The Recovery of Self

Why You Go Quiet in Relationships — And What Your Nervous System Has to Do With It

Inspired by Colette Jane Fehr's The Cost of Quiet

Friday,  I attended a book signing for The Cost of Quiet by Colette Jane Fehr, LMFT, LMHC — a therapist and author whose work sits squarely at the intersection of attachment science and relational honesty. I was invited by Guardian Recovery, and I left with a lot on my mind.

Fehr's argument is both simple and devastating: the silence we use to preserve our relationships is often what destroys them. Staying quiet to keep the peace doesn't actually create peace. It creates disconnection. And over time, it creates a version of you that has gone missing inside your own relationship.

As a trauma therapist specializing in Somatic Experiencing, I'd add one layer she gestures toward but that I want to name directly: for many people, going quiet isn't a choice. It's a survival response. And until you understand that, no amount of communication coaching will get to the root of it.

Your Attachment History Wrote the Script

Attachment theory tells us that the relational patterns we developed in childhood — particularly around conflict, emotional expression, and need — become the operating system for every intimate relationship that follows.

If you grew up in an environment where speaking up led to punishment, withdrawal, or escalation, your nervous system did exactly what it was designed to do: it learned that silence was safer. That shrinking was a form of protection. That your needs were a burden better left unspoken.

This isn't weakness. This is intelligent adaptation to an environment that couldn't hold you.

The problem is that the adaptation outlives the original threat. You carry it into relationships with people who are nothing like whoever taught you to be quiet — and your body still braces for impact when you open your mouth.

What Silence Feels Like in the Body

This is where Somatic Experiencing becomes essential to the conversation that Fehr is starting.

The decision to go quiet in a relationship rarely feels like a decision. It feels like a constriction in the chest. A sudden flatness. A sense of "what's the point." The thought that forms isn't I choose not to speak — it's closer to something in me just shut down.

That shutdown is a nervous system response. In Somatic Experiencing, we call this dorsal vagal activation — a state of collapse or freeze that the body moves into when engagement feels too threatening and fighting or fleeing aren't options either. It's the most primitive of our survival responses, and it is profoundly physical.

When you "keep the peace" by swallowing something true, you're not just making a relational choice. You're asking your body to hold something it was never designed to carry indefinitely. And it does — until it can't.

The symptoms show up as chronic tension, emotional numbness, a creeping sense of resentment you can't fully explain, or the feeling of being a ghost in your own life.

The Body Has to Come First

Here's what I want anyone reading this to understand: you cannot talk your way out of a response that lives below language.

Fehr's work is valuable and I recommend it. Learning to have hard conversations, understanding your triggers, communicating your vulnerability — these are real skills that real relationships require. But for trauma survivors, the work has to begin at the level of the nervous system before those skills become accessible.

This means:

Learning to notice when your body shifts into protection — the subtle tightening, the breath that goes shallow, the impulse to disappear.

Building enough nervous system capacity to stay present when the conversation gets difficult — not white-knuckling through it, but genuinely having enough regulation to remain in contact with yourself and the other person at the same time.

Slowly, carefully, updating the old story. The one that says speaking up costs you something you can't afford to lose.

Staying in Relationship With Yourself

What Fehr captures so well is that silence is ultimately a form of self-abandonment. And that language — self-abandonment — is deeply somatic. When we silence ourselves chronically, we are not just withholding words. We are withdrawing from our own inner experience. We stop trusting our perceptions, our needs, our sense of what's true.

The path back isn't just learning to speak. It's learning to stay in your body while you do. To tolerate the activation that comes when you say a hard thing. To remain present to your own experience even when the outcome feels uncertain.

That is the work. It's relational, it's somatic, and for many of my clients, it is the most meaningful work they've ever done.

If this resonates — if you recognize yourself in the pattern of going quiet, keeping peace at the cost of yourself — therapy can help you understand where that pattern began and what it would take to begin to move differently.

I work with adults navigating relationship trauma, betrayal, and the slow erosion of self that comes from years of learned silence. Using Somatic Experiencing, we work at the level of the nervous system — because that's where the real change happens.

You don't have to keep disappearing to stay loved.

For a consultation, www.jennifergogginlmhc.com/contact

Jennifer Goggin, LPC, LMHC, SEP  is a licensed trauma therapist in Palm Beach, Florida offering in-person and virtual sessions for clients in Florida and Connecticut. She specializes in trauma therapy, Somatic Experiencing, and self- recovery.