The Cost of Staying Silent
Holding your tongue probably won't work in this case. If the promise was broken and it's really bothering you, you're unlikely to be a good enough actor to hide your feelings. You may try to choke them down, but they'll bubble up to the surface in unhealthy ways.
If you don't talk it out, you'll act it out.
When people try to hide their emotions or "put on" a feeling, they are using different groups of muscles than they use to express authentic feelings. And other people can tell. You can't hide your real emotions. When you observe a problem, feel bad about it, and then decide to say nothing, your feelings don't come out only in your facial expressions and other nonverbal behaviors; they also escape in the form of biting sarcasm, cutting humor, or surprising non sequiturs. When you've gone silent, your body language keeps sending out hostile signals or you're dropping hints or relying on sarcasm.
When it comes to deciding whether we're going-to speak up, we kid ourselves into making the same error over and over. We choose certainty of what is currently happening to us (no matter how awful it may be) over the uncertainty of what might happen if we said something. This of course drives us to silence, quitely embracing the devil we know, when there's a good chance that we really should have spoken up.
WHen we're trying to figure out if we should speak up, we often envision a horrific failure and immediately decide to go silent. Then we look for reasons to justify the choice to say nothing. Effective problem solvers use an opposite approach. Only after they've decided that the conversation should be held do they ask themselves "How can I do this?"
Our two favorite methods for tricking ourselves into remaining silent are 1. downplaying the cost of not speaking and 2. exaggerating the cost of expressing our views.
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