Know When to Evoke Companionable Silence

Depression/anxiety may have touched your family, your friends, yourself; what helps you to deal with it? Sharing is caring!

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CitM
Posts: 157
Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2012 12:45 pm
Location: United States

Know When to Evoke Companionable Silence

Postby CitM » Sun Feb 07, 2016 1:42 pm

Sometimes, I will say something that I heard on the news, and my husband will tell me it's not possible and that's not the way the world works.

Now mind you, I just read it in the news, so obviously that is the way the world works, but rather than argue with him. I will tell him, well I saw it in the news, maybe you could look it up? And then I'm quiet. No matter what he says about it later on, I just listen. I'll respond to other conversational topics that are seeming to go well (which happens a lot with more than two people around), but I'll remain quiet on that. It's not a 'frozen' silence I invoke, just a listening silence.

So far, that seems to be a good strategy to avoid being drawn into some kind of bizarre conversation where it is used as fuel to emotionally dominate.

I think it is really important for people to realize that just because they have had some serious health issues in the past, that it doesn't have to always be that way, and abusing people who are ill, is wrong. Just wrong.

That goes for whether it is to keep people from a job, people from experience, people from an education, people from fair housing, etc.

Prycejosh1987
Posts: 424
Joined: Sun May 31, 2020 10:54 am
Location: Birmingham UK

Re: Know When to Evoke Companionable Silence

Postby Prycejosh1987 » Fri Jun 05, 2020 2:03 pm

CitM wrote:Sometimes, I will say something that I heard on the news, and my husband will tell me it's not possible and that's not the way the world works.

Now mind you, I just read it in the news, so obviously that is the way the world works, but rather than argue with him. I will tell him, well I saw it in the news, maybe you could look it up? And then I'm quiet. No matter what he says about it later on, I just listen. I'll respond to other conversational topics that are seeming to go well (which happens a lot with more than two people around), but I'll remain quiet on that. It's not a 'frozen' silence I invoke, just a listening silence.

So far, that seems to be a good strategy to avoid being drawn into some kind of bizarre conversation where it is used as fuel to emotionally dominate.

I think it is really important for people to realize that just because they have had some serious health issues in the past, that it doesn't have to always be that way, and abusing people who are ill, is wrong. Just wrong.

That goes for whether it is to keep people from a job, people from experience, people from an education, people from fair housing, etc.

Concern is not abuse, but i guess it is how you come across.


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