and they couldn’t change it if they wanted to. They’re reacting in their role as prey.
As much as we wish it weren’t so, humans are also often prey. Some victims call the result ‘trauma’, and begin the lifelong challenge of confronting and resolving it head on, whilst some soldier on like nothing happened, and nothing’s wrong. In both cases, they drink a lot.
If you’ve ever tried to get close to one, you might notice that in addition to the bone in their forearm, traumatised people people have a third, radius of the pigeon variety.
It’s instinctual, it’s for their own protection and they they’ve been trying to escape it since the day it took shape. But they can’t as long as they still need it to cope.
Having the requisite vocabulary
Around the age of twenty eight, I wrote a line in one of my comedy books. “I attract crazies.”
I wouldn’t phrase it like that now, but I think what I was trying to express, using my limited twenty-something emotional vocabulary was something like “I seem to attract people who’ve been through trauma.”
At age forty I realised that was incomplete. I don’t attract traumatised people. But it does look that way from the outside.
Let’s face it. Between dads that drink too much, families rich in everything but love, school bullies, date rape, creepy bosses, handsy priests, well meaning but emotionally mute caregivers, ill-meaning and emotionally adroit sociopaths, peak hour traffic, modern politics and the continuing human proclivity for denial, every one of us both encounter and are traumatised people of varying degrees of severity every day.
The process
The way it normally plays out is that I’ll meet someone, be myself, and at some point in the future much earlier than they would normally would, they confide in me about something that they find difficult to talk about. How do I know that about the time frames? People tell me.
This has happened to me my whole life. My Mum and my partner also say this happens to them. Read into that what you will.
It’s not that I attract a disproportionate amount. It only seems that way because traumatised people tend to stick around me. The reason is one core belief I have, and the behaviours that emerge from it.
It’s okay to not be okay.
Emotional damage is a universal human experience, that having been hurt damages a person, but not their intrinsic worth That it’s fine to be damaged, but not fine that you were.
This is something I’ve come to believe from a lifetime’s experience. So I don’t require people to put on a face and be any particular thing around me. I least of all want them to pretend to be okay about things in their lives that clearly aren’t. This is something trauma victims do every day.
Of course this isn’t something you say out loud. It’s something that emerges from believing, genuinely believing that it’s doesn’t invalidate you to have suffered bad things, and that in any case, the quickest way out is through the truth.
So even though the effect may look like I’m attracting them, it’s more accurate to say that I’m embracing them. “I embrace people who’ve been through trauma.” That sounds much nicer.
Listening 101
I know listening is boring. It feels like you’re not doing anything. But it’s not. If people knew how powerful listening was, they’d train it like a martial art. Karatear.
Because you can give a person the best advice in the world, but they don’t feel sufficiently safe and heard in their life, they won’t be capable of of taking it. As we can all attest to, change doesn’t come when you realise what to do, only when you’re able to do it.
Listening gains potency the more open the mind and more closed the mouth. It’s highly attuned passivity. Listening is a receptive process, so the key to doing it well is in what you don’t do .
Less is more. Don’t demand things of their experience (“No I refuse to believe that, that can’t be true”). Don’t attach your own trauma to theirs (“Well men are all useless, we both know it!”).
Be courageous but stretchy. Guide whilst being guided. Fit yourself to whichever vessel presents itself. Be water my friend.
If you can create a space where you listen, people let you and you hear what they say, an transformative thing will happen.
You won’t pity them. You won’t glorify or minimise their pain, or join them in plotting revenge. You won’t get so triggered by what they’re describing that you passively-aggressively demand that they minimise it, hiding the aggression under a cloak of candid concern. You certainly won’t re-traumatise them in doing so, nor will you further entrench their dysfunctional belief that honesty is dangerous. You won’t do any of those things, and that is a very good thing indeed.
Instead, you’ll commune with then. In their words and sufferings you’ll hear your own. The same creature in different clothes. We may not have had the same experience, but feeling betrayed, unsafe scared and let down. We all carry our own wounds.
Isolation traps trauma. To sit, listen and hear a person; to commune with them, demilitarising the minefield of their mind. Feeling safe and heard on a regular basis can transmute the past from millstone into a formidable character, forged in tempered steel. This alchemy is possible, but by absolutely no means inevitable.
TL:DR - It’s just love.
For the millionth year in a row, the award for ‘thing reliably proven to improve good decision making’, is love, and the safety it provides. Not predation disguised as love. Not self-glorification dressed as love. Just boring, passive, garden variety love.
And accepting the award on behalf of love, here’s a puppy getting twizzled.
Sitting and listening. Asking someone what they need and helping provide it. Putting up boundaries and keeping an appropriate distance. Staking out space around a person where they can feel safe being their actual selves, away from judgment and confusion.
Helping them feel safe in the knowledge that they don’t owe anyone the insidious full-time job of keeping their secrets, even if they may subsequently choose to do so.
Understanding that they are more than enough just the way they are. That they’re not broken. Legitimised in but not defined by their pain.
Every moment spent with this feeling feeling uplifts and empowers the spirit of any person, moreso traumatised people who so often spend most of their waking moments in a state of chronically normalised anxiety. A picket fence facade to a house with mess strewn everywhere. Unpleasant and unresolved feelings hoarded to the rafters.
Yes, there is a certain irony in writing and publishing a piece telling everyone to listen. But that’s reductive thinking. Every single idea in this piece that I’m telling you originally came from listening. Amplifying the form if not the specifics of traumatised people’s experiences is a form of honouring those terrible things people trust you enough to share.
The power of stillness.
A volcano can destroy a village and kill its people and livestock. A tsunami can travel across oceans to devastate houses and crops. But hidden within the atomic bonds of a thimbleful of each is enough energy to destroy the world many times over.
The volcanic blast can be heard for miles in all directions. And yet the strong force, the field that holds together each of the trillions of quarks in the protons and electrons that make up the volcano, the lava, the air the sound traveled through and the ears that it enters. That deep well of unimaginable potency, makes no noise at all.
It’s the same with people. There’s energy in yelling and screaming, waging war and laying waste.
But power? Real power, is quiet.