The cost of staying silent

Have you ever felt stuck between two impossible choices—speak up and worry people will think you’re too much, or stay quiet and lose touch with who you really are? This is what Dr. Carol Gilligan calls a crisis of connection—caught between staying connected to others and staying connected to yourself.

When we spoke with her recently for the podcast, she shared what girls around age eleven describe in her research: “If I say what I’m feeling and thinking, no one will want to be with me. My voice will be too loud. But if I don’t say what I’m feeling and thinking, no one will know me. Either way, I’m going to lose relationships.”

What happens to girls?

Carol’s research found something striking about how this crisis develops. Younger girls are remarkably clear and direct—they see what’s happening, speak up, and act on it. But somewhere around age eleven, that clarity begins to fade.

“The phrase ‘I don’t know’ becomes a cover for knowledge,” Carol explained. In one interview with a ninth grader, the girl said “I don’t know” fourteen times—not because she was confused, but because she’d learned her knowing was dangerous.

The unspoken bargain: silence what’s true for you in exchange for acceptance, safety, and love. As Carol explains: “Patriarchy depends on women’s silence. We saw that with the ME TOO movement.”

The cost? For many women, exhaustion, depression, and a haunting sense of being lost. We’re not just silencing our voices. We’re absenting ourselves from our own lives.

What happens to boys?

Carol couldn’t help but wonder if boys face similar challenges. The answer was yes—except it starts much earlier.

Between the ages four and seven, boys begin showing signs of psychological distress. Carol’s student Judy Chu observed four-year-olds who were remarkably present with each other—clear, direct, emotionally attuned. But by age seven, those same boys had become more guarded, more distant, less willing to share what they actually felt.

“Boys know more than they show,” Carol explained. The bargain they’re learning: suppress your emotional life and capacity for deep connection in exchange for being accepted as a “real man.”

By late adolescence, the cost becomes clear. In researcher Niobe Way’s studies, seventy-five percent of boys no longer had a close friend—they’d learned “how to be more of a man.” It’s the same crisis of connection girls face, just packaged differently: disconnect from yourself or risk not fitting in.

Finding our human voice

Different ages, different bargains, same impossible choice. What Carol came to understand: these aren’t women’s issues or men’s issues. They’re human issues.

“If you want to establish a hierarchy, the person on top cannot have empathy for the person on the bottom, and the person on the bottom cannot have a voice that is listened to and heard,” Carol explained.

So these capacities—empathy, authentic expression, the ability to say what we know—threaten any structure built on ranking some people as more human than others. For example, social systems like patriarchy.

But when we refuse to silence what we know or disconnect from our capacity to care, we’re reclaiming what Carol calls our “human voice”. And, this is resistance is available to all of us.

“We never lose these capacities,” reminded Carol. All it takes is someone who is willing to listen with curiosity instead of judgment. To ask: Is that really true? Is that how you really feel? Do you really believe that?

This kind of listening re-surfaces what’s been buried. It creates the space we need for gender compassion — recognizing how we so often as girls and boys we were taught to abandon ourselves, and helping each other reclaim the caring connections that were taken.

Listen and learn more

You can hear our full conversation with Carol in the podcast above, where she shares more about breaking the bargain and reclaiming our human voices.

For more of Carol’s wonderful work, grab a copy of her latest book In a Human Voice.

Please note: We are mindful that ‘girl’, ‘woman’, ‘boy’ and ‘man’ are socially constructed ideas of gender that can fall painfully short of defining the fabulous complexity of who we each are. If these words resonate with part of how you have previously or currently identified yourself, we’d love to hear about your lived experiences.