The Family Group Chat: Typing, Deleting, Then “Sounds Good”
Load · The Reading Room, Vol. 45 · 7 min read · What 126 studies of self-silencing actually found, and who does it more
Based on the published research of
Dana C. Jack, EdD · Professor, Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Western Washington University · creator of the Silencing the Self Scale · faculty page · her 2025 review · Google Scholar · her book (Harvard UP)
People pleasing with family usually shows up first as an edit: a true answer typed, then deleted for something safer. A psychologist has measured that pattern for three decades. What her 126 studies found is not quite what circulates.
The group chat lights up. Someone is suggesting Sunday at your mother’s again, the same Sunday you already blocked off for the one thing that is actually yours this week. You type the real sentence: I can’t do Sunday, I already have plans. You look at it for a second. You delete it. You type “Sunday works!” instead, take out the exclamation point because it feels like overselling a lie, and send “Sounds good.” Then you put the phone face down.
That fifteen-second edit war is the actual subject here, not the Sunday plans. It has a name in the research literature, a scale that measures it, and three decades of studies behind it — and the newest of those studies found something that does not match the story most people tell about who does this and why.
The short answer: editing your honest answer down before you send it is a measurable pattern called self-silencing, and it tracks with depression at a real, moderate strength. What the newest review does not confirm is that women do it more than men — in most studies that checked, they did not.¹
The skim version
- Dana C. Jack, EdD, built the Silencing the Self Scale in 1991 to measure how often people suppress their real thoughts and feelings to protect a relationship.¹
- A 2025 review covering 126 studies published between 1992 and 2023 found a moderate correlation between self-silencing and depression: r = .39.²
- Of 29 studies that checked for a sex difference, none found women silencing themselves more than men. Nineteen found the opposite — boys and men scored higher.²
- What predicted self-silencing consistently was the relationship, not the person: conflict, power imbalance, and a lack of mutuality raised it in anyone.²
- A smaller 2024 study of 53 young adults found self-silencing is relationship-specific rather than a fixed trait — the same person spoke freely in one relationship and stayed quiet in another, and perceived safety was the deciding factor.³
- What none of this measured: family group chats specifically, or women in midlife. The scale was validated on general adult and student samples, not this exact scene.
In this article: Why the edit happens before you decide · Is this really a women’s pattern? · What it costs to keep editing · The one honest sentence · FAQ
Why do you edit the honest answer before you have consciously decided to?
Because the editing is not really a decision. It is a schema — Jack’s word for it — a learned template for how intimacy is supposed to work, built up over years of a specific relationship, that runs before conscious thought gets involved. By the time you notice you are rewriting the text, the first draft has already been judged, weighed against the room’s likely reaction, and quietly rejected.
Jack’s original 1991 book, Silencing the Self: Women and Depression, and the 1992 scale she built with Diana Dill to measure it, described this as a specific way of trying to stay connected: suppress the parts of yourself that might create conflict, present a version that keeps the relationship smooth, and judge yourself by an internalized standard of what a good daughter, wife, or sister is supposed to sound like.¹ The scale asks people to rate statements like “I tend to judge myself by the standards other people have set for me” and “Instead of risking confrontation, I would remain silent.”¹
None of that requires a difficult childhood or a dramatic family. It requires only a relationship you value enough to protect, and enough repetitions of protecting it at your own expense that the shortcut becomes automatic. The retyping is the visible trace of an old habit doing its job quietly.
Definition
Self-silencing is the habitual suppression of one’s own thoughts, feelings, or needs in a relationship, in order to maintain the relationship or avoid conflict, measured by agreement with statements about judging yourself by others’ standards and avoiding confrontation.¹
If the editing happens before you have consciously decided to do it, the Quiet Audit is ten minutes on when you learned to. Start here.
Is people-pleasing with family really a women’s pattern?
The newest evidence says: less than the framing around it suggests. In 2025, Jack and colleagues Leslie R. Brody and Jennifer Sikov published a review in Sex Roles covering three decades of research on the scale she created — 126 studies using it, published between 1992 and 2023.² Of those, 29 specifically tested whether women scored higher than men. Not one found that women self-silenced more. Nineteen found the reverse: adolescent boys and men scored higher than girls and women, across undergraduates, couples, and community samples alike.²
That is a genuinely uncomfortable finding for an article that opened with a scene about a family group chat, and it is worth sitting with rather than editing out. It does not mean the Sunday-plans scene is not real, or that self-silencing does not cost women something. It means the mechanism is not gendered the way three decades of popular writing, this outlet’s earlier version of this article included, assumed it was.
What the review found instead was more specific and more useful. Self-silencing rose in “inequitable and hurtful social environments; contexts shaped by traditional gender role ideologies; and relationships characterized by conflict, power inequities, and a lack of mutuality.”² In other words, the predictor is not which body you’re in. It’s whether the relationship in front of you has room for your honest answer.
The predictor was never the person. It was whether the room had room for the truth.
A family system where one person’s comfort has quietly become the organizing rule, regardless of who occupies which role in it, will produce self-silencing in whoever has the least power to disrupt that rule. In a lot of families that is still, structurally, the adult daughter. The research does not deny that. It just refuses to hand it to you as a fact about women’s psychology rather than a fact about the room.
What the research found
The study. Jack, D.C., Brody, L.R., & Sikov, J. “Advancing the Next Generation of Research on Self-Silencing and Depression.” Sex Roles, 2025/2026. A narrative synthesis of 126 studies using the Silencing the Self Scale, published 1992–2023.²
The finding. Self-silencing correlated with depression at a moderate strength across the pooled research (r = .39, p < .001). Of 29 studies testing sex differences, none found women scoring higher; 19 found men and boys scoring higher instead.²
The limitation. The authors state plainly that the evidence base is drawn overwhelmingly from White, heterosexual samples, leaving “significant gaps in our understanding of how variations in gender identity, sexual orientation, and intersectionalities of race, ethnicity, and age might contribute to the self-silencing–depression patterns.”² No study in the review targeted midlife women specifically, and none measured family text threads as a distinct setting.
What does it actually cost to keep editing the honest answer?
More than any single deleted text suggests. The r = .39 correlation is not proof that self-silencing causes depression on its own — correlational research can’t settle direction that cleanly — but it is a consistent, moderate association held up across 126 separate studies and three decades, which is a different order of evidence than one plausible-sounding theory.²
A smaller, more recent study adds texture to what “cost” looks like day to day rather than in aggregate. Christin Grothaus, a researcher at Mahidol University International College, interviewed 53 young adults in Bangkok about where they spoke freely and where they stayed quiet.³ The headline finding: self-silencing was not a trait some people simply had. It was relationship-specific. The same person could be open with a friend and guarded with a parent, or the reverse, and the deciding factor was not the category of relationship but perceived safety within it — whether they expected to be met with acceptance or with conflict.³
That reframes the family group chat usefully. It is not that you are “a people pleaser” as a fixed identity. It is that this particular chat, with this particular history, has taught you what happens to an honest “no,” and you have adjusted accordingly. The adjustment was rational once. Whether it still needs to be is a separate question from whether you are, in general, an agreeable person.
| The edited answer | The honest sentence | |
|---|---|---|
| What it protects | The room’s comfort, this one time | Your actual plans and your word |
| How it feels to send | Safe now, unsettled after | Uncomfortable now, clear after |
| What the family learns | Your yes doesn’t reliably mean yes | Your words can be taken at face value |
| What it does over years | Tracks with depression at r = .39² | Resets the pattern one exchange at a time |
What actually interrupts the pattern — one sentence, not a family overhaul
Grothaus’s finding points at the fix as much as the problem: if perceived safety is what determines whether you self-silence in a given relationship, then the way to test whether a relationship has more room than you assume is to offer it a small, low-stakes piece of honesty and see what actually happens, rather than what you have pre-run in your head.³
Next time you catch yourself deleting the true answer, send the honest version once, without a paragraph of justification behind it. “I can’t do Sunday, I’ve already got plans” is a complete sentence. Over-explaining usually just reopens the negotiation you were trying to close.
Expect the first honest sentence to feel worse than the edited one. That discomfort is not evidence you did it wrong. It is what a system feels like while it is recalibrating to a version of you whose words can be taken literally. The second honest sentence is reliably easier than the first.
Pick one low-stakes exchange this week, not the highest-conflict relationship in the family, and not the biggest ask. A small, real sentence sent once is proof of concept for a much larger pattern than the Sunday plans, and it gives you actual data — not a prediction — about how much room that relationship really has.
Who else has measured this
Christin Grothaus, Mahidol University International College. Interviewed 53 young adults and found self-silencing was relationship-specific, not trait-like — the same person spoke freely in one relationship and stayed silent in another, with perceived safety as the deciding factor. Behavioral Sciences, 2024 · ResearchGate · Google Scholar · LinkedIn
Diana Dill, EdD, co-developer of the original Silencing the Self Scale with Dana Jack in 1992, establishing the four subscales still used in current research: externalized self-perception, care as self-sacrifice, the divided self, and silencing the self. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 1992 · ResearchGate
Leslie R. Brody, PhD, Boston University, and Jennifer Sikov, co-authors of the 2025 review with Jack, both specializing in gender and emotional development research that informed the review’s reframing of who self-silences and why. Sex Roles, 2025 · Brody: faculty page · Scholar · lab site · ResearchGate
Frequently asked questions
Isn’t people-pleasing with family just a personality trait some people have?
The newer research says no, or at least not mainly. Self-silencing looks relationship-specific rather than fixed: the same person can be open in one relationship and guarded in another, with perceived safety as the deciding factor rather than a stable trait they carry everywhere.³
If women don’t self-silence more than men, why does this feel so gendered?
Because self-silencing tracks power and role expectations, not sex directly, and in many families those still run along gendered lines. The research separates the mechanism (an unequal or conflict-heavy relationship produces silencing in whoever has less power in it) from the demographic pattern people assume goes with it.²
Does one honest text really change anything?
It changes what you know, which is different from changing the family overnight. A single low-stakes honest answer is a test of the room’s actual capacity, not a demand that it transform. Grothaus’s research suggests the room’s response to that one test is more informative than any amount of predicting it in advance.³
What if the honest answer does cause real conflict?
Then that is useful, if unwelcome, information about the relationship rather than proof the honest sentence was a mistake. The pattern this article addresses is editing out of habit, even when conflict is not actually likely. If conflict is genuinely likely, that is a separate, harder problem this one sentence will not solve by itself.
Is self-silencing the same thing as being polite or diplomatic?
No. The scale specifically measures suppressing your actual view to avoid confrontation and judging yourself by others’ standards, not ordinary tact about tone or timing. Choosing a kind way to say something true is different from not saying it.¹
Where this evidence thins out
The 126-study review is broad but not universal: the authors themselves flag that the underlying samples skew White and heterosexual, leaving real gaps for how gender identity, sexual orientation, race, and age change the picture.² Nothing in this research base was collected specifically on midlife women, on family text threads, or on the exact scene this article opened with. The Grothaus study that best supports the relationship-specific framing used 53 young adults in Bangkok, a genuinely different life stage and cultural setting from the one this is written for.³
What is solid: self-silencing is measurable, it tracks with depression at a real and repeated strength, and it responds more to the shape of a relationship than to any fixed trait in the person doing it. What is thin: exactly how that plays out in a specific family, at a specific age, over a specific decade of group chats. Research suggests the mechanism. Your family is the only place that can tell you the local rules.
About the researcher
Dana C. Jack, EdD, is Professor at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Western Washington University. She holds a BA from Mount Holyoke, an MSW from the University of Washington, and an EdD from Harvard University. She created the Silencing the Self Scale in 1991 and has studied women’s depression and self-silencing across cultures for more than three decades, including a Fulbright fellowship in Nepal. Her doctorate is in education, not medicine. Western Washington University faculty page
Disclosure
This article is informational and is not medical or psychological advice.
We are not clinicians or psychologists. We read the published work and translate it into plain English.
Blue Leaf Journal has no affiliation with, and no endorsement from, Dana C. Jack, Leslie R. Brody, Jennifer Sikov, Diana Dill, Christin Grothaus, Western Washington University, Mahidol University, or any journal or publisher named here.
No commercial relationship exists with any person, book, or method mentioned here.
Every quotation and figure above was checked against the primary source on 6 September 2026. Corrections: jobrennan@blueleafjournal.com. We amend errors in place and note the change and its date here.
References
1. Jack, D.C., and Dill, D. “The Silencing the Self Scale: Schemas of Intimacy Associated With Depression in Women.” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 1992, 16(1):97–106. onlinelibrary.wiley.com
2. Jack, D.C., Brody, L.R., and Sikov, J. “Advancing the Next Generation of Research on Self-Silencing and Depression: A Narrative Review and Synthesis of Three Decades of Research.” Sex Roles, 2025/2026, 92, Article 7. link.springer.com
3. Grothaus, C. “When Silence Is Selective: Self-Silencing Across Relationship Contexts Among Young Adults.” Behavioral Sciences, 2024, 16(6):963. mdpi.com
4. Jack, D.C. Silencing the Self: Women and Depression. Harvard University Press, 1991.
Written by Jo Brennan for Blue Leaf Journal. Updated: September 6, 2026.
The same reflex that edits the group chat also gets in front of things that were never yours, which is why the apology arrives before you have decided to give one.
The one move
Tonight, before the next family message needs an answer, write the honest sentence somewhere private first — a notes app, a scrap of paper. Read it back once, outside the pressure of a blinking cursor. Send it as written, once, without the paragraph of explanation trailing behind it.
If the editing runs wider than one group chat, there is a short, private audit that names the whole pattern in about ten minutes. Nobody sees your answers. Start here.
The phone will light up again on some other Sunday. The draft you delete will still say something true. The only real question is which version you send.
