By Lillian Okenwa
You’re not listening to me.
Few sentences carry more disappointment than those five words.
They are spoken every day, although not always in the same way. A child struggles to explain why tears suddenly appeared over what adults dismiss as something small. A wife realises that she has repeated the same concern so often it now seems to drift past unnoticed. A patient describes pain that refuses to fit neatly into a medical chart. A university student tries to explain that effort and results are not always the same thing. An elderly parent tells a familiar story once again, hoping that this time someone will hear the loneliness beneath the memory.
Sometimes the words are spoken aloud. Sometimes they never leave the heart.
People survive remarkable things. They bury those they love, rebuild after devastating losses, begin again after dreams collapse and somehow find the strength to face another morning. Yet few burdens weigh more heavily than the feeling that your fears, your pain or your experience no longer matter to anyone else.
One of trauma’s deepest injuries is not always the event itself. Often, it is the growing suspicion that speaking no longer changes anything.
That suspicion does not belong only to private lives. It can settle over entire communities. This week, many Nigerians have once again woken to headlines that reopen familiar anxieties. Families are desperately searching for loved ones after fresh abductions. Homes already stretched by the rising cost of living continue to make impossible choices. Across the country, conversations are filled with worry, frustration and uncertainty, yet beneath all the noise lingers a question that deserves far more attention than it receives.
Is anybody really listening
Not listening long enough to prepare a response. Not listening simply to defend a position. Not listening with the intention of explaining another person’s experience back to them. Listening in the way that allows another human being to feel that their life has been acknowledged.
Trauma has a way of entering conversations without announcing itself. It appears in hesitation, in unfinished sentences and in the decision to say, “It doesn’t matter,” when it matters very much.
Few people wake up one morning and decide they will never speak again. They explain themselves once more. They search for gentler words. They wonder whether they failed to make themselves understood. They try again. Then, almost without noticing, they are no longer speaking with the expectation of being heard. They are simply going through the motions of conversation.
That is why silence can be misleading.
Not everyone who grows quiet has found peace. Some have merely grown accustomed to disappointment.
Others continue talking long after hope has begun to fade. They answer questions. They smile politely. They contribute to meetings. They send messages. They sit around family tables. Yet somewhere within them, expectation has taken its leave. Their voices are still present, but they no longer believe those voices can alter very much.
It appears in marriages where conversations become routine exchanges rather than genuine encounters. It appears in families where young people stop confiding in their parents, convinced they will be misunderstood before they have finished speaking. It appears in workplaces where fresh ideas are swallowed before they are voiced, and in classrooms where struggling students decide it is easier to remain silent than explain themselves yet again.
The same pattern can spread through entire communities. People stop asking for help before they stop needing it. They withdraw from conversations before they stop caring. They lower their expectations long before they lose their compassion. Very little announces the moment hope begins to retreat. There is no ceremony. No final conversation. People simply begin asking less of those around them because experience has taught them not to expect very much.
Perhaps this is one of trauma’s least recognised echoes. It does not always reveal itself through anger or tears. More often, it hides in ordinary moments: the friend who shrugs instead of explaining, the neighbour who no longer attends community meetings, the graduate who has stopped talking about ambitions that once filled every conversation, the patient who says, “I’m fine,” because describing the pain one more time feels like another disappointment waiting to happen.
We often imagine that listening begins with hearing words. It begins much earlier than that. It begins with deciding that another person’s experience deserves our full attention, even when we cannot solve the problem they bring to us. Every time someone feels genuinely heard, they recover something disappointment had almost persuaded them to surrender.
In a season when so many voices compete to be heard, perhaps the rarest gift we can offer another human being is the assurance that they have not become invisible.
Sometimes healing begins there.
A lawyer and equity advocate, Lillian can be reached at [email protected]. Follow me on X: @OkenwaLillian.
