Things Women Don't Say Out Loud: Why We Hide What We're Really Feeling

I'm not coping as well as everyone thinks I am. I love my children, but sometimes I miss the person I was before I had them. I'm lonely in my relationship. I'm tired of being the one everyone relies on. Sometimes I don't want to be needed. I don't actually know what I want anymore.

There are things many women can think relatively easily but find much harder to say. Not necessarily because they're secrets, but because they seem to contradict something we're supposed to be: grateful, capable, loving, easy-going, emotionally available, a good mother, a supportive partner, someone who can cope.

So instead, we edit. I'm exhausted becomes I'm just tired. I'm really struggling becomes It's been a busy week. I'm unhappy becomes I'm probably just stressed. Sometimes we become so practised at translating uncomfortable feelings into more acceptable ones that we barely notice we're doing it.

Why do we silence ourselves?

Psychologist Dana Jack developed the concept of self-silencing to describe a pattern in which people suppress thoughts, feelings or needs, often in an effort to preserve relationships or avoid conflict and rejection (Jack, 1991; Jack & Dill, 1992). Although self-silencing isn't exclusive to women, the theory emerged from women's experiences and sits within a broader understanding of the social expectations placed upon women to be caring, accommodating and attentive to the needs of others.

There is a difference between having an emotion and believing you're allowed to express it. A woman can love being a mother and still hesitate before admitting she sometimes longs for her old life. She can love her partner while feeling lonely in the relationship. She can be highly competent and still desperately want somebody else to take over for a while.

The feelings aren't necessarily contradictory. They're simply more complicated than the stories we're often encouraged to tell about our lives.

‘But I should be grateful’

Sometimes nobody else needs to silence us because we do it ourselves.

You have healthy children. A nice home. A partner who isn't a terrible person. A career you've worked hard for. Friends who would probably describe you as fortunate. So when something feels wrong, another thought appears almost immediately: What have I got to complain about?

Gratitude can be enormously valuable, but gratitude and difficulty aren't opposites. Appreciating what is good in your life doesn't require denying what is painful within it. You can be grateful for your children and overwhelmed by motherhood. You can recognise everything your partner does well and still feel that something important is missing. You can have a successful life and feel exhausted by maintaining it.

Research into emotion regulation also suggests that habitually suppressing emotional expression is associated with poorer wellbeing and interpersonal outcomes, although context matters and keeping emotions to ourselves is not inherently unhealthy (Gross & John, 2003). The question isn't whether we should say everything we feel. It's whether we've begun to believe that certain feelings are unacceptable even to acknowledge.

The cost of being ‘the capable one’

Some women become particularly good at appearing fine. You're the organiser, the person others call when something goes wrong, the one who remembers, reassures and gets on with things. Being capable can become an important and genuinely positive part of your identity.

But identities can become restrictive when we believe we're only allowed to behave in ways that maintain them. If everyone sees you as strong, saying I can't manage this on my own can feel strangely exposing. If you're the easy-going one, setting a boundary can feel selfish. If you're the person who looks after everyone else, admitting that you need looking after yourself may feel almost uncomfortable.

Research on self-silencing has linked greater tendencies to inhibit self-expression with poorer psychological outcomes, including depressive symptoms (Jack & Dill, 1992; Cramer et al., 2005). That doesn't mean keeping something private causes depression. But it does raise an important question: has silence become part of the price you pay for maintaining a particular version of yourself?

Sometimes we're protecting other people

Women don't always stay quiet because they're frightened of being judged. Sometimes they're trying to protect somebody else. I don't want Mum to worry. He's already stressed. The children don't need to know I'm struggling. She'll feel terrible if I tell her that hurt me.

This can come from genuine care. Relationships require sensitivity, and not every emotion needs to be immediately handed to somebody else. But there is a subtle difference between caring about another person's feelings and becoming responsible for preventing them from experiencing uncomfortable ones.

If saying you're hurt will make somebody feel guilty, you may decide not to say you're hurt. If saying no will disappoint somebody, saying yes seems kinder. If admitting you're overwhelmed means somebody else will have to step in, you keep going.

Eventually, other people's emotional comfort can begin to depend on your silence.

Saying something doesn't mean you have to act on it

Sometimes difficult thoughts remain unspoken because saying them feels dangerous. If I admit I'm unhappy in my relationship, does that mean I have to leave? If I say motherhood sometimes feels overwhelming, does that make me a bad mother? If I admit I'm lonely, what does that say about my life?

But naming a feeling isn't the same as making a decision about it. Psychological research into affect labelling suggests that putting emotional experiences into words can influence how we process them (Lieberman et al., 2007). We shouldn't oversimplify that into ‘name it and you'll feel better’, but language can help turn a vague sense that something is wrong into something we can begin to understand.

There is a difference between something doesn't feel right and I think I'm lonely. The second gives us somewhere to begin.

What aren't you saying?

None of this means we need to tell everybody everything. Privacy can be healthy. Timing matters. Some relationships aren't safe places for vulnerability, and sometimes we need to understand what we're feeling ourselves before sharing it with anybody else.

What matters is having somewhere you don't need to translate your experience into the version most comfortable for everyone around you. Somewhere I'm finding motherhood incredibly hard doesn't immediately need to be followed by but obviously I love my children. Somewhere I'm unhappy can exist for a moment before somebody asks what you're going to do about it.

Perhaps there is something you've been editing: a feeling you keep explaining away, a boundary you keep postponing, something you want but feel embarrassed to want, or something that hurts but doesn't seem serious enough to mention.

You don't necessarily need to say it to anybody today. But you might try saying it honestly to yourself. Not the reasonable version. Not the grateful version. Not the version designed to make sure nobody worries. Just the sentence that lies underneath. Because sometimes the things we don't say out loud are exactly the things that deserve to be heard.

Things Women Don’t Say Out Loud is a brand new Hear.You. series about the thoughts, feelings and experiences many women have, but don’t always say.

References

Cramer, K. M., Gallant, M. D., & Langlois, M. W. (2005). Self-silencing and depression in women and men: Comparative structural equation models. Personality and Individual Differences, 39(3), 581–592.

Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362.

Jack, D. C. (1991). Silencing the Self: Women and Depression. Harvard University Press.

Jack, D. C., & Dill, D. (1992). The Silencing the Self Scale: Schemas of intimacy associated with depression in women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 16(1), 97–106.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.