The quiet power of people who stopped explaining themselves - Silicon Canals

"Before someone stops explaining themselves, there's almost always a period of over-explaining. Years of it, sometimes. Decades. They explain why they said no. They explain why they need space. They explain their tone, their choices, their feelings - not because they owe it, but because somewhere along the way, they learned that unexplained behavior gets punished."

"Psychologist Dr. Harriet Lerner, author of The Dance of Connection, has written extensively about how chronic over-explaining is often a trauma response - a pattern rooted in early environments where a child's "no" was never accepted at face value. The child learns: if I can just make them understand why, maybe they'll let me have this boundary."

"The exhaustion isn't dramatic. It accumulates like sediment. One day, you notice you're tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix. Not tired of people, exactly. Tired of translating yourself for people who speak a different emotional language entirely."

People often over-explain their decisions, boundaries, and feelings due to learned patterns from early environments where unexplained behavior was punished. This chronic over-explaining accumulates as exhaustion that sleep cannot fix. A turning point occurs when individuals recognize that certain people will never understand their perspective, and crucially, don't need to. This realization represents a radical shift from seeking validation through explanation to accepting that some relationships operate in fundamentally different emotional languages. The moment someone stops explaining themselves may appear cold or selfish externally, but internally it feels like releasing a burden carried for years.

Read at Silicon Canals