I’ve lived mostly alone for over two years. It’s been horribly isolating. But, I’ve learned a lot about finding the courage to speak up for myself.

I said it.  Out loud, in writing.  And I want you to know something – I almost didn’t write it.

I almost stopped myself from saying anything.

That instinct, the one that says just stay quiet, is the exact thing I want to talk about today.

I believe this phenomenon is quietly running in more of our lives than we know.

I used to think secrets were kept by liars.  That is true.  But, that isn’t the entirety. 

Secrets are also kept by really good people who are waiting – waiting for someone else to speak up first, waiting for permission, waiting for a better moment that never comes.  

And while everyone is waiting, the silence does its work.

Silence is Not Neutral

Here is the thing I had to learn the hard way:  silence is never just the absence of words.

It is an active ingredient.  It is the thing that dysfunction and dishonesty need to survive.

Now, there is nuance – obviously.  I’m not talking about tattling on someone’s little white lies.  Or blurting out someone else’s private moments. 

This is not permission or promotion of gossip over someone else’s pain.

Family therapists have a name for this weaponized silence:  we don’t talk about it. 

Not because everyone in the group dynamic is a villain – but because systems, including families, need stability.  They would rather keep doing the familiar painful thing than risk the discomfort of naming it.  So the unspoken agreement continues:  don’t say the true thing, and we can all keep pretending. 

The people who study these patterns will tell you that belonging, confusion, and loyalty get turned into weapons.

The Family Scapegoat

I can speak firsthand.  My need to belong kept me silent.  My tremendous sense of loyalty kept me quiet.  The confusion over what was true kept me in the dark. 

Everyone else comes first.  We don’t air our business.  They are doing their best.

These statements sound like comfort.  However, they are silencing mechanisms.

The message underneath is always the same:  your honesty is disloyalty.  If you say anything, even if you ask for clarification, you are betraying something sacred.  You are betraying me.  Keep it quiet. 

Notice who tends to get the most pressure to stay silent.

Researchers who study family scapegoating say it’s usually the one who is the most sensitive, the truth teller, the one wired differently from the group.

The one most likely to say the real thing out loud is the exact one the family dynamic needs to keep quiet – because their honesty threatens the story everyone else has silently agreed to believe.

If you have ever felt like the “problem” in a room simply for noticing what was wrong, I want you to know this:  noticing is not the problem.  The thing you noticed is the problem.

You are not too much.  You are not being dramatic.  You are not causing drama.  

Reality check:  You are too honest for a room that has agreed not to be.

Dishonesty and Dysfunction

Dishonesty is self-protection to avoid the consequences of poor choices and to control how you are seen by the world.  A person participating in dishonesty lies to protect their image as well as avoid the pain they have caused others.  It is a fear based tool used to avoid accountability.

Dysfunction is what happens when the system is organized around dishonesty.

It tends to thrive when people don’t have the tools to address the dishonesty head on to keep it from taking over the relational dynamic.  

Here’s how it takes hold:  fundamentally good human beings – children who sense something is wrong but have no words to describe it, a spouse kept in the dark, a family member or even a friend who knows they’ll be frozen out if they don’t go along to get along – mistakenly turn to the very person who has a secret ulterior motive – for answers.

That person is often in a trusted position of authority and uses that authority to control the narrative. 

Now, good people are caught up in something confusing and potentially painful. 

The person they rely on for the truth is the same person manufacturing the chaos and the turmoil.

Every single one of those good humans are weighing the same quiet question:  If I say the true thing, what will it cost me?  My family?  A place in the group where I want to belong?  My marriage?  A friendship? The only people I have that matter?

So the truth stays swallowed – because the price of speaking up feels higher than the price of silence.

They’re left spinning.  Am I misunderstanding this?  Should I ask for clarification?   Do I rock the boat?  It becomes exhausting. 

Exhaustion breeds silence.  The questions go unasked, the doubts go unspoken, and the malignancy spreads throughout their entire system.

The Bystander Effect

For years I didn’t understand why the people around me – people who knew things – would say nothing.  Was I delusional? I know you know.  I know you saw that.  The betrayal was painful.

Why didn’t you defend me?  Why didn’t you say anything?

Then I learned that psychology has been studying this exact freeze for over half a century, and it has almost nothing to do with caring.

It’s called the bystander effect.

Back in the 1960s, psychologists Latané and Darley started asking why people witness something wrong and don’t step in.  What they found is that the more people are present, the less likely any single one of them is to act.

Not because they are cold.  Because of something called diffusion of responsibility. When responsibility is shared among a group, each person feels less of it personally. 

Everyone assumes someone else will go first.  Someone more qualified.  Someone closer.  Someone more brave.  In a crowd of people who all see the same thing, no one moves.

Pluralistic Ignorance

There’s a second mechanism that is even sneakier.  It’s called pluralistic ignorance.  It means we read each other’s silence as evidence nothing is wrong.  

You look around, see everyone else staying quiet and calm, and you conclude:  it must not be that serious, or someone else would have said something. But everyone else in the room is doing the exact same math, looking at your calm face and drawing the same false conclusion.  The silence feeds on itself.  Each person’s quiet becomes the reason for the next person’s quiet. 

I will explain this mechanism in another way:  the silence of others becomes proof that you don’t need to do or say anything.

The people who said nothing were not necessarily heartless.  Many of them were caught up in the oldest trick in the book – waiting for a named person to step up and take responsibility. In the absence of locating a responsible human, they assume the responsibility can’t be theirs. It’s also probably not that big of a deal.

The crowd doesn’t need a poor leader to fail.

Just shared silence – for a few days.

That turns into a few months, into years, and then decades.

But Wait, There’s More

There’s one more layer, and it lives inside you.  When you let the truth start to surface, you feel it – it is a very uncomfortable feeling simmering just below the surface.  That  discomfort is your core values screaming:  say something.  

But most of us are moving through life on autopilot – doom-scrolling, binge-watching, drowning in political noise meant to divide us, numbing out with a drink or substances.  All of it, at least in part, a way to escape that discomfort.  So we ignore the very signal that’s trying to help us. 

Here’s the thing:  the discomfort is temporary.  You have to learn to sit with the discomfort, to acknowledge it.  I am not going to sugar coat this.  This discomfort can be extremely uneasy to hold.  But it will pass.  Then clarity will come. You have to be willing to wait it out.  

Another positive – the more you are willing to sit with it, the easier it gets.  There may come a time when you almost welcome it, because you recognize your intuition.

I believe my intuition is God – it is telling me to pay attention to something important.

It’s All About Me

While I was busy being horrified that no one around me would say the obvious thing, I looked in the mirror and realized:  I have been keeping quiet too.

I have lived alone for two years and let the world believe something tidier.  Something romantic.  Something ridiculous. 

I have managed my hyper-independent public image while privately carrying a horrible reality I said out loud to no one. 

Why?

Faithfulness. Loyalty. Love. My own need to belong. 

Until I realized all of those things were purposefully used against me.

Here I was ready to indict everyone else for their silence. Yet, I was standing in a deep, dark silence of my own. For a time I felt like a hypocrite. But I’ve come to see it differently.

There are two types of silence that destroy from the inside out. The silence that protects a lie and the silence that was imposed on you to survive.

For most of my life, I’ve been standing with one foot in each circle.

The Why

Sometimes you go quiet when you don’t understand what is going on because you are being deliberately misled.  Sometimes you go quiet because you choose comfort over truth.  And, sometimes you go quiet because you are told it is for your own good.

You are told that speaking up would make things worse, that keeping the peace was your job, that the safest thing for everyone is to say nothing. 

Then one day we wake up to realize the silence we were promised would protect us is the very thing that was used to cast blame.

It leaves us holding the collapsed house of cards.

Which is exactly what happened to me.  I woke up and realized I’ve been living and protecting someone else’s lies for someone else’s future plans.

Plans that don’t even include me.

There was no love, no loyalty, no partnership to protect – the house of cards never even existed.

The Named Person

So what do you do with all this?

The research points to something very simple.  The single most powerful thing that breaks the bystander effect is one person deciding:  I will act as if I am the only one here.

Not waiting for permission.  Not waiting for someone in the crowd.  Just going first.  

In an emergency, you call for help. You, the named person, act.

And in a family, a friendship, a marriage, in your own precious life –  the named person can be you. You can be the one who decides the responsibility is yours.

You say the true thing out loud.

It will feel disloyal.  It is supposed to.

The machinery of silence is designed to make honesty feel like betrayal.

But telling the truth about your own life is not betrayal.  It is the opposite.

Your life is your life to live, not manage around someone else’s secrets.  

Keeping quiet about someone else’s life that is negatively affecting you is betraying yourself – you are essentially gaslighting yourself. 

Speaking up is the thing that finally allows you to stop pretending, and gives you your voice back.

The caveat – just because you speak up doesn’t mean smooth sailing here on out.

In fact, you may find yourself standing alone.  That can be very disconcerting.

My Faith

This is where my faith carries me the rest of the way.  I cannot do this on courage alone.  God has my back, and my faith allows me to believe God doesn’t want me to hide.

You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free – John 8:32

Not the comfortable version.  Not the tidy, socially acceptable version everyone likes.  THE TRUTH.

The thing about God that unravels every family secret ever kept is that there are no secrets kept from Him.  Everything done in the dark is already seen.  Therefore, silence never protects anyone – it only delays the light.

I would rather step into that light on purpose than wait on someone else to drag me into it.  The reality is, in all likelihood, no one else is paying attention because they are all consumed with their own lives.

That may be a tough pill to swallow, but it’s true.

We’ve all heard the saying “No one is coming to save you.”  Why? Everyone else is mostly focused on their own set of overwhelming problems.

You could be left in the darkness, if you don’t proactively fight to find the light.

The Courage To Go First

I am not saying this from some wonderful enlightened mountaintop.

The school of hard knocks is my teacher.

I have been living alone in this giant house, carrying the weight of the world, mistakenly protecting someone else’s darkness for far too long.

Mislabeling my silence as a deep love and loyalty to someone who has shown me repeatedly, they have never felt the same way about me.  

I am done letting a silence I didn’t choose keep telling the story of my life.

I’ve already said this but I will say it again:  dishonesty and dysfunction can only breathe in darkness and secrecy.

Take away the silence, and there’s no oxygen left for those two malignancies to survive.  That makes room for the joy and light in your life to spread like wildfire.

Someone had to go first. 

It might as well have been me.  

I’ll see you when I see you.

– Jennifer 🤍

Looking for More Essays Written By Me?

Daddy – My father – the man who taught me to speak up when something’s wrong and never turn my back on unfair treatment. Everything I know about courage, I learned from him. I still smile when I read this one.

God, Guardian Angels, and Cast Iron Skillets – My brother Alton, and Lillie – the guardian angel who raised us both and went on the very date already sacred to our family. It’s woven through with the God winks I’ve built my faith on. I understand now that God did bring David into my life – just not for the reasons I believed at the time. God works in mysterious ways.

My Love Affair with Grass – The love of the land my father planted in me, from Yard of the Month in tiny Tallulah to the St. Augustine I still watch like a hawk. It’s full of Daddy – the toads, the crop duster, the day he spray-painted the bare grass green so no one would be the wiser. Some inheritances you can’t lose, no matter what else gets taken.