Why it's So Scary for Women to Share Their Voices and Speak Their Truth

Let me begin by stating the obvious yet often forgotten truth:

Women silence themselves and withhold their gifts from the world when they believe that there is something so massively essential that they will lose if they open their mouths and let out the truth. And so, if we are to make the most of this one precious life, experience real intimacy with others, offer our authentic gifts in the world, and advocate for our own innocence, all of that has to become more essential to us than anything we think we might lose in the process.

And for some of us, that can feel like actual death.

A few years ago I never would have considered myself to be a woman who was afraid of her own voice.

In fact, by the time I was 27 years old I had created a multi million following online by writing my most intimate stories and sharing them with the world. I was frequently told how brave I was to be so vulnerable publicly, but in earnest at the time to me, it felt normal.

I shared about my heartbreaks and disappointments, insecurities and fears, sexual history and traumas, and most anything you could imagine. My honesty, authenticity, and relatability were my claims to fame, and countless women would write to me or stop me on the street and tell me I gave words to the feelings they didn’t know how to express.

So my choice in August of 2018, following an extremely life altering event that completely obliterated anything I once thought was true, to end the brand I had invested seven years, a lot of sleepless nights, huge trust leaps, and buckets of cathartic tears into, didn’t really scare me. I assumed I would bounce back quickly. Resurrect something even more impactful. I did not expect to spend more than a year drowning in the swampy depths of every way I had ever abandoned and betrayed myself through my voice. I did not expect to feel completely paralyzed and unable to write again. I did not expect to wallow in so much doubt, confusion, and grief over why I had handed over my own crown.

What’s fascinating and also heartbreaking about any wounded belief, is that is wound into everything that we do.

But the winding can seem paradoxical. It may weave through the buried crevices of repression and denial in one corner of our lives and through the overt expressions of our reactions in another. “The way you do one thing is the way you do everything” only applies when you understand that reaction and repression, seemingly opposite, ultimately stem from the same source. We have to actually follow those threads home to their source if we stand a chance of actually understanding what drives us and making a real difference on a deep level.

On my personal journey of healing the power of my voice, which I now understand is intimately connected with the power of my womb, I danced in some huge extremes. I went from posting on my blog multiple times a week, sharing on social media multiple times a day, popping in for live videos regularly, and facilitating a community of at times millions of readers, to ending my blog as if it meant nothing to me, going radio silent on social media, planning to never show up publicly again, and living on tiny deserted islands where no one knew me and I wouldn’t have to speak.

At first this contrast was deeply healing.

I replenished the well that had stopped gifting me inspiration a long time ago, and was continually flooded with beautiful poetry and fresh ideas. Through my healing journey with my womb and reawakening my priestess lineages within my ancestry and from many lifetimes, my whole expression rebirthed herself. As I communed deeper with my own femininity this profound soul voice began speaking through me. It was the lived experience of the inner winter quietly nourishing the soil for a riotous bloom.

Once I had refilled my cup, it became clear to me that it was time to come up for Spring. But when I did, I met with an entire mountain of resistance that hadn’t been there before. Every single judgement against public vulnerability, which was essentially every single unresolved judgement I had developed towards my former self, blocked me.

It took many many many months wading through overwhelming levels of doubt and confusion to navigate all of the resentment, betrayal, and humiliation I felt towards the part of myself who I now saw as giving all of herself away for nothing and who based her worthiness on fame, attention, and external validation.

The voice and the womb are intimately connected and the throat and the yoni can equally be used for prostitution.

When I started healing with my womb and seeing into my story as a priestess, I met the betrayal wounds of the whore (derived from hor, which means womb) in many flavors. With my voice, it was the same.

While we have all been raped and raped ourselves through these channels, we need them in order to deliver our medicine into the world. The power of our voices and the power of our wombs are not the problems. Our expression and our sexuality are not the problems. Our misuse of them due to unconscious trauma, wounding, and abuse is. So the only choice is to heal, and healing requires feeling.

Feel everything I did. And I started sharing my voice in quieter ways where the trigger still felt present, but at least less acute. I started guiding my women’s retreats again, seeing the direct effects of how much more powerful my voice had become. I created an online immersion Whole Woman that offered so much wisdom and insight I had gleaned from my own journey in the dark enchanted inner forest of the feminine.

Even doing this for very small groups of women felt extremely scary and hard.

Posting a picture and a few words on social media felt borderline... revolting. I would expand out and immediately shut down. I would have an epic surge of inspiration and then collapse into an endless abyss of depression for days on end. And eventually it got so uncomfortable being in so much despair, I decided to really look at the very bottom of why I was so afraid of sharing my voice in the world again.

There was, as I mentioned before, the prostitution angle. The belief that I would abandon myself again by being so public and sharing so much. That people would expect things from me and I’d be projected onto constantly. But the more I unwound that, and decided to heal with the part of me who created This American Girl instead of blaming her for everything, I could see that prostitution is the reactive side to frigidity.

Silencing myself and giving all of myself away... it didn’t matter what I chose if both were ultimately rooted in the same wounded belief structure that I was somehow unworthy of my divine humanity. So I went all the way down there and asked myself the question… “what makes me think that I am unworthy of my divine humanity?” And why did that belief seem to have such a huge effect on how I did or did not use my voice?

What did I think I was going to lose, on a deep, deep level, if I started showing up again in my full power?

The thing is... my fear of speaking my truth existed even when I was sharing often and widely read. It just manifested differently. Back then, what I wasn’t afraid to post online, I was deeply afraid to speak aloud, especially to men. Vulnerability to me didn’t look like telling my stories for the world to read. Vulnerability looked like standing up for myself in the face of dishonor, and being willing to lose someone to honor myself. That was a vulnerability I wasn’t brave enough to step into at the time, because to lose the approval of a man I had placed on a pedestal, whether it be father, mentor, brother, or lover, actually felt like death.

I arrived at an alarming yet deeply resonant belief...
“If I start writing again and return to my throne, no man will ever love me.”

Which was rooted in perhaps the most universally limiting belief in existence: “I’m not lovable, and so I will die.”

The deeper I unraveled this belief through my relationships with all of the men of my past, eventually I arrived at the most obvious characters they were all just mirrors for: patriarchy.

Deeper than my fear of being abandoned by a lover, a mentor, or even by my own father, was my fear of being abandoned by God. Of God disapproving of me because the patriarchy disapproved of me. And because of the DNA that weaves through me, the bones that carry the codes of my ancestors, and the eggs in my womb that come from my great grandmother, a part of me has been programmed to believe that I have to go through a man to get to God. If that man doesn’t approve of me, then neither does God. And so I will die. A sinner. And burn in hell. For all of eternity.

My greatest judgement in being a writer and a voice, was actually rooted in my perception that it wasn’t “spiritual” for me to feel any of the things that I feel... let alone speak any of them out loud. Because my feelings and my expression did not fit into the appropriate box of hyper-masculine spirituality I had prescribed to, and I wasn’t fit to share until I was categorically “enlightened.”

Further, there was the general unspoken message that “it’s not spiritual for a woman to have a big voice or a big following in the world” and “it’s not feminine to have a big voice or a big following in the world.” Consequently, I found evidence of this everywhere, and it took a lot of devotion to my own truth to believe in something that actually serves my higher purpose in this life.

And you know what... me not writing had come to feel like burning in hell for all of eternity.

Despite what some “spiritual” teachers taught me, I was not in fact “rewarded” for my silence. If anything, all of life was throwing challenges my way to get me to start voicing more than I ever had before.

Finally, I knew that I had to start speaking up for myself, even if it looked really messy. I had to regain the trust within myself that my fear of being abandoned by “God” was less important to me than my desire to be true to the spark of light inside of me that actually is God(dess).

I remember one night in my bungalow in Thailand, deep in my own doubts about being a writer, reading Marguerite Porete’s story and my entire body igniting in a fever for two days. If you don’t know her story, in 14th century France, after being encouraged by the church to share her revelations of embodying divine love, Porete was charged with heresy and publicly burned along with her book for refusing to take back her truth and admit she had not in fact directly experienced christ consciousness from within. She stood behind her message, and she was burned.

While her revelations and her devotion may have been unique, her sentencing certainly wasn’t.

As you know, so many women healers, teachers, priestesses, alchemists, and mystics have been burned across the world and through the ages, simply for standing in their truth. Including my ancestors. And most probably yours.

Years ago while exploring Cambodia as a travel writer, I spoke with and befriended many survivors of the genocide that took place there. Stories I heard and read confirmed that the first people to be killed were the teachers, the doctors, and even anyone wearing glasses. At the time these were symbols of intellect, which were symbols of power. Which made them the greatest threat to the regime.

A woman contains the blueprint for all of creation inside of her body. We have wombs that literally incarnate a soul into being.

That is power. And do you know one of the most effective and most covert ways to strip a woman of her power? Convince her it’s not holy, spiritual, or attractive to be big, wealthy, and influential. Then demonize the two greatest channels for her power… her sexuality and her voice.

A man said to me recently, “we are not only the descendants of the witches who were burned, we are also the descendants of the ones who burned them... we are both sides.” An important and humbling reminder. This was certainly what I saw when I journeyed through my own ancestral lines in my rebirthing breathwork training. I witnessed the abusers and the abused. The abused become the abuser. The abuser become the abused.

With our voice as a channel for our power as potent as the canal that co-creates orgasms and births babies into this world, I wonder are we afraid of being destroyed for our truth... or are we afraid of destroying with our truth? Are we afraid of how we will be harmed, or of whom we will harm?

Are we afraid of being the abuser or the abused?

It’s worth repeating...

Women silence themselves and withhold their gifts from the world when they believe that there is something so massively essential that they will lose if they open their mouths and let out the truth. And so, if we are to make the most of this one precious life, experience real intimacy with others, offer our authentic gifts in the world, and advocate for our own innocence, all of that has to become more essential to us than anything we think we might lose in the process.

In my experience, this cannot be simply undone with hyper-positive coaching, an affirmation mantra, or by forcing ourselves to “just do it.” It can only be patiently presenced, deeply respected, and tenderly allowed in order for that part of the self to be seen, received, understood, and healed. Most importantly it means deciding that you value the rewards of speaking your truth, claiming your voice, and offering your gifts, more than you value what you think you stand to lose.

Some deeper self inquiry to explore...

What are the stakes of me sharing this truth in the world? What might I lose if I speak this out loud?

What might I gain if I speak this out loud?

Who might abandon me if I share this?

Who might come closer if I share this?

How is not speaking this keeping me safe?

How is not speaking this keeping me small?

How am I afraid I might harm myself if I stand in my full power?

How have I used my voice as a form of self abandonment or avoidance?

How have I used my voice with force or manipulation?

How have I let myself be forced or manipulated by refusing to exercise my voice?

How have I or my ancestors been harmed for standing in truth?

How have I or my ancestors abused, manipulated, harmed others with our power?

How have I come here to change the pattern?

How can my voice set myself and our world free?

How can I trust myself enough to let my voice shine?

How can I speak my truth with love and grace?

What’s a safe way that I can start speaking and sharing more openly now?

What’s a safe space where I can be seen and heard?

What’s a promise I can make to myself, to know that my voice, my power, and my womb are safe first and foremost with me?