In a 2026 study of self-silencing, a university student given the pseudonym Joy described herself very differently depending on who she was with.

She spoke openly with her parents. Their relationship felt stable to her, and she associated it with trust. A close friendship had taught her something else. The friend could become aggressive and sometimes hit her when she did not comply. Joy later told the researcher that she had “lost [her] confidence” and no longer knew how to handle conflict in close relationships.

What caught my attention was not simply that Joy became quieter. She had not lost the ability to speak her mind everywhere. She still did it at home. Her silence belonged to particular relationships.

Christin Grothaus found the same broad pattern among the 53 young adults she studied at international universities in Thailand. Participants often expressed themselves comfortably in one relationship and held back in another. The strongest dividing line was whether the relationship felt secure enough to tolerate expression.

Joy's experience is obviously more serious than being indecisive about a social invitation or worrying that a colleague might be annoyed. It would be careless to treat physical aggression and ordinary people pleasing as different points on one tidy scale. Her story is useful for another reason. It shows how confidence can become attached to context. People learn something from what happens when they express a need, disagree, disappoint someone, or refuse to cooperate.

Sometimes the lesson is that speaking is safe. Sometimes it is that silence works better.

That second lesson can outlive the situation that taught it.

“Self-abandonment” is not a psychiatric diagnosis. The phrase is used loosely for a cluster of habits: overriding your preferences, distrusting your reactions, suppressing needs, or allowing other people's anticipated responses to carry more weight than your own judgment.

I find the last part the most useful. Plenty of generous people put other people's needs first without abandoning themselves. Compromise is ordinary. The more revealing question is how quickly someone's own experience gets discounted before a decision is made.

A person can become very skilled at doing that without looking insecure.

They may be decisive at work and strangely uncertain at home. They can solve other people's problems quickly, then spend half an hour deciding whether their own annoyance is reasonable. They may know perfectly well that they do not want to do something and still feel unable to act until someone else agrees that declining would be acceptable.

Over time, this changes what confidence means.

When your own answer needs supporting evidence

Dana Jack developed self-silencing theory from her research on women and depression. The theory describes patterns in which people suppress thoughts and feelings, prioritize others, and judge themselves against external standards in an effort to preserve important relationships.

Jack, Leslie Brody, and Jennifer Sikov revisited more than three decades of this research in a 2026 review in Sex Roles. They examined 126 studies that had used the Silencing the Self Scale. Seventeen studies across varied populations found a significant association between greater self-silencing and lower self-esteem. Other research in the review connected lower self-silencing with a stronger sense of identity.

The direction is not settled. Much of the evidence is cross-sectional. Low self-esteem could make someone more likely to silence themselves, while regularly suppressing themselves could also contribute to lower self-esteem. Both processes may occur together.

That ambiguity fits ordinary life better than a simple cause-and-effect story.

If someone already doubts their judgment, reassurance becomes attractive. Each time they hand a decision to somebody else, though, they lose a small opportunity to see what happens when they rely on themselves.

There is a particular form this can take that I have come to think of as excessive justification.

A preference alone starts to feel insufficient.

You cannot simply dislike something. You need to explain why it is objectively bad. You cannot simply be tired; there should be evidence that you worked hard enough to deserve rest. Feeling uncomfortable around someone starts an investigation into whether the discomfort is fair.

The interesting part is not that people reconsider themselves. We should reconsider ourselves. First impressions are often wrong, and other people frequently have information we do not.

The problem appears when your own reaction begins every discussion with less credibility than everyone else's.

Advice then changes function. Instead of helping with a decision, it finishes the decision.

A friend says, “No, that wasn't rude,” and relief arrives. Someone agrees that a request was unreasonable, and suddenly refusing it feels legitimate. The information may not have changed much. What changed was the presence of permission.

This is one way self-abandonment can damage confidence without producing obvious timidity. You become capable of making decisions but reluctant to certify them yourself.

Silence can be learned in one place and carried somewhere else

Grothaus's study complicates the idea that some people simply have passive personalities.

The participants did not silence themselves uniformly. Some who had grown up in homes where expression was encouraged became guarded in later relationships. Others who had learned to stay quiet at home became more expressive after finding relationships that felt safer.

This suggests that the useful question is often not “Why am I like this?” but “Where am I like this?”

Someone may discover that they become unusually agreeable around authority but not friends. Another person may speak plainly at work and become cautious in romantic relationships. Someone else is comfortable disagreeing with almost everyone except one parent.

Those differences contain information.

A habit that originally reduced conflict can persist after the danger has become much smaller. The response still makes sense to the nervous system because it has a history, even when the current relationship is capable of surviving disagreement.

This also explains why forcing assertiveness can be clumsy. Silence may have been doing a job. Before trying to eliminate it, it helps to know what job that was.

Perhaps it prevented an argument from escalating. Perhaps being easygoing earned affection. Perhaps another person's moods were unpredictable enough that monitoring them became useful.

Once that pattern becomes familiar, an odd thing can happen in safer relationships. Nothing terrible occurs when the person disagrees, yet disagreement still feels expensive.

Confidence does not return simply because the environment improved. The person still has to accumulate new experience inside that environment.

Confidence needs decisions you can recognize as yours

There is an older study that helps here.

In 2008, Whitney Heppner, Michael Kernis, John Nezlek and colleagues followed 116 people for two weeks. Participants reported their self-esteem each day along with their sense of authenticity and whether their needs for autonomy, competence, and connection were being met.

Daily self-esteem was higher on days when people felt more authentic and experienced greater autonomy, competence, and relatedness, even after the researchers accounted for positive and negative mood.

I would be careful about stretching that finding beyond what the study measured. It does not tell us how to repair years of self-silencing. What I take from it is narrower: the experience of having some authorship over your own behavior seems to belong in conversations about self-esteem.

That gives confidence practice a different shape.

It does not have to start with saying no more often. Sometimes the useful practice is simply delaying an answer long enough to discover what it would have been without pressure.

There are mundane places to notice this. Somebody proposes a plan and you hear yourself saying you do not mind, although you do. You are asked for an opinion and immediately soften it after seeing the other person's face. You reach a decision, then keep asking people about it until somebody gives the response that finally makes you comfortable.

The point is not to obey the first impulse. It is to notice how the decision changes and why.

That distinction matters because reversing yourself can be good judgment. New information should change decisions. Another person's needs sometimes deserve priority. Maintaining a relationship occasionally matters more than getting your preferred outcome.

Fear of another person's reaction is also information. It just deserves to be identified accurately.

For one week, keep a note of moments when what you initially wanted and what you eventually did were different. Record the first preference, the final decision, and what happened between them.

Do not try to become more assertive during the experiment. Do not count how many times you said yes or no. At the end of the week, look at the reasons.

Then choose one recurring situation where the reason was mainly anticipated disapproval and handle it differently the next time. Not dramatically. Give yourself enough time to make the decision before asking somebody else to approve it.