31 days of reflection {day 29} my struggle with silence

One of the biggest hurdles that I have over-come in my healing is learning to say whats here vs. letting the silence and weight of the silence over- take me.

This has certainly been one of the biggest struggles my whole life.

I have always been a quiet and reserved person. Lots of thoughts going through my head, but never feeling as if I had the right to speak out how I feel – even good feelings.

Silence became a huge part of me growing up – that is why writing was something I took to since I was 5 years old. Writing was my voice, and my voice was my writing. Any thoughts or feelings that I had, I wrote them out since I was little little. I had stacks of paper and that was my outlet for my voice back then.

When I first began therapy 7 1/2 years ago, the 3rd week of therapy I brought in to my therapist this napkin that I wrote all my feelings out on – telling him one of the first hardest things I felt inside, and he was in awe of that napkin. I handed it to him and I sat there in the chair with my eyes covered. It was the beginning of my journey of learning how to speak how I feel or what I am thinking.

Through the years in my healing, my therapist and I would write an email to each other every Sunday evening. I would write out how I felt about sessions in that past week, and I would speak how I felt, and he would read it and respond back, and that would be the beginning of the good connection before our session on Mondays.

Writing has been a HUGE part of my healing process even in therapy.

Slowly I began learning to take those thoughts into therapy room and talk about them instead of just writing them. It was hard hard work and many times I would go into anxiety attacks right in session because I didn’t know how to break through the silence without having help through it.

Today, it’s so so different! I finally can walk right into session and talk and talk and talk through my feelings … but there are moments when I am going through a really hard time and that hardness comes back and I feel silenced right back into myself – like a big big cloud of feelings that I feel – but can’t get them out.

It’s not often I go through that like I once did back 7 years ago, but there are times I still struggle to get out how I feel when I am really struggling with emotions and feelings and big big thoughts.

Last night I tried something different, I was having a hard time with some thoughts I was holding and Instead of writing about it to my therapist, or instead of writing it in my blog, I had an inner dialog with myself and talked through my feelings until I felt stronger in my thoughts and beliefs and it worked… I felt better and stronger.

Silence is the result of pain and suffering from abuse! Silence is what was forced upon me and it’s something that took years and years to break from. But there is hope on the other side of that silence!

Silence cannot live in connection! Silence is the one thing that most abuse victims struggle with because it was the one thing that was threatened against them.

I know for me, silence was the abuse, because for me not being able to say how I felt was the most painful – even more than the abuse itself.

That is why this blog has been a godsend for me through the years.. yes my blog has suffered some very hard times, but the good it has brought me outweighs any of the negative that it did struggle in.

Say how you feel, speak what is there .. rise above and be in connection with yourself and others through your voice!