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When the noise goes quiet

What happened when I named this in therapy

Started 31 December 2025 · 16 replies · 118 hearts · read 1.7k times

FreyaReykjavík, IS · 31 December 2025
7 months ago

What happened when I named this in therapy — putting it in its own thread so it does not get lost in the check-in.

This is a difficult one to write and I have deleted it twice.

This is the third time I have started this post and the first time I have got to the end of it, so I am going to press the button before I lose my nerve.

Not asking anyone to fix this. Mostly saying it out loud somewhere it will be read kindly, which I have not managed anywhere else.

Thanks. Saying it here first has made the idea of saying it to somebody else considerably less impossible.

39

TavishIsle of Skye, UK
#1

Coming back two years on to say the quiet held, that the adjustment was real, and that I would not go back to how my head sounded before.

4

JonahFacilitatorCork, Ireland
#2

Noticing that the thread has stayed with feeling rather than sliding into logistics, which is right for this circle and takes discipline.

18

MaeveSligo, IE
#3

The thing that helped was not treating the quiet as the point. It was one change among several and building everything around it made it fragile.

5me too 4

AnnaAthens, GR
#4

Jonah has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

I walked past a shop I had never once walked past in my adult life and stood outside it slightly stunned. That is my whole story about this.

7

HannahSheffield, UK
#5

Mine did not go entirely quiet, it went quieter, and I want to say that because the total-silence accounts made me feel like something had not worked.

3

TinukeManchester, UK
#6

Maeve, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

The hardest conversation I had was explaining to somebody who has never had it what it was like to have it. There is no good analogy.

9

AmmiKarachi, PK
#7

Something I did not expect: I was less irritable within a fortnight, and I now think a good deal of my irritability had been the constant background negotiation.

7

BrammyBelfast, NI
#8

What helped was writing down what the noise had actually been, while I could still remember it clearly. Six months later the memory of it had gone soft.

8me too 7

OsgarKillarney, IE
#9

I have found the quiet made some things harder rather than easier. Boredom, mainly, which I had apparently not experienced in decades.

6

OdileMontreal, CA
#10

Mine came back for a fortnight during a very stressful autumn and then went again, and I have learned not to read too much into a bad fortnight.

5

MapleToronto, CA
#11

I did not realise how much of my planning had been about this until it stopped. Entire structures in my week turned out to exist for a reason that had gone.

4

FionnualaDundalk, IE
#12

Osgar said something I want to sit with for a second.

The thing I would say is that this is worth talking about in therapy if you have access to it. Mine opened up a great deal that I had not connected to it.

6

ClemmieNorwich, UK
#13

Picking up Fionnuala’s point rather than starting a new one.

Mine is quieter on some days than others and correlates strongly with sleep, which took me about a year of notes to see.

5

WinnieCarlisle, UK
#14

What surprised me most was how ordinary I felt. Not better exactly. Ordinary, in a way I had assumed was simply not available to me.

9me too 1

JonahFacilitatorCork, Ireland
#15

Closing note: this stays linked from the circle landing. If you have arrived late and want to say something, there is no such thing as too late here.

15me too 6

LenaMunich, DE
#16

Somebody in this circle described it as the volume going down rather than the station changing, and that was the most accurate description I have read.

7