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Is Silence Killing Your Relationship?
Unhealthy peace is just as bad as unhealthy conflict
I’m sitting in silence right now. It’s completely peaceful. A calm, happy kind of peaceful and it makes me think of a time, a few years ago now, where I lived with a different kind of peace — a peace where I avoided conflict and chose silence. The kind of peace I tried to keep in my marriage.
But according to the experts, this kind of peace-keeping is not as peaceful as we think.
Conflict resolution expert, Priya Parker says “Unhealthy peace can be as threatening to human connection as unhealthy conflict.”
Unhealthy peace damages our marriages. It doesn’t “keep the peace”, it keeps the annoyances, the hurt, the unmet needs, the buried resentment. Unhealthy peace often becomes stonewalling and stonewalling our spouse is not the same as healthy peace.
When silence is a wall
Stonewalling is when one partner (or both) avoids conflict by withdrawing. They turn away from their partner mentally and/or physically and make them feel blocked and unheard, and leave the issues unresolved.
I realised after my divorce that even though there was a lot of conflict, much of it — from my side — was left unsaid. A conflict raged in my own head…
