The Cost Of Silence: When Asking For Help Is A Burden

This episode contains discussion of trauma and survival response.

Please listen with care and pause if anything feels activating.

Let's begin.

Welcome to Exile in Rising.

I'm Anamail,

Somatic experiencing therapist for PTSD and trauma recovery.

Today piece is called Excuse me,

I'm drowning,

But I will remain silent.

From the book,

The Trauma We Don't Talk About.

When we carry trauma in our bodies,

Silence becomes survival.

Even when we are in pain,

Even when we are drowning,

When we are dying,

We learn not to make waves,

Not to disturb or not to need.

This piece is for those who learned to stay quiet while suffering,

For those who protect everyone else from their own pain.

Together,

We will explore what happens when the body confuses asking for help with danger and what it takes to slowly reclaim your voice.

Let's begin.

Excuse me,

I'm drowning,

But I will remain silent.

With a trauma body,

You don't want to disturb or upset anyone,

Even if you are drowning.

You can be submerged in a lake and not even splash the water,

Make any sounds or God forbid,

Call out for help.

That is what trauma does to us.

We are conditioned to stay silent in the deepest,

Most desperate pain.

We are taught to figure things out on our own while remaining considerate of everyone else.

Even when we are sure we will die.

We drown in the shame of inadequacy because even in the moment when we know we are about to die,

We judge ourselves and feel ashamed that this happened to us.

What a loser we say to ourselves.

You're drowning in this lake.

You did it to yourself.

Die.

This is it.

You made it happen.

It is your fault.

Again.

This self-alienating talk isn't enough.

In our self-induced shame,

We also believe that if we cry for help,

We will make someone upset with us.

They would need to stop reading their book or whatever it is they are preoccupied with to help us get out of the lake.

While we are struggling to breathe in the last molecule of oxygen,

We don't want anyone to be annoyed with us.

So,

We remain silent and drown.

This is the piece called,

Excuse me.

I am drowning.

But I will remain silent.

Page 132.

The book is The Trauma We Don't Talk About.

So,

Let's begin into deep dive of this piece.

As always,

Pause,

Write things down in your journal,

In your notebook,

And let's begin.

Main theme I want to describe in this piece is psychological and social trauma pattern.

The belief that your very needs are a burden.

What we call in a therapy,

The burden identity.

And at the center of this trauma state is a learned conviction that your existence is inconvenience for others.

So,

How it forms in early life.

If a child's distress or need was met with irritation,

Silent treatment,

Punishment,

Withdrawal,

Rather than comfort,

The child internalize,

When I express pain,

When I express my need,

People suffer.

And to preserve attachment,

Because child is completely dependent of a parent,

The most essential survival bond,

The child suppresses their own needs to protect the caregiver's comfort.

And this becomes the root of self erasure.

In some families,

Even saying I'm hungry means it will be met with a quality of burden,

With a comment,

Again.

So,

Very common,

If you face that,

Is that you will even suppress your need to eat.

You will lose your appetite.

If you're in pain,

If you're coming down with flu and cold,

And if you see a mother being completely distressed now or anxious,

And if you can see your cold,

Your pain is making your mother extremely worried or very worried,

The child will not express or say that it's in the pain.

Getting sick wasn't even allowed for some people.

Why?

Because of medical bills.

So,

Child learns that own experience in existence is inconvenient for parents,

For caregivers.

And over time,

The nervous system wires this pattern.

Need,

My need,

Will be met with shame.

I will feel shameful about this basic need or even wanting just something,

Just wanting,

Right?

My shame will then be met with silence.

That equals I will be isolated.

Self-blame follows,

And I will collapse.

And the body learns silence equals safety.

Visibility,

Expressing,

Naming what I need equals danger,

Equals shame,

Equals being isolated,

Equals feeling so bad about self because of self-blame.

And it equals I will resign.

Also,

What we have here is from attachment wound,

We quickly move to moral wound because this metaphor I used of drowning while staying quiet captures a double bind.

If I speak,

I cause pain.

If I don't speak,

I disappear.

And this is not mere condependence.

This is a moral injury.

There you're forced to betray your own aliveness,

Your own life sometimes to preserve belonging.

And by life,

I mean many more men.

They will hide their illness.

They will hide they need help.

They will hide their terminal ill so they don't feel as a burden to anyone.

If you grow up like this,

Or this is also what your partner can condition you and make you feel as any expression of your need is a burden to him or her.

And this results in a chronic hyper-responsibility,

Constantly scanning other's moods to avoid upsetting them.

Second,

Learned self-disgust.

Internalizing caregiver stress,

Your wantings and your needs is something shameful,

Is something as shouldn't ever happen to you.

As calling for help is not okay.

As being sick is not okay.

Wanting to get something nice for yourself is not okay.

Being fed is not okay.

And then we have third,

Survival guilt,

Feeling unworthy of care,

Attention,

And rescue.

And when the guilt fuses with shame,

The person's help seeking reflects shutdown.

So this is very,

Very important.

This is very important.

So even in crisis,

They self-soothe by not needing.

And it's so important to check on your people,

To ask them to offer help even without asking.

It's so important.

As you know,

I'm somatic experiencing therapist for PTSD and trauma recovery.

And describing drowning without making a splash,

It is not a metaphor.

It is the felt reality of dorsal vagal shutdown and the phone appeased response.

Their nervous system equates movement,

Sound,

Or request with danger.

Where the body freezes its own distress signals to maintain social safety.

This is so automatic.

So phone and appeased response is so quick.

And many people can feel deep shame because they didn't ask for help.

They would say,

I was so stupid.

Why I didn't?

But there is no blame because response is something you don't have control over.

Nervous system response,

Fight,

Flight,

Freeze,

Phone is innate.

It is automatic.

It's part of your biology.

Okay?

So remaining silent is neurological strategy.

It's not weakness.

It is the body protecting the last shred of connection by sacrificing expression.

And that expression can be the last call to stay alive.

And this comes from a deep childhood wounds where a child is raised with a burden identity.

And it was so necessary for a child to make peaceful agreement not to make parents upset because life dependent on the parents.

Also,

What's very important here is to expose collective trauma pattern,

Not only individual.

Families in dysfunctional system,

The child learns emotional caretaking.

And then spoken rule is don't upset the family peace.

Speaking truth or asking for helps makes you the problem.

Right?

So if you're coming from a family of complete denial and pretense of happiness,

This is very common.

If you speak truth,

If you're a whistleblower,

You are the problem.

You are that burden no one wants to deal with.

Right?

And in society,

In capitalist and patriarchal cultures,

Productivity and composure are valued over vulnerability.

And people who struggle are told to toughen up or not to make it about themselves.

It needs to be a team experience.

You don't get to have your own experience.

And the result is silence becomes a virtue.

And pain and asking for help becomes shameful.

And this image of a lake is a mirror of modern society,

A culture of drowning politely without the sound.

Where your best friend can struggle.

Where your best friend can face terminal illness.

And it will not share anything with you.

So main teachings would be silence was never your personality.

It was your protection.

And silence is not same as being introvert.

It's not the same.

The inability to ask for help is not a flaw.

It's a survival reflex learned in unsafe environments.

Learned from burden identity.

Help seeking is relational repair.

And when you begin to call out even softly,

You will rewire your nervous system to believe in safe co-regulation.

And you will not force your nervous system.

You will have evidence that people,

Safe people around you are more than willing to help same way as you would.

Third,

The burden story is inherited.

Many carry generational trauma where visibility was dangerous.

If you're a minority,

Person of color,

If you went through the war,

Poverty,

Displacement,

Being silent was only thing what kept you safe.

It did me.

I was silent for many years.

Then I lived in the wars.

Many years in deep silence and that kept me safe.

Absolutely.

Also for it,

Altruism is self-harm.

So we need to expose the shadow of selflessness.

How being considerate can become a trauma pattern that erases the self.

So this is now complete opposite from narcissistic personality.

Right?

So being considerate is a silent killer of your own being.

And it's a trauma pattern.

And it's also conditioned in patriarchal structures.

Right?

You cannot be seen.

You cannot be heard.

We know about that one.

And the way how you will heal is to reclaim permission to disturb.

And yet,

You will not disturb.

What you feel this is disruption is what people are doing all the time.

Disrupting other's comfort was a memory how you grew up.

You will not disrupt anyone's comfort if it means saving your life.

It is not harm.

It is what people do all the time.

And the essence of this is you do not owe the world your silence in exchange for belonging.

You're not that child,

Helpless child anymore.

You're not.

So we need to move from appeasement to aliveness,

From self-blame to self-recognition,

From invisible suffering to embodied dignity.

Being taught that you're a burden creates a core trauma of unentitled existence.

And one thing you're entitled is your existence.

You're entitled of your own existence.

Your need is not too much.

Your seek for help is not harm.

And your survival deserves space and help from others.

So asking for help is not disturbance.

And if you're surrounded by people who always react as you're a burden,

As you're disturbing them,

Then it's a time to change your people because they were never your people.

You get to build your own adaptive family,

Your soul family.

Or you find that one person.

But clearly,

If there is this dynamic of you being over-considerate,

Always silent,

Hiding your needs,

And when you need help,

But you're always available to help others,

And then if expression of your needs is received as a burden and you feel like you're a burden,

It's time to change people around you.

It's too costly to have them.

And why would you?

It's not enjoyable.

Absolutely,

It's not enjoyable.

Core teachings,

Trauma-trained silence.

Their nervous system would rather die quietly than risk disturbing others.

And the body equates asking for help with danger,

Shame,

Or retaliation.

This is very important.

If sound retaliate when you expressed your needs or wants,

Your nervous system will go in a silence mode so you don't feel this ever again.

But your nervous system will not make a difference if this is very serious now where you need to ask for help and scream.

I work with victims of abuse.

It's not uncommon that a woman will completely be silent and not scream for help.

And that's very real.

Very real.

Because of this.

Self-attack replaces self-rescue.

So that inner voice becomes the most difficult critic.

And many times the voice of abuser.

It's your fault.

Die.

So this is internalized,

Perpetrated logic,

Self-alienation learned from chronic invalidation.

Right?

When someone is continuously invalidating our needs,

We internalize that and we start doing the same on our own.

So we suppress that need to say anything,

To want anything.

It's very intelligent how it works.

Appeasement as survival.

So even at the brink of suffocation,

The system prioritizes not upsetting others over its own breath.

And this is cruel paradox.

We protect others from inconvenience while abandoning ourselves.

And the cost can be our life.

And that's the trauma we don't talk about.

We don't.

And when it comes to social and culturally layered,

Gendered and cultural scripts are so in us.

Because we were raised to be nice,

Undemanding,

Low maintenance.

And in oppressive context,

Right,

Visibility has been costly.

If you are undocumented now,

Is it wise to scream out for help?

Or is it better to stay silent and hide?

Okay?

And there is a deep moral injury.

The demand to remain considerate.

So inner demand,

Survival demand to remain considerate while dying creates a betrayal of self.

And that's a moral injury against one's own aliveness and existence.

Asking for help is regulation.

It's not burden.

That's biology.

It's not selfishness.

And disturbing is sometimes ethical.

So shifting from don't upset them to protect your own life reorders values from life is more important than belonging in this moment.

Or any moment with wrong people.

And when we also want,

And how can you immediately start working with this,

Is to seek a safe person where you will make a contract for help seeking.

So with a partner,

Pre-agree with your friend.

Describe,

Describe what you are going through,

What was your life.

So pre-agree,

It can be signals,

It can be phrases.

And no questions asked,

Responses.

For example,

I will sit and not fix.

Okay?

There you start expressing your wants and needs without asking for permission or to look if you're in that moment a burden for them.

And predictability reduces the cost of disturbing,

Right?

So make a pre-contract with your safe person.

And then if the parts,

IFS work,

Okay,

If appeasing part shows up,

You can say,

Thank you for keeping us safe from retaliation.

We will ask small and specific.

Dear adults,

Dear adults,

We will be fine.

And if that judging,

Shaming part kicks in,

Right,

It's very rash,

You can say from your witnessing mind,

You took a job to prevent shame.

Thank you.

So I will take it from here.

And to the exile,

So that's that part who is completely silent and it will resign to the death.

You say,

I'm here.

We will surface together.

I will take it from here.

Dear adults,

Dear adults,

And work with this with your therapist.

This is very,

Very important.

And you can retrain breath into voice and voice into small rehearsed asks.

Please remember,

Needing help is not a burden.

Your voice deserves to exist.

You deserve to exist.

Your breath deserves to be heard.

You are no one's burden.

Until next time.

Be gentle with yourself.

Be gentle with yourself.

I am on a mile.

This is exiled and rising.

Much care.

Much care.