the Silent Treatment -- poetic form

My mother would give my dad the silent treatment,

sometimes for days, when they argued.

The house would shimmer and shake in the deafening quiet

My sister and I never knew what he did

or what she was so angry about

No one in the house knew what would break the cycle

of nothingness. No smile. No looking into the eyes.

Nothing that could suggest connection was necessary.

Curt words dealt with the home

Terse body language everyone could hear

screamed her rage with no sound.

I used to think my own dance with anger was anything but silent.

An F-bomb in quiet prose is more my style

A measured tone with surgically precise language

describing the offense, the affront to my world, my body

Lots and lots of words seems to be more my style.

I’ve learned the verbal choreography of anger

necessary in the worlds of men.

But seven years ago, I woke up to a Reality 

I had resisted seeing for decades:

the centuries’ long abandonment, the inexcusable abuse

of women, girls, little boys, all of creation.

Silenced. Shoved aside. Raped. Pillaged.

God protects us from nothing,

even if He sustains us in all things (says James Finley)

Goddess seems to have lost the battle, if not yet the war (says me).

She came too late, really, for this little girl to not be abandoned.

For many, this signals a rupture of faith,

a departure from the faith community,

errant in its ignorance

culpable in its persistent choice to neglect. 

But how do you leave something that is five decades

embedded into your very cells? your sense of purpose in the world?

You don’t. At least not without spending the rest of your precious years

on this mysterious twirling sphere of abundant grace

fighting what is already a part of you.

Then I realized today that my mother was onto something.

What else can a woman disempowered in a dangerous world

do with her righteous anger, her abandonment as an infant

by the Sacred, a little-girl-to-be who wouldn’t know 

she was beautiful as a girl, she was perfect as the girl she is

until she was an older woman, nearly fifty years old?

She can give All That Is Holy the Silent Treatment.

The Silent Treatment

 Somewhere along the line, I learned that anger required the silent treatment for getting along in a family, in a household, in life for the moment. By and large, folks who know me and my father see I am clearly my father’s daughter. Verbose, inquisitive, service-oriented, intellectual. Those are characteristics of my father. But I’m also my mother’s daughter in many ways. My physical frame is largely hers, for one. I remember seeing on film my 16-year old self walk across the stage as accompanist to a high school choir. “I walk just like Mom!” I exclaimed, startled. I had not seen the physical resemblance so clearly before. My mother is the intuitive, the perceptive, though those things have waned in her later years, as her hearing and speaking have waned. I credit my own perceptiveness and intuitive sense to her, along with deeply repressed emotional capacities I’ve learned to welcome into awareness more often. Today, I’m newly aware that I’m my mother’s daughter when it comes to anger. We give everyone around us the silent treatment when we’re angry. 

Arguments in my home when I was growing up were always tense affairs, but they would also last for days. Whatever the flare-up was about, if Mom was angry, it would linger in the house, unspoken but simmering. You never quite knew when it was over. You couldn’t really persuade her out of it. Dad (the usual recipient and protagonist of this kind of anger) would simply get the silent treatment for ages. And then when it was over, for some unexpected reason, it was over. Life went on. At least until it happened again, which it, of course, always did. From the outside, it always looked like Dad ran the family with his domineering verbosity and intellectual prowess. It’s taken me years to see that actually, Mom’s anger controlled the spaces in a much more impactful way than I ever fully knew.

It’s taken me some time to see this behavior in me, because I’m a hybrid father’s-mother’s daughter. I use the exquisitely honed skills of a verbal-intellectual communicator that I have inherited from my father, softening them up with my own deep-feeling capacities and attuned intuitions, perceptions. The combination of these gifts, skills, tends to stave off much direct conflict in my relationships. My husband and I rarely have firey arguments. We have deeply engaged discussions that can cycle forever instead. Sometimes we just need a fiery exchange to break the cycle because we’re both such good verbal communicators. As such, I don’t give the silent treatment to my husband very much. To anyone I love, actually. I’m more prone to drop an F-bomb in a discussion, to alert to the anger in me, to break up the unending conversational cycle about something.

This morning it dawned on me, however. In the area of my most extensive and deeply raging anger, I’ve reverted to the earliest strategy I know: the silent treatment. I’ll get into the specifics in a moment, but it’s gotten me interested in the Silent Treatment as a strategy. I mean, how does it work, exactly? What does the one imposing the Silent Treatment get out of it? What does the one being Silenced get? What are the practical fruits of the whole business?

Looking with my 51-year-old eyes and heart, I realize it’s a strategy that makes sense for women in the society in which we’ve been shaped these last several decades. Women, especially those my mother’s age, didn’t really have an easy road to voice, after all. Financial dependence, fear of being ostracized (especially within Christian circles), deep familiarity with male-on-female violence in the home and beyond it… Anger was a fire that was too costly to let rage much. Better and safer to tone it down, repress it, hone it, use it. So the Silent Treatment is a passive-aggressive strategy quite available to women who wanted to survive the challenges of their day. It is a basic exercise of indirect power over what women could control: easy harmony in the home. 

So how it works… First, you refuse to speak to the one with whom you are most angry. You deny them access to your eyes, and you neglect their needs as much as you can get away with. [We would still eat family dinners together, for instance, but they would be strained and even quiet. Mom still functioned as homemaker, but she made sure Dad was really uncomfortable. Us too, for that matter.] For prolonged periods of time, the one imposing the Silent Treatment gets to create her own world with direct disregard of those who have angered her. There’s a smug feeling of “see? You’re not that important to me after all” while life goes on in as much disregard of the other as possible. There is also a false sense of freedom from the anger, driven by the anger itself.

The one being ignored, if he’s honest, feels the power inflicted or imposed, if unexpectedly or indirectly. There is a daily/hourly consequence for having transgressed whatever boundary was transgressed. A natural reaction may be just that, a reaction. A mirroring of “it doesn’t matter to me either,” for instance. Or more often, we would see a retrenchment and refusal to see that any boundary was transgressed at all. A refusal to get curious about what made Mom so angry. A refusal to consider that it mattered or was important. 

The stalemate could go on for hours or days. Enough time for the rest of us to wonder...what does the Silent Treatment offer? What does each participant “get” for keeping the dynamic alive?

Today, I can empathize with my mother’s need to have some control over her environment, in her own life. Dad is a dominant presence, conditioned to control the spaces with his voice, his curiosity, his intellect. The Silent Treatment reinstated a balance of power, of sorts. Mom controlled the spaces for a while, not him. He couldn’t force her to speak when she simply refused. So this also gave her agency to refuse parts of her life that weren’t of her own agency. She became more of an autonomous person, in that sense. 

The one being Silenced could keep on “being right” by refusing to be cowed in the Silence. I don’t know many human beings who don’t choose the feeling of being right. It’s quite seductive, at least in my family. And a refusal to show that the Silence was any different, that it was uncomfortable or unwanted, meant that no apology was forthcoming or considered warranted. Participating in the entire dynamic meant that being right about whatever sparked the fight in the first place was more important than getting curious, trying to see or sense the feeling(s) of the other, reconciling the relationship. 

So the Silent Treatment creates a holding pattern in which neither party needs to get too close to the rupture, the anger. This ‘buys’ a sense of security or safety that can be necessary, for shorter or longer periods of time, depending upon the boundary transgressed. This strategy also provides a way of being rooted in one aspect of consciousness--being right, at almost all costs--while refusing another level or invitation to consciousness--being curious, being willing to see all things as interconnected, interdependent...which would mean his/her part in the rupture is more significant than “being right.” 

One thing was crystal clear over the years of watching the Silent Treatment control our home from time to time: one never knew what or when would break it open, would end the Silent Treatment.

So there’s the rub for me as I realized this morning that I’m relying on this strategy of the Silent Treatment in a pretty large portion of my life. There is a deep lava flow of anger within me, which can erupt into a controlled but exhausting rage unexpectedly. Whenever the disempowerment, shaming, silencing, neglect, outright abuse, or abandonment of women/girls touches my life, I can be taken over by the fires. Rage. Tears. Sadness. Reactivity. It’s less volatile than it used to be, but it’s always with me.

I know enough about anger to know it wounds only (mostly) me, but I honestly don’t know how to reconcile my root-tradition’s utter abandonment of me as a woman, of women for centuries, with the so-called charism and gifts of this tradition (Christianity). I do know I cannot ‘leave’ that which is in over four-decades of my body-soul memory. So I remain…and I don’t deny the gifts in (much of) Christian traditions, particularly for so many I serve. But I no longer have access to these gifts, directly, for me. It’s literally been years since I felt I could enter into any prayer of direct-address (to a personal Source-God/de-Spirit) for myself. I hold this space for directees and students all the time without sense of dissonance, but for me? My yearning for the Holy waxes and wanes, in a fragile dance with my grief, my rage. 

Praying in any direct address to either God or Goddess who abandoned me/us feels like complicity in this abandonment. Offering up anything of my own intimate life in devotion to this One? Sawdust in the mouth and airways.

This morning, it dawned on me in no uncertain terms. I’m doing the only thing I know as a woman to do when she’s angry in a world that is dangerous for women: I’m giving God/de the Silent Treatment. You refuse to speak to the one who has transgressed the boundary. You deny access to your eyes, and you neglect their needs/desires as much as you can get away with. For a while, you can pretend that you control the space and you’ll be able to protect yourself from the pain that happened before…

For a while…

...which then becomes an on-ramp to getting curious about what, if anything, might break the cycle, the pattern. I honestly don’t know. Am I right about the abandonment of women by religious traditions over centuries? Pretty hard to argue against the evidence. Is being right the only thing important to me? Of course not. But this Silent Treatment is the holding pattern in which neither party needs to get too close to the rupture, the anger. This ‘buys’ a sense of security or safety that can be necessary, for shorter or longer periods of time, depending upon the boundary transgressed. This strategy also provides a way of being rooted in one aspect of consciousness--being right, at almost all costs--while refusing another level or invitation to consciousness--being curious, being willing to see all things as interconnected, interdependent...which would mean his/her part in the rupture is more significant than “being right.” 

The stalemate holds… Stepping out of the stalemate feels disingenuous, at best. What is 'my part' in the abandonment of women over centuries? could be the question, but it's nonsensical to me. The stalemate holds... What is 'my part' in this rupture?