Speech is among the most fundamental ways we have of connecting our selves to other selves. There are silences that are positive and powerful and willed by the self, but many silences have a destructive origin and destructive consequences. They are the result of shame, or fear, or inhibition. In the silence of shame, we imagine that if others knew our story they would recoil in disgust or disapproval. Or we can be inhibited by the sense that our experiences have no significance or value. In the silence of fear, it is possible to feel that we are still in danger from hurtful people in our past, or that speaking of something will cause hurt to people we care about. There is also the silence of oblivion: a sense that cherished people and things have vanished and we are powerless to recover them.
Often these silences are connected to a sense that survival depends on them. That we will be stronger by being silent. Or that being silent is the only way we can survive. We think that, in order to successfully endure our suffering, we must not speak, even to ourselves. And yet, this silence makes us the victim of our experience, not the master. We cannot master experience until we acknowledge its true nature and dimensions: both the facts of what happened and the emotions associated with those facts.
To suffer in silence, like grieving in silence, is destructive of the self, since it means walling off aspects of experience and the emotions connected with them. No one and nothing can prevent suffering, loss, and confusion in life. These phenomena are simply a part of human experience. It is the destructive or isolating silence that arrives in the aftermath of such experiences that can be changed.
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