It arrives at the dinner table, in the wedding-planning meeting, at the in-laws’ house, in the office when the deadline moves again: thoda adjust kar lo. Adjust a little. Rarely said with cruelty, it usually sounds like common sense, and often it is. Families, workplaces and friendships all run on people bending a little so the whole can hold together. But psychology has a name for what happens when bending becomes the only thing a person ever does: self-silencing.
It means habitually holding back one’s feelings, opinions and needs in order to keep relationships safe and peaceful. The research on it does not say that adapting is bad. It says something subtler: the same outward behaviour giving way, staying quiet, saying “it’s fine” can be a generous choice on Tuesday and a slow erosion of the self by the following decade. The difference lies in motive, reciprocity and whether the person can still say no.
This article looks at where the expectation to adjust comes from, what the evidence says about conformity and emotional suppression, why culture complicates the picture, and how to tell healthy compromise from a pattern that quietly costs too much and why speaking up is not equally safe for everyone.
Where “Adjust” Comes From
In many Indian households, and in some other South Asian settings, “adjust” is more than a word; it is a social skill, a virtue and sometimes a job description. Children adjust to a sibling’s exam schedule. A new daughter-in-law adjusts to a household’s routines. A son adjusts his career choices to family finances. Guests adjust, elders adjust, and the person with the least power in the room is frequently the one who adjusts most. None of this is uniform: expectations differ with region, caste, class, religion, education, whether a family is joint or nuclear, and whether it lives in a village, a metro or abroad. What follows describes a common pattern, not a rule about any one community.
The idiom is a good example of what cultural psychologists describe as an interdependent view of the self, in which a person is understood mainly through their relationships and obligations rather than as an independent bundle of preferences (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). In such a framework, attending to others’ expectations is not a failure of individuality; it is what a mature person does. That is worth taking seriously before rushing to diagnose anything. Much of what looks like “suppression” from outside is, from inside, consideration, loyalty and love.
The trouble starts when the expectation is distributed unevenly, and in many households it follows lines of gender, generation and seniority. The sociologist Deniz Kandiyoti (1988) described a “patriarchal bargain” in what she called classic patriarchy, a system she saw as characteristic of South and East Asia and the Muslim Middle East: a young woman enters her husband’s household as its most junior member and accepts subservience in exchange for security and, in time, authority over her own daughters-in-law. Seen this way, adjusting is not only a personality trait but a strategy within real constraints.
Economic research on rural India gives the idea some empirical footing. Debnath (2015) found that women in nuclear households had more decision-making power than women in joint households, with the size of the gap varying by income, caste and region. A set of public-goods experiments in rural North India found that young married women in extended households often lacked the power to assert their preferences, and that the daughter-in-law–mother-in-law relationship was especially strained (Gupta et al., 2021). Power is not only a gender matter, either: it stacks up by generation, marital status and who earns, so the person who adjusts most is usually whoever sits lowest on several of these at once.
Two cautions apply. These studies measure autonomy and decision-making, not self-silencing itself; the link is an inference, though a reasonable one: where speaking up changes little or carries a cost, holding back becomes the sensible strategy. And the picture is not fixed. Education was associated with greater decision-making power for women in joint families (Dhanaraj & Mahambare, 2019), and men adjust too, as any son who has bent his career to family finances knows; in one student sample, men scored higher than women on “care as self-sacrifice” (Lutz-Zois et al., 2013). Jack’s theory, taken up next, ties silencing to relationships and social worlds in which gender and power shape whose voice is safe.
Self-Silencing: The Theory
The psychologist Dana Crowley Jack developed the “silencing the self” theory after interviewing depressed women about their intimate relationships (Jack, 1991). She noticed that many described an effort to keep relationships secure by presenting a compliant outer self while an unexpressed inner self grew angrier, lonelier and harder to reach. Jack and Dill (1992) turned these themes into the Silencing the Self Scale, a 31-item questionnaire with gender-neutral wording. It measures four strands:
- Externalised self-perception: judging yourself by how others see you.
- Care as self-sacrifice: believing that being good means putting others first, and that wanting things for yourself is selfish.
- Silencing the self: withholding thoughts and feelings that might cause disagreement.
- Divided self: showing a pleasant surface while feeling that your partner doesn’t know the real you.
A few sample items from the scale capture the flavour: not speaking feelings in a close relationship when they would cause disagreement, burying feelings that might cause trouble, and feeling that doing things just for yourself is selfish (Jack & Dill, 1992).
The link to mental health has been tested extensively. A recent review of 126 studies that used the scale concluded that self-silencing is consistently associated with depression and noted a meta-analytic correlation of about .39, a moderate relationship (Sex Roles review, 2025, citing Pintea & Gatea, 2021). The same review reported that a small number of prospective studies found self-silencing at one point in time predicted later depression even after accounting for earlier depression, which strengthens, though does not settle, the causal story.
Three nuances matter. First, the evidence is largely correlational, so “silencing causes depression” should be read cautiously; low mood can also make people withdraw and stay quiet. Second, self-silencing is not only a women’s phenomenon. Studies find men can score as high as or higher than women on parts of the scale, though the connection to depression tends to be stronger for women (Lutz-Zois et al., 2013). In one college sample, women scored higher on externalised self-perception, while men scored higher on care as self-sacrifice.
Third, culture shapes how the pattern looks. Research on South Asian samples, such as a study of married women in Lahore, found that women with depression reported more self-silencing and poorer marital adjustment than women without depression, with externalised self-perception emerging as a notable predictor (Ahmed & Iqbal, 2019). Jack and Ali (2010) brought together work across cultures precisely to show that the pattern recurs wherever relationships demand one person’s voice be the quieter one.
Conformity: Harmony, Pressure and The Line Between Them
Self-silencing is related to, but not identical with, conformity. Conformity means shifting your behaviour or stated views toward a group’s. Self-silencing is narrower and more personal: it involves withholding your own inner experience so a relationship stays smooth.
The classic evidence on conformity comes from Solomon Asch’s line-judgment experiments, in which people sometimes gave obviously wrong answers to match a unanimous group. A meta-analysis of 133 such studies from 17 countries found that conformity was systematically higher in collectivist cultures than in individualist ones (Bond & Smith, 1996). It also found shifts over time within countries, which suggests that conformity is not a fixed national trait but responds to social climate.
Two cautions apply. A line-judgment task tells us about public agreement with a group, not about how someone feels afterwards, so these findings cannot be stretched into “collectivist people suppress themselves.” And higher average conformity is not automatically a problem: in many settings, going along with group norms is how cooperation works. What matters is whether the person is going along because they agree or because they fear the cost of dissent.
Social psychology has two vocabularies for this. Deutsch and Gerard (1955) distinguished informational influence (the group may know something I don’t) from normative influence (I’ll be disliked if I disagree). Kelman (1958) separated compliance, where someone agrees in public while privately disagreeing, from internalisation, where they come to accept the view as their own. Self-silencing often looks like normative compliance, but the two ideas overlap rather than coincide, and treating them as the same loses something:
- The source of pressure differs: Normative influence is usually studied as pressure from a group majority. Self-silencing typically plays out inside one or two close relationships: a spouse, a parent, a mother-in-law.
- It is a pattern, not an episode: Compliance can be a one-off response to one situation. Self-silencing, as Jack and Dill measure it, is a durable way of relating, built into how a person judges what is safe or selfish to want.
- The pressure can become internal: When “care as self-sacrifice” is deeply held, a person may police themselves with no one applying pressure at all, which sits closer to Kelman’s internalisation than to outright compliance.
- What is withheld differs: Conformity concerns what you say or do in step with others. Self-silencing concerns what you keep back: feelings, needs, the fact that you minded.
So normative influence is one route into self-silencing, not a definition of it. That mapping is my interpretation of how the concepts relate, not the finding of any single study. Here is how the distinction looks in practice. A family fixes a cousin’s engagement for the weekend before Priya’s exam, and she privately thinks it is unfair.
- Conformity from agreement: she thinks it over, decides the family’s reasoning is sound and goes along. No silencing, and no cost.
- Normative compliance: she says “of course” at the meeting while privately furious, then vents to a friend that evening. She complied, but she knows what she thinks and has somewhere to say it.
- Self-silencing: she says “I’m fine, whatever works” before she has noticed what she would prefer, feels guilty at the very idea of asking, and over the years has stopped telling anyone when she minds.
What separates the third case from the second is not that day’s behaviour but the pattern around it: her own preferences have become hard to find, even for her.
The Cost of Keeping Feelings In
If self-silencing is about holding back what you feel, emotion-regulation research asks what holding back does to a body and a relationship. Gross and John (2003) distinguished two common strategies: reappraisal, which means reinterpreting a situation so it carries less emotional force, and expressive suppression, which means hiding the outward signs of what you feel. In five studies, they found that habitual suppressors reported less positive emotion, more negative emotion, poorer interpersonal functioning and lower well-being, whereas reappraisers fared better on each. Experimental work reviewed by Gross (2002) showed that suppression reduces visible expression but does not reduce the inner experience, and can increase physiological arousal in the suppressor and sometimes in the person they are talking to.
Close relationships specifically, the cost seems to add up. In a diary study of dating couples, days on which people suppressed emotions while making a sacrifice were linked to lower emotional well-being and lower relationship quality for both partners (Impett et al., 2012). In other words, the person who stays quiet “to keep the peace” may not actually be producing peace; their partner can sense something is withheld.
But Culture Changes the Arithmetic
Here the story becomes more interesting, and more honest. If suppression were simply toxic, cultures that prize restraint would show widespread distress. The data say something messier. Hong Kong Chinese students report using suppression more than European American students, yet in one study suppression was unrelated to their life satisfaction and depressed mood, while it was linked to worse outcomes among the European Americans (Soto et al., 2011). Butler, Lee and Gross (2007) found that the social costs of suppression were clearest among people holding Western European values and weaker among those holding Asian values.
A comparison of students in Germany, Hong Kong and Japan likewise found that links between suppression and well-being differed by culture (Schunk et al., 2021). The usual explanation is fit: where restraint is a shared, understood and valued way of showing care, it carries different meaning and does less damage. The relationship research tells a similar story. Le and Impett (2013) found that suppressing negative emotion during a sacrifice could feel authentic and be beneficial for people high in interdependence, because it matched what they valued.
A related line of work found that sacrificing to avoid conflict was not as costly for highly interdependent people (Impett et al., 2013). There is a boundary on how far to take this. These studies mostly use student samples, measure everyday sacrifice rather than sustained coercion, and show that suppression is not universally linked to depression; they do not show it is free. My reading of the evidence is that cultural fit softens the cost but cannot protect someone in a situation where adjusting is demanded rather than chosen, where only one person ever does it, or where it extends to tolerating mistreatment. The Silencing the Self research was built on exactly those situations.
Healthy Compromise Versus Persistent Self-Silencing
So how do you tell the difference from the inside? Impett, Gable and Peplau (2005) offer the most useful distinction. In a two-week daily diary study, they examined sacrifices made with approach motives. These sacrifices were made to make a partner happy or bring you closer. In contrast, they also examined sacrifices made with avoidance motives to dodge conflict, guilt or disapproval. Approach-motivated sacrifice was linked to better personal well-being and relationship quality. Avoidance-motivated sacrifice was linked to more negative emotion, lower satisfaction and a greater chance of the relationship ending. The outward act can be identical; what differs is what is driving it. A few everyday cases show how the same “yes” can sit in either column:
| Situation | Approach-motivated yes | Avoidance-motivated yes |
| A cousin’s wedding clashes with your plans | “I want to be there; she’d do the same for me.” | “If I say no, Mummy will sulk for a week and the relatives will talk.” |
| Hosting a dozen guests again | “It’s my turn, and I enjoy it.” | “If I refuse, I’ll be called selfish.” |
| The deadline moves to the weekend | “This launch matters to me, and I can manage this one.” | “People who push back here get sidelined.” |
| Taking the stable job your family prefers | “Financial security matters to me too, and I’m at peace with it.” | “I can’t tell Papa I wanted something else.” |
Avoidance is not always a mistake. Sometimes, a quiet yes is simply prudent. Additionally, the interdependence research discussed above suggests that avoidance-motivated sacrifice costs less for highly interdependent people (Impett et al., 2013). The signal is which column your yeses usually fall in, and whether you ever get to choose the other one. Beyond motive, healthy adjustment tends to look like this:
- It is chosen: You could have said no, and you know it.
- It is reciprocal over time: Not every day, but across months, others adjust for you too.
- It leaves you feeling fine afterwards, not quietly resentful.
- Your needs still get heard: You can state a preference without it becoming a crisis.
Persistent self-silencing tends to look different:
- You rarely know what you want, because you automatically start from what others want.
- Disagreement feels dangerous, not just uncomfortable.
- “It’s fine” has become a reflex, and sometimes you don’t know whether it’s true.
- You feel that the people close to you don’t really know you, Jack’s “divided self.”
- Being selfish is the thing you fear most, so even reasonable requests feel like a moral failing.
Notice that none of these markers is about how much you give. A person can give enormously, from love, and be healthy. Another person may give very little yet feel deeply self-silenced because even a small act of giving can feel like holding their breath. The question is not “am I adjusting?” but “who decides, why, and what happens when I don’t?”
Boundary-Setting Without Burning the House Down
If the pattern sounds familiar, the goal is not to become someone who refuses everything. In relationships that value harmony, a sudden shift to blunt self-assertion can backfire and, for many people, simply feels wrong. The aim is a wider range: being able to adjust and to decline, to give and to ask. One honest caveat comes first. Advice to “just set a boundary” assumes that saying no is safe and that the other person will listen, and neither is equally true for everyone. A daughter-in-law who depends on her in-laws for housing, a spouse who does not control the money, an employee whose manager controls her job: each risks more by speaking up than someone with an exit, an income or allies.
In India’s sixth National Family Health Survey (2023–24), about 22 per cent of ever-married women aged 18–49 reported spousal violence, down from about 29 per cent in the previous round (International Institute for Population Sciences, 2026, as reported by South First); experts caution that reporting is likely incomplete. So the steps below run from lower risk to higher, and where power is badly unequal, the first job is safety and support, not assertiveness.
1. Start by noticing, not changing
For a week, observe the moments when you say “it’s fine” or “I don’t mind.” Ask yourself a quiet follow-up: Do I? Self-silencing can cause your own preferences to fade into the background. You may need to reconnect with them before you can express them to others. Recognising your own feelings is a skill, and it responds to practice.
2. Start small, and calibrate the risk
Choose the restaurant. Say you’d prefer a different time. Decline one optional errand. Small boundaries build tolerance for the discomfort of disagreeing, which is the muscle self-silencing weakens. If you are unsure what kind of yes you are giving, ask which column of the table above it belongs in. What counts as low risk depends on your situation: pick the steps where a poor reaction would cost you least, and keep the first few reversible.
3. Say it in the language of the relationship, not against it
Boundary-setting inside a close family usually works better when it affirms the bond. Something like “I want to be there, and I can’t do both days” keeps the connection intact. Additionally, asking “Which one matters more to you?” shows consideration for the other person. Similarly, “Main iss baar nahi kar paungi, par agli baar pakka” expresses a boundary, a courtesy and a promise in one breath.
4. Tell someone, and keep the reappraisal honest
Hiding what you feel is not a neutral act. Therefore, find one person, such as a friend, a sibling or a counsellor, who can listen to how a sacrifice actually felt. For instance, it may have felt tiring, unfair or surprisingly fine. That also builds an ally, which matters most where power is unequal. Reappraisal can help when the reinterpretation is honest. For example, it may involve remembering why something matters to you. However, it is not honest when it convinces you that harm is acceptable.
5. Know when it is bigger than boundaries
Adjusting may sometimes mean accepting control, humiliation, monitoring, threats or violence. However, this is not compromise. Nor is it a communication-skills problem. In those situations, confronting the person can raise the risk rather than lower it. Support from a counsellor, a trusted relative or a local women’s helpline is important. Additionally, help with planning for safety matters more than any script. Low mood, persistent hopelessness or a sense of having disappeared may also accompany this pattern. In such cases, speaking with a mental health professional is a sensible step rather than an overreaction.
For the People Asking Others to Adjust
It is easy to read all of this as advice for the one who bends. But the pattern is relational: it needs someone on the receiving end. If you are someone who habitually says adjust kar lo, ask yourself whether you would feel comfortable if the roles were reversed. Also, ask whether the person adjusting has had a chance to express what it costs them. Asking, “Is this okay with you, really?” is important. Being willing to hear an answer you don’t like is also important. In fact, it is one of the most protective things a family can do. Evidence suggests that unexpressed feelings do not simply disappear. Instead, unexpressed feelings may create emotional distance, and partners can often sense when the other person is holding something back.
Conclusion
Adaptability is a strength, and many cultures have refined it into an art of living together. Psychological research does not suggest that people should abandon adaptability. However, research on self-silencing, suppression, and sacrifice suggests that adaptability remains healthy under certain conditions. First, the person chooses to adapt. Second, they share the burden with others. Finally, they remain aware of their own thoughts and feelings. When “adjust kar lo” becomes automatic, one-directional and unspoken, it stops being flexibility and starts being disappearance. The goal, then, is not less love or less accommodation. It is a self that can bend without breaking. Moreover, it remains recognisable even after adapting.
References +
- Ahmed, F., & Iqbal, H. (2019). Self-Silencing and Marital Adjustment in Women With and Without Depression. Pakistan Journal of Psychological Research, 34(2), 311–330. https://doi.org/10.33824/pjpr.2019.34.2.17
- Bond, R., & Smith, P. (1996). APA PsycNet. Psycnet.Apa.Org. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1996- 01401-008
- Butler, E. A., Lee, T. L., & Gross, J. J. (2007). Emotion regulation and culture: Are the social consequences of emotion suppression culture-specific? Emotion, 7(1), 30–48. https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.1.30
- Gross, J. J. (2002). Emotion regulation: Affective, cognitive, and Social Consequences. Psychophysiology, 39(3), 281–291. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0048577201393198
- Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348
- Impett, E. A., Gable, S. L., & Peplau, L. A. (2005). Giving up and giving in: The costs and benefits of daily sacrifice in intimate relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(3), 327–344. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.89.3.327
- Impett, E. A., Kogan, A., English, T., John, O., Oveis, C., Gordon, A. M., & Keltner, D. (2012). Suppression Sours Sacrifice. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(6), 707–720. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212437249
- Silencing the Self — Harvard University Press. (2024). Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674808157
- Jack, D. C., & Dill, D. (1992). The Silencing the Self Scale: Schemas of Intimacy Associated With Depression in Women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 16(1), 97–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1992.tb00242.x
- Le, B. M., & Impett, E. A. (2013). When Holding Back Helps. Psychological Science, 24(9), 1809–1815. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613475365
- Lutz-Zois, C. J., Dixon, L. J., Smidt, A. M., Goodnight, J. A., Gordon, C. L., & Ridings, L. E. (2013). An examination of gender differences in the construct validity of the silencing the self scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 55(1), 35–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2013.01.012
- Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psycnet.Apa.Org. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-23978-001
- Schunk, F., Trommsdorff, G., Wong, N., & Nakao, G. (2021). Associations Between Emotion Regulation and Life Satisfaction Among University Students From Germany, Hong Kong, and Japan: The Mediating Role of Social Support. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.745888
- Jack, D. C., Brody, L. R., & Sikov, J. (2026). Advancing the Next Generation of Research on Self-Silencing and Depression: A Narrative Review and Synthesis of Three Decades of Research. Sex Roles, 92(2). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-025-01637-8
- Soto, J. A., Perez, C. R., Kim, Y.-H., Lee, E. A., & Minnick, M. R. (2011). Is expressive suppression always associated with poorer psychological functioning? A cross-cultural comparison between European Americans and Hong Kong Chinese. Emotion, 11(6), 1450–1455. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023340
