Quiet pacts are agreements that are generally not even explicitly given, imply a commitment to remain silent on a particular topic or facts, or on certain people, assume that speaking can have disastrous consequences.
The common thing is that these covenants of silence revolve around a taboo-qualified subject, which implies certain beliefs. In this case, the belief that one should avoid talking about a particular subject, the consequences of breaking with the sacred or with a very strong social principle. Or perhaps with a very respected value.
“Sometimes silence is the worst lie, Miguel de Unamuno?
In each family there are problems that are difficult to discuss; tragic death, someone’s suicide, a pregnancy outside of marriage, etc. One thing, however, is to have trouble talking about a particular topic and another sealing pacts of silence.
This is done only when the consequences go beyond mere shame or discomfort.
They say “you don’t talk about what doesn’t exist. “That is the logic that seems to prevail in the covenants of silence. Shut up and pretend the facts never happened. It becomes easier to expel from consciousness what happened.
There are also two large groups of themes that revolve around the pacts of silence in the family sphere and also in the social sphere, one on crime and the other on sexuality. The two, in the end, have serious consequences on the psyche of those involved.
Sometimes there can also be legal implications. In this way, the issues on which we remain silent have to do with robberies, murders or a criminal trajectory. That, on the one hand. On the other hand, they also refer to forbidden sex, such as incest, sexual abuse, same-sex relationships and similar topics, all of which could divide a family history into two.
Pacts of silence often involve several generations, the generation in which the facts occur forbids matter, and this prohibition is inherited, it is common to lose the sense of truth over time and what remains is the weight of silence on this terrible thing. Calar gives the subject an even more terrible connotation.
Silence is a way to repress, to encapsulate, to repress oneself by force, however, as psychoanalysis points out, all repression returns, keeping silent about something is never a success, there is always a fissure through which the truth escapes and exercises a great influence.
The marks of what has not been said are always present in one way or another, in the way of feeling, acting, thinking, etc. , silences become phobias or diseases, or in silent guilt and in strange atmospheres. is not part of the family pacts of silence.
Refusing to discuss the subject has unpredictable consequences, at first it is a confidential truth that leads, in most cases, to trauma, and the trauma opens an endless cycle of repetitions.
That is why it is not so difficult to find families in which, for example, there has been sexual abuse that everyone knows but have never been mentioned; it is common for similar experiences to occur in other generations.
The same goes for all forbidden acts, without realizing that people educate each other to carry a silent guilt or to punish themselves, it is something that is beyond their control because it is in their unconscious.
The guilt, the pain, the strength of what happened does not simply dissipate through these covenants. Rather, on the contrary; come to life, become a never-before-seen ghost, but it is always present and accompanies many families.
Silence makes you sick and the word heals. The only way to exorcise the ghosts of an abominable event is to talk about it.
This prevents many families from causing deep unrest to those living in the present and also to those who will come in the future. Eliminate that strangeness, face it head-on so that life is no longer so heavy.