Today, I am going to explain to you what “self-silencing” is in the psychology literature. I think we are all familiar with the concept, especially women, more especially women in Turkey.
– What is it?
Dana Crowley Jack is an American psychologist who worked with especially depressed women. In her book, “Silencing the Self: Women and Depression” (1991), in the beginning, she explains how she finds traditional theories of depression insufficient in terms of understanding and treating depression in women, which I completely agree with. What she means by the concepts used in traditional theories of depression is, for example:
“Depressed women need to learn to become independent by developing autonomy and self-reliance in relationships so that they can keep their self-esteem and sense of identity.”
For Jack, these ways of thinking about depression were not enough or valid for the women’s case. So, she preferred to listen to women to understand what exactly they were going through instead of only applying some theories to treat them.
After interviewing and studying with 12 depressed women, Jack (1991) introduced “self-silencing” to the literature. She found that the fact that women’s silencing creates a feeling of “loss of self”, resulting in depression.
In short, we can say self-silencing is the fact that women silence themselves, they do not express themselves, their needs, and their emotions to their partners (in this case to men) so that they can maintain their intimate relationships. The main construct here is that women put others first rather than themselves because of the expectations from society and culture, also due to the gender roles. At the end of the day, women are emotional, caring, nurturing, blah blah blah. If they think of themselves, they would be evil, they would be bad girls, bad moms, bad sisters, bad daughters, blah blah blah.
That is kind of relevant to Turkish women, I would say.
How?
“What I feel is not that important. The important thing is the happiness of my family”
“It is better to be silent than disturb my husband’s peace”
“If I think about my own needs and desires first, I would be a selfish mom and wife, I should put my husband’s and my children’s needs and feelings first”
I can give hundreds of examples here. However, I’ll keep them for my next blog post with more explanations of Silencing the Self Theory.
References
Jack, D. C. (1991). Silencing the self: Women and depression. Harvard University Press.
