Self-Trust When Voice has Failed You
Phew this first month of Voice of Fire has been…FIERY. The universe sent me countless opportunities to choose truth over silence, and trust my voice. So many of us have ruptured, difficult relationships to our voices– a direct result of how systemic trauma embeds in the body. Rebuilding trust in our voices is essential to building liberatory power.
Voice, trauma and power are inextricably linked, and voice is essential to liberatory work. By voice I am referring to expression in general and physical voice, especially conversations, singing, chanting and public speaking.
Traumatic experiences can deeply rupture our self-trust, especially when we don't understand why our bodies are doing what they are doing. Often after experiencing harm, we naturally wonder what we could have done to prevent or stop it. If our voices failed us in the moment, or we said yes when we meant no, it can be terrifying to feel that our bodies betrayed us when we needed them most.
Lately I've been thinking about two different types of trauma (this doesn’t include all trauma, and as usual nothing I say is diagnostic/ medical treatment):
Individual traumatic events– often still rooted in systemic oppression, but the trauma is directly connected to a particular event
Identity-based trauma– visible belonging to a certain group resulting in repeated harm at both interpersonal and institutional/ systemic levels, often starting from early childhood
When we experience a threat to our safety, our decision-making is taken over by our nervous system's protection responses. We momentarily bypass the brain's prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for analytical thought and complex decision making. This means your body, in a split second, is making a decision based on your body's memory of past experiences/ threats and what worked in those cases.
Protection responses fall into the following categories. These all exist on a continuum, and can become patterns in the body especially when activated repeatedly, dramatically, and/or at a young age.
Flock– if it feels safe/ available, we call in help. This is our natural first instinct, as inherently connected beings.
Fight– may manifest as jittery big energy, shouting, or other acts to fend off an aggressor. If this is unavailable/ deemed unsafe by your body, then…
Flight– removing oneself from the situation; if this is unavailable/ deemed unsafe…
Freeze– collapse, space of energy shut down; if this is unavailable/ deemed unsafe…
Fawn– appeasing to make it through, the person may seem ok but this is actually a highly suppressed and dissociative state, may also show up as people pleasing/ self-silencing behavior
Fear shuts down our voices when we do not have connection– our only true protection is each other, our bodies know this and it is wired into us and our protection responses. Especially in the freeze space, once we've tried connection, fight and fleeing, our breath shuts down and with it our physical voice.
Fawning is a total co-opting of the voice & central to oppression. We go to fawning when everything else has failed. To me, this has been the most disturbing aspect of healing my relationship to my voice– realizing how many times I have suffocated my voice or even said yes when I felt No. Fawning is when we give "consent" out of fear, and it is so embedded in our culture that especially from women/ femmes we characterize this behavior as "being nice."
Fawning is the least understood of the protection responses and is often tied to identity-based trauma. Oppression uses fawning to condition us to give away our energy and right to consent. People with marginalized identities learn from a young age that their safety is dependent on compliant behavior. This is taught by family, educators, police, government, religious leaders, mental healthcare providers, or other community members. The compliance requirements are often vague or shift with the oppressor's moods.
This naturally creates a constant state of hypervigilance, tip-toeing around and pretzeling one's identity to maintain some semblance of safety. Some subtle examples are code-switching, changing one's posture or voice in certain spaces, or not feeling worthy of healthy boundaries. Unfortunately when these patterns are entrenched in our bodies, fawning can become our default. Fawning is the compliant state that an abuser wants, and the easiest way to extract as much as possible.
Identity-based trauma is largely ignored by Western psychology, because of the logical conclusion– identity based trauma cannot be solved by fixing the person harmed. It must be a systemic approach, collectively held.
Instead of focusing on individual failings, we must recognize that ruptures to voice and any other trauma responses are relational and systemic. We do what we can to fortify ourselves, dress wounds, uproot internalized hate and clear away lingering energy—but not in isolation—together. We walk away from silencing relationships and create spaces that are truly affirming and empowering. At the same time, we dismantle and rebuild.
If you are on this meandering path of claiming your voice and power, please take a moment to appreciate your body's wisdom. You may disagree with its choices, but it made them for a reason, and here you are. Maybe your body never failed you, maybe you are bearing the weight of generations of trauma and hope, now ready to alchemize this energy into pure fire.