Until You Find Your Voice, You’re Never Going to Feel Heard.
Standing up for yourself can be kind of tough sometimes. I have a good friend who was raised in a house where dissent, of any kind, was essentially forbidden.
The worst thing you could do was say “No” to someone in ‘authority’, and heaven forbid expressing an opinion that was counter to the one your parents gave you.
And while her home seemed happy, it was just that no one felt comfortable speaking up.
Many years ago I heard a saying that has stuck with me until today…. ‘Real boats rock’. That means that when you see something that appears to be perfect, you’re either not looking hard enough, or someone is hiding something harder than you are looking. Real families have dissent, and they learn how to work through it.
But my friend felt like she was unable to have a voice of her own, and this carried into her adult years,
And so she discovers herself, at the wonderful age of 37, trying to find her voice in life, in love, and in her own family. It’s always hard to learn things later in life than we were supposed to learn them.
Normally the teenage years are the time where you forge your own identity, and learn how to deal with disagreement and conflict through discussion and compassion, but if that timeline is missed, then you carry some very difficult habits with you into adulthood.
And so my friend came to me for help, because she was tired of feeling like she was never heard.
It wasn’t that her family wasn’t trying to listen to her, but when you’ve spent 34 out of 37 years of your life learning that you can’t express yourself fully, you have a tendency to imply rather than express, and get frustrated when others don’t understand why you are feeling the way you do.
If you’ve never felt safe saying what you really want to, you find yourself saying the things you think others want you to.
Do that long enough, and hard enough, and you’ll feel like you have no voice at all.
As we discussed her situation, I realized that she was going to have to push herself through an emotional wall, and do something very hard for her. As we talked, I gently brought her to a point in the conversation where she was frustrated, and very close to tears. In that moment of vulnerability, I gently opened her to the truth of the situation that she didn’t want to hear.
“Until you find your voice, you’re never going to feel heard”.
She looked at me for a moment with resentment, and then her glare softened. She knew I wasn’t trying to hurt her, and because I’ve been able to help her with things in the past, she was willing to listen to the words instead of ignoring them. Even better, she took them to heart, and went away and did something very difficult for her.
She expressed herself fully in a difficult conversation.
It actually went really well. Because she felt heard, she was also able to listen to the other person’s point of view, rather than hearing only the echoes of the words she wanted to say, but had been unable to.
The two of them came closer as a result of their conversation, and both felt uplifted by the experience.
And it started with one woman finding the courage to express what she truly felt.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings