I never realized how much I hated silence.
Not the silence of a calm room after a long day at work. Or the quiet that comes when my daughter is asleep and I finally have a few hours to myself. It’s the stillness in waiting for an answer that I just can’t stand. It’s being desperate to know something and no one’s talking.
It’s frustrating. It made me angry and I never understood why.
How many times have you texted someone with no response, sometimes for days? Did you ever apply for a job you really wanted and there’s no answer?
Silence.
Did you ever ask God to move and nothing happens?
Silence.
It can break you if you let it. In prison, they call it solitary confinement and it can drive you crazy if left there for too long.
But is it really the silence that I hate? Don’t we all just want a little bit of quiet from time-to-time? What makes one silence horrible and another silence a hope for restorative calm?
I’m in a personal season of silence. I’m unsure of my next steps and not really hearing what I should do. It’s brought me to places emotionally that I’ve been surprised of and also disgusted with. I’ve come face-to-face with my weaknesses in the silence. And the truth is, I couldn’t handle it.
Thankfully, by the mercy of God, I realized it’s not the silence itself that bothers me. The truth is, I’m afraid of it. I’m afraid of silence. I hate it because I am afraid of it.
I never formed a good opinion of silence. In my perspective, silence preceded a punishment or being forgotten. My brain associated silence with a negative and I began to fear it which is a defense mechanism for survival to stay away from it.
Fear is one of those emotions that we very rarely realize until it’s quite large and in charge of other aspects of our lives. The way we react to things, what we stay away from or pursue has a lot to do with fear. The emotion of fear resides in the part of our brain that holds our survival mechanism, also our “flight or fight” response. Fear and anxiety have the same effects on our body; heightened sweat production, blood pressure and the release of the same hormones. This part of the brain is called our Amygdala. It’s located in our temporal lobe of our cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex is in charge of higher thinking. It’s where our thoughts are passed through logic. The interesting thing is that it takes 12 milliseconds for a fear to reach our amygdala but DOES NOT have to pass through the place of logic (Cortex). So in essence, many walk around with illogical fears that have no substance in fact. For a fear to even be recognized we have to truly understand why we do what we do. What is driving us? Why am I feeling this?
The good part is if we can discover the fear, we can then pass it through our cortex for logical reasoning and dismantle it completely if there is no factual basis for it. By recognizing the fear and speaking it aloud, we force it through our cortex. If we then force our brain to recognize it we can then reverse the ideas that we’ve formed around it using logic.
In my case, silence made me feel alone, forgotten, and that punishment was coming. In my rationale, nothing good ever came from silence. But that is an illogical and false idea. Silence often means something is growing or changing or moving. When I found out I was pregnant with Eliana, she didn’t make a sound, but she was growing inside me. When I bake something in the oven, it’s pretty quiet in there, but what’s changing inside is going to be great! So silence really isn’t the enemy, it’s my expectation of what coming after the silence that I am dreading. It’s skewing my entire condition to react to something that has not happened nor do I have any factual basis that it will happen.
Silence, in all actuality, is nothing. Silence is the lack of sound or speaking. By this understanding, I was afraid of nothing. The “nothing” was scaring me when there was no reason. To get upset or anxious about not hearing back from someone is illogical. My brain was conditioned to react toward the stimulus of silence and prepare me for something very bad. My heart rate would increase, I would be nervous waiting for the release to finally hear something. It’s exhausting and, honestly, no way that I want to live.
So how do you change it?
By changing the pathway your mind is using to initiate the response. For me, identifying my fears within the silence exposes what I’m actually trying to avoid: feelings of being forgotten, loss of control, punishment, etc. Seeing those things in their most basic sense helps me to now use logic to inform my amygdala that there is nothing to fear because “nothing” has happened. Silence means nothing. My goal is to then associate silence with the positive: rest, security, peace. The best part of this, and what makes it easier, is that the amygdala is located in our temporal lobe. This is the part of our cortex that receives by hearing. If I can confront my fears with the truth then I reformulate my thought process. This is why God always tells us to speak His word!
The truth will always expel lies just like love will always expel fears. To base my emotions on a perceived outcome (lie) will keep me in an emotional prison that will control and shape me and the choices I make in my future. They will limit me and my relationships always. But truth and love walk hand-in-hand. You can’t lie to someone you love without feeling guilt – you know it’s wrong. In the same way, when you confront the lies in your mind with truth, the fear is uncovered so you can love freely, even those things you thought you hated.
By battle with silence isn’t over, but I laid a good foundation. Now I just need to build on it. Like with any step of growth, the first step is the hardest, but if you just keep going, you can build something beautiful in your life. This is why God stayed silent because he’s trying to make something beautiful inside me and He’s using no words at all.
“I’m just a person who writes about her experiences to hopefully help others not fall where I have. I hope that my lessons can inspire. I pray I can produce hope in others. I write about me to unburden my soul of the weight I feel to just help one person.” -Daniela V. Mangini
Becoming Invincible 