Silencing Response

Silencing Response Assumptions

In 1997, during preliminary investigations into the silencing response phenomenon, Baranowsky and Gentry conducted interviews to determine if specific assumptions were operating among those using this response. Conclusions from these interviews resulted in speculation that the silencing response is most likely to occur when the helping professional uses one or more assumptions regarding the traumatic experiences of those they are helping. The assumptions that follow (based on interviews conducted with family and individual therapists at Florida State University, 1997) make up an interconnecting framework that singly or as a group affect the helper's ability to attend to recollections of traumatic material. In 2002, Baranowsky reported these assumptions as follows:

• 1.
  I can't do anything about it. Listening won't help so I don't want to hear about it.
• 2.
  If we touch on the traumatic event, the person will fall apart or be destroyed. The main notion is that talking about the trauma will only make things worse.
• 3.
  I will be destroyed if I hear about the traumatic event. The helper feels fearful of being exposed to the terror that the individual experienced directly.
• 4.
  Good things happen to good people—therefore you must be bad for this to have happened to you.
• 5.
  This is too terrible to be true. Yael Danieli wrote about the conspiracy of silence, which exposed the tendency of mental health practitioners to silence the horrific experiences of Holocaust survivors with the notion that these events were too terrible to be true.
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• 6.
  This violates my assumptive world (e.g., my neighborhood is safe; therefore, this couldn't have happened here).
• 7.
  The helper has a strong need for the trauma survivor to “just get over it.” The helper is using a type of magical thinking whereby he or she believes that any and every trauma survivor can “just get over it” and that this can occur automatically and without any therapeutic intervention.
• 8.
  If it happened to you, it could happen to me. This vulnerability to terrible events might lead the helper to feel that what happened could be contagious.

As Frank Angelo and his colleagues identified, trauma survivors need to speak of their experiences, and when given a choice between prolonged exposure (PE) or pharmacological treatment, the most common form of treatment chosen was PE and the reason given was a “need to talk” about the trauma. Jennifer Hoult's 1998 article “Silencing the Victim” in Ethics and Behavior reminds us that refusal or inability to attend to traumatic memories or experiences does not reduce their impact on the individual or simply make the associated difficulties go away. Amy Cameron and her colleagues concluded that there was a relationship between the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), emotional distress, and the tendency to use thought suppression. Therefore, failing to see, hear, or speak about trauma does not mean that the individual is no longer suffering. We cannot expect the signs and symptoms to vanish without appropriate care. Although many trauma survivors are remarkably resilient and recover without care, when care is needed, recovery can be impaired when none is offered. Yet, without a deep sense of what is required for adequate care, we may be left with a conscious or unconscious tendency to avoid traumatic subject matter.

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