Self-silencing, relationship expectations and depression in women

Listening for beliefs about intimacy

The scale grew from Jack’s earlier study following twelve women with clinical depression over time. She listened for beliefs that seemed to guide how they evaluated themselves and acted in relationships. Themes recurring across their interviews became the starting point for questionnaire items.

Jack and Dill proposed that women could learn rules about maintaining intimacy that required them to restrict feelings, thoughts or actions. In their account, trying to fit those rules could involve setting aside parts of themselves and judging themselves harshly when they fell short. They called this pattern self-silencing.

The authors located these expectations within social life. They described gender norms that gave greater weight to a man’s needs, associated women’s goodness with self-sacrifice and encouraged compliance in close relationships. Their model concerned both a woman’s endorsement of these expectations and the demands made by particular relationships and circumstances.

The distinction also changed where the authors looked for an explanation. They treated these rules as learned ways of interpreting relationships, shaped by social expectations and material power. A woman might encounter the same demand to accommodate others in her work and in her personal life. Understanding her answers therefore involved more than identifying a personality characteristic.

This gave the questionnaire a wider purpose than recording whether someone expressed an opinion. It examined what expression meant to her. A disagreement might be understood as something two people could discuss, or as a failure to be the kind of partner she believed she should be. The scale was designed to make those beliefs available for examination alongside the social conditions in which they operated.

Four parts of the experience

Jack and Dill organized the scale around four dimensions drawn from their theory and the women’s accounts. Each described a different aspect of evaluating oneself or participating in a relationship.

Externalized self-perception concerned judging oneself through outside standards. One item asked about evaluating oneself through how other people were thought to see the person. Another concerned failing to meet one’s own standards, with space to name those standards. Together, these questions directed attention toward the criteria a woman used to decide whether she was acceptable or good enough.

The invitation to name a standard added something that a score alone could not contain. Someone who strongly endorsed not measuring up was asked to list up to three standards she felt she failed to meet. Her answer could make the expectation itself visible, giving the general feeling of falling short a more particular meaning.

Care as self-sacrifice concerned beliefs that maintaining attachment required placing other people’s needs ahead of one’s own. The item about whether equal consideration was selfish belonged here. The distinction was in the rule attached to caring. Giving someone priority on an occasion and believing that one’s own needs deserve less consideration involve different expectations.

Silencing the self, the third dimension, addressed restricting expression and action to prevent conflict or the possible loss of a relationship. Its representative items concerned withholding feelings when disagreement was expected and whether a person expressed her own needs when they conflicted with a partner’s. The scale connected what remained unspoken with beliefs about what the relationship required.

The divided self concerned a gap between an outwardly compliant presentation and inward feelings such as anger or rebellion. Items addressed difficulty being oneself in a close relationship, appearing happy while feeling differently inside and whether a partner loved and appreciated the person as she was. This dimension made room for an experience that someone’s outward manner might conceal.

These were related dimensions, and the scores overlapped substantially. Their value lay in distinguishing several experiences within a broader pattern. A person’s standards for judging herself, beliefs about care, decisions about expression and feelings beneath an agreeable appearance could all contribute to the picture.

What the research found across three groups

To develop the measure, the researchers reviewed an initial set of 41 statements and reduced it to a 31-item questionnaire. They then examined responses from women in three settings. The groups included 63 university students, 140 women staying in domestic violence shelters and 270 new mothers taking part in a study of substance use during pregnancy. The mothers completed the measures at a follow-up four months after giving birth.

Across these groups, the full scale showed strong consistency among its items. Students with higher scores also tended to score higher when they completed the questionnaire again two weeks later. These findings supported using the questionnaire to study a coherent pattern of beliefs and experiences.

Participants also completed the Beck Depression Inventory, a measure of depressive symptoms. Within each of the three groups, higher self-silencing scores were associated with more symptoms. The strength of the association was very similar across the groups, with correlations close to .50. This meant the relationship between the two measures appeared within each setting, rather than arising only because one group scored higher than another.

The groups also differed in their average scores. Students averaged about 78 on the self-silencing scale, new mothers about 82 and shelter residents about 100, on a scale ranging from 31 to 155. Average depressive symptom scores followed the same order. The overall differences among the groups were statistically significant.

The shelter group also illustrates why the surrounding conditions mattered. Most of these women were unemployed and depended economically on a partner or public assistance. They completed the questionnaires during the first three days of their shelter stay. Their answers came from a particular moment in lives affected by abuse, rather than from an abstract preference about how much to speak.

Jack and Dill understood these comparisons in relation to the demands women faced. They expected women experiencing abuse in their relationships to encounter stronger pressures toward submissive behavior. They also considered expectations surrounding motherhood and intimate partnerships. This was their proposed explanation for the pattern, rather than a cause established by the comparisons. The women differed in many circumstances, and the study did not follow them through changes in those circumstances to see what happened to their scores.

The authors also cautioned against reading a higher score simply as poorer functioning. In their model, it could reflect greater pressure to meet expectations of being a good woman. That pressure might come from longstanding beliefs, current relationships or both. The same score therefore called for attention to the life in which the answers made sense.

The more complicated finding about care

The four dimensions did not have equally strong relationships with depressive symptoms. In the two larger samples, judging oneself through outside standards and experiencing a divided self were more strongly associated with depression than care as self-sacrifice was.

Among the new mothers, care as self-sacrifice had very little association with depressive symptoms, with a correlation of .09. Among shelter residents, the association was stronger at .28, though still smaller than the corresponding associations for several other dimensions. A general statement that every part of self-silencing related to depression in the same way would miss this difference.

There were also difficulties with measuring care. This part of the questionnaire showed weaker consistency among its items in the student and postpartum groups. Two statements about putting oneself first and being independent had been intended to indicate the opposite of self-sacrifice, but they did not fit the overall pattern as expected in the two larger samples. The authors called for further work and advised caution when using the care dimension on its own.

The qualification matters for understanding the paper. Its strongest evidence concerned the full pattern measured by the questionnaire. The findings about care alone were less consistent, and the measurement itself needed refinement. The study leaves open how different meanings of care, independence and putting oneself first might fit different relationship circumstances.

Making room for the person’s circumstances

The scale was developed around women’s experiences, and the validation samples were predominantly white. Jack and Dill identified race, ethnicity and gender as areas requiring further research. They also reported preliminary findings from a small group of male students who endorsed self-silencing beliefs, but whose scores were not significantly associated with depressive symptoms. The pattern observed in the women’s samples could not simply be assumed to describe everyone.

For the women studied, the questionnaire gave researchers a way to examine the connection between depressive symptoms and beliefs about being acceptable in a relationship. It also kept an important distinction in view. A score described a pattern of responses. Understanding that pattern required attention to the standards the person had learned and the pressures she encountered.

Making those expectations specific allows care and self-expression to be considered together. The question becomes what room a relationship provides for the person who is caring, including her needs and her understanding of herself. The paper offers a way to examine that room. It does not show that speaking more, by itself, changes the conditions surrounding her.

The item about equal consideration captures this contribution. It brings a person’s own needs into the account of intimacy, together with the judgment she may attach to acknowledging them. The scale made it possible to study both the relationship a woman wanted to preserve and the expectations shaping how much of herself she felt able to express within it.