Ep. 276 How to Stop Self-Silencing and Reduce Anxiety Through Authentic Connection in Midlife

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About the Host: 

MJ Murray Vachon, LCSW, is a seasoned clinician, educator, and host of the podcast Creating Midlife Calm, recognized by Maria Shriver as a “Listen of the Week.” Over the past 40 years, MJ has led more than 50,000 therapy sessions and developed the Inner Challenge mental wellness program and the Inner Challenge Master Class, practical tools for emotional regulation, self-awareness, and resilience taught for more than 30 years in junior high schools and at the University of Notre Dame for freshman football players. Through her podcast, teaching, and coaching, MJ helps people build calmer lives, stronger relationships, and healthier communities.

Creating Midlife Calm is a podcast designed to guide you through the challenges of midlife, tackling issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, feeling unworthy, procrastination, and isolation, while offering strategies for improving relationships, family support, emotional wellbeing, mental wellness, and parenting, with a focus on mindfulness, stress management, coping skills, and personal growth to stop rumination, overthinking, and increase confidence through self-care, emotional healing, and mental health support. 

Transcript

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover how to transform self-silencing into grounded, authentic connection Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, the podcast where you and I tackle stress and anxiety in midlife so you can stop feeling like crap, feel more present at home, and thrive at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 50,000 hours of therapy sessions and 32 years of teaching practical science-backed mental wellness. Welcome to the podcast. A friend called me this week to give me dates for an upcoming visit, but before he gave me the dates, He started talking about how overwhelmed he feels trying to manage phone limits with his teenage son, and at one point he said something that really stayed with me. He said, "When he pushes back, rolls his eyes, gets angry, I feel like I disappear." And honestly, I think many of you listening know exactly what he means. Because when tension enters a relationship, you don't just become quieter, you often become less connected to yourself. Your thoughts get scrambled, your confidence drops, You stop responding from clarity and start reacting from anxiety. In this episode, you'll discover how to recognize self-silencing earlier in your nervous system, how to express yourself more honestly without exploding or shutting down, and how to stay connected to yourself while staying relational with others. On Monday, your inner challenge was simply to notice moments where you emotionally disappear inside conversations, relationships, or tension. Today, I wanna make this very practical for you because the work of transforming self-silencing usually doesn't begin with dramatic confrontation or demanding that other people suddenly understand you. It often begins with much smaller moments that only you are aware of. Moments where you notice yourself backing away from your own thoughts, feelings, limits because tension suddenly enters the room. This sounds simple on a podcast, but it's actually very difficult because the hard part is usually not knowing what to say. The hard part is staying grounded enough to say it without shutting down, exploding, over-explaining, or disappearing. today I wanna walk you through a simple process that can help you notice yourself disappearing inside these difficult, messy human moments The process is this, notice, name, tame, and aim. Not perfectly, just progressively. Let's start with the first step, notice. Simply becoming aware. You most likely won't notice this cognitively at first. You'll notice it physically. Your nervous system will often recognize the danger before your mind recognizes the self-silencing. Basically, your body lights up. One of my clients after spending a week observing and noticing, My first signal is my throat tightens. Go figure. It's like the tension chokes me into silence." Another person notices it in their stomach and says, This discomfort makes me feel physically ill." Another starts internally rehearsing what they want to say and then immediately talks themself out of it. My friend on the phone said to me, I just tell myself it's not worth it, and I leave the room." And while everybody has their own signals, one experience tends to feel universal. Afterward, you leave the interaction feeling strangely deflated, less solid, less like yourself, not because something huge happened, because once again, you disappeared a little inside the moment. That's what my friend was describing with his son. He sets a reasonable phone limit And immediately the emotional atmosphere changes. His son rolls his eyes, gets irritated, and pulls away emotionally, and suddenly my friend is no longer simply parenting. Now he's internally struggling with tension, discomfort, the pushback, and the possibility of being disliked and disrespected. This doesn't only happen with parenting. It happens in marriages, in meetings, with adult children, with friends. Anytime tension enters a relationship, the nervous system starts prioritizing relief over grounded, authentic connection. That's the moment to notice. The second step is name. Ask yourself, "What is actually true for me right now?" Not how do I win this? Not how do I make this other person agree? Not how do I unload everything I'm feeling? Just what is true. Most of the time, the truth is surprisingly small. I see this differently than you." "Oh, that really hurt." I need to ask you to not do that, please." Could I share a different perspective?" Or in my friend's situation, "The limit is still the limit." That's very different than lecturing, leaving, proving, or emotionally flooding the room. It's very possible that you have never learned this distinction. You learned either suppress yourself and feel small or explode and temporarily feel powerful. But healthy emotional expression usually lives somewhere in the middle: steady, grounded, clear, and connecting. And in the parenting example, the real goal is not controlling the child's reaction. The real goal is staying connected to yourself while expressing something honestly and calmly. That's where people slowly move from suppression toward wholeness. One of my clients reminded herself while her son was tantruming after she asked him to leave his phone in the kitchen overnight, My job is to model how I want him to act, nothing more, nothing less." That mindset helped her stay grounded instead of emotionally unraveling and reacting inside the conflict. And this takes us to the third step, tame. And this is where many people get confused because emotional regulation is not suppression. It's not avoiding your emotions. It's not numbing your feelings, but instead it's staying steady. Staying steady doesn't mean you stuff all your emotions down. It means that you help your nervous system settle enough that your response becomes intentional instead of reactive You move from your head to your body. My friend described how overwhelmed he becomes when the tension rises with his son. At one point, he said, the second he gets angry, I start unraveling inside. I feel like my mind gets scrambled. I just can't stay with myself anymore. All my focus goes towards his behavior." One client describes stepping into the bathroom during difficult moments with her family. She would run cool water on her hands, slow her breathing, feel her feet on the ground, and let her adult self come back online. One time afterward, she looked in the mirror and jokingly said, "Welcome back." Not because the tension disappeared, but she re-regulated her nervous system and she felt enough steadiness to respond intentionally instead of reacting automatically. The more you understand emotional overwhelm, the easier it becomes to respect simple grounding practices instead of dismissing them. And honestly, sometimes emotional maturity looks very ordinary. A slower breath, a pause before responding, relaxing your shoulders, not rushing to fix the tension immediately. Think of it like grounding yourself on a windy day. Not perfection, just enough regulation to stay present. And finally, the last step, aim. Ask yourself, "What is one small way I can remain authentically connected while being myself?" Not dramatically, not perfectly, just authentically. Maybe it means staying in the conversation a little longer instead of emotionally leaving. Maybe it means calmly repeating a limit without escalating. Maybe it means tolerating disagreement without immediately retreating or circling back later when your nervous system is steadier. One client recently said to her boss, "I need to be honest. When we talked about my workload, I wasn't fully truthful. It's too much, but I was afraid you'd think I was a slacker." And her boss's response, "Oh, this is a relief. I couldn't figure out how you were gonna get all this done." This is really the work of differentiation without disconnection, learning how to stay connected without abandoning yourself. One of the secrets of AIM is grounding what you do in your values, just like the mom did when she reminded herself, my job is to model how I want him to act." In many ways, that's the deeper work. Not controlling another person, but becoming the kind of person you want to be inside difficult moments This is one of the healthiest shifts in midlife, realizing my goal isn't to be right all the time. My goal is to stay relational. But being relational doesn't mean accommodating, fawning, disappearing, or anxiously assuming you know what another person thinks. It means learning how to stay connected to yourself, to another person, and to the relationship itself, even when discomfort is present. If this idea of notice, name, tame a name feels helpful, I invite you to listen to episode one thirty, which goes deeper into this process. I'll place it in the show notes. In this episode, you learned that transforming self-silencing doesn't begin with becoming louder. It begins with becoming more present, more grounded, and more connected to yourself. You learned that emotions and opinions and values can be slowly expressed in ways that are both honest and relational, and the process notice, name, tame, and aim because every small moment where you stay connected to yourself without disappearing slowly helps rebuild identity, relationships, steadiness, and calm and if someone comes to mind while listening to this episode, a spouse, friend, coworker, or another parent, I invite you to share it with them And remember, sometimes relationships become healthier when even one person learns how to stay grounded without disappearing. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Monday with more Creating Midlife Calm.