Reclaiming Your Voice: When Silence Was Survival
- The Broken & Beautiful
- Feb 9
- 5 min read
We lose our voices for many reasons.
Some of us learn very early—often subtly—that silence is safer.
Some grew up under the horrific idea that children should be seen and not heard. Some literally had their voice beaten out of them.
Others watched what happened to someone else and learned that staying quiet was the only way to survive.
What is true in every case is this: our younger selves were brilliant.
The survival instinct that taught us to go silent was not weakness—it was wisdom. It kept us alive in situations where speaking would have cost too much.
If you didn’t have to go silent to survive, you are truly one of the lucky ones.
That distinction matters, because many people carry shame for the very thing that once protected them.
Silence was not the failure—it was the strategy.
When Silence Takes Over
In February of 2022, as images poured out of Ukraine, one news segment lodged itself in my body. Refugees were arriving by train in Poland—met by volunteers offering food, blankets, and warmth.
A journalist was interviewing people helping on the platform when she came across a woman who was volunteering as a psychologist. She pointed to the crying children and devastated faces and asked her what she was seeing.
She replied, “Yes, that is the reality—and it’s horrible. But the children who are crying are not the ones we’re most worried about.”
She went on to explain that those children had moved beyond fight or flight.
They had frozen. Dissociated.
Blank eyes.
Robot-like movements.
Given food but not eating.
Handed a blanket and simply holding it.
Those kids had gone somewhere far away inside themselves.
For many of us, that is what losing our voice looks like.
Pushed past our limits.
Overwhelmed. Terrified. Frozen.
Even if our stories didn’t reach that extreme, the extremes teach us something important. They reveal what is quietly happening in countless subtler ways every day.
My Own Losing of Voice
In my story, I was told I was too much. Wild. Out of control. Rebellious. A troublemaker.
And then the quieter, sharper messages: evil at my core, broken, deserving of death. When I tried to explain myself or tell my side, I wasn’t believed. Or I was told I should know better because I was the oldest.
I didn’t freeze as my primary survival strategy.
I fought. I raged.
I lived on high alert.
There were moments I dissociated—staring into space, numb, unable to hear or feel anything.
That often happened sitting in church.
Even now, I sometimes notice myself slipping there. That was the place where the messages overwhelmed me most. However, there is another important distinction in my story.
The truth is: my parents loved me. They were trying to do their best.
That mattered. It likely kept me from disappearing inside myself more often. Even when our parents try their best, we can still be wounded and traumatized.
Love does not cancel impact. Both can be true.
Giving Voice Comes Before Confrontation
As I began my healing journey, I discovered something essential: reclaiming our voice starts inside. It begins by telling the truth of our own stories—first to ourselves, then to safe people.
Letting the younger parts of us speak. Letting pain that was never witnessed finally be seen. This is where voice begins to form.
Coaches. Therapists. Friends. Groups. Wise guides.
Slowly, my voice grew. At one point, a leader told me I should confront my father. So I did. I was angry, and what I said didn’t make much sense.
Looking back, it was bad advice—for where I was at then. I didn’t yet have the clarity or grounding to do that well. It was also a huge risk. Thankfully, my dad responded with curiosity and some openness, even though he was confused.
That was grace.
Many others I know weren’t so lucky. Their parents doubled down, blamed them, defended themselves. It re-injured them and drove their voices deeper underground.
I later apologized to my father for how I approached him. That repair mattered.
What Reclaiming Your Voice Is Really About
What I know now is this: finding our voice is not primarily about venting anger or confronting people. It is about understanding what happened. Learning to treat ourselves with compassion.
Noticing how we internalized the same shame and contempt that once silenced us.
And then turned it on ourselves to stay safe.
That isn’t failure. That is survival. Reclaiming your voice requires honesty without self-violence. It requires patience with the parts that learned silence for a reason. And it requires safety before expression.
The Seed Underground
Here is the paradox: the silence that helped us survive buried our voice like a seed deep underground. Shame and contempt became the soil that hid it. When we begin telling the truth of our story, it is like sunlight reaching the dirt for the first time.
When we grieve what happened to us, the tears water that soil. When we name what we were forced to swallow, carry, or endure, even the manure becomes fertilizer.
As safety grows, as self-acceptance takes root, as love enters places once ruled by fear, the soil softens. The tears go deeper. The seed begins to drink.
Awareness. Attunement. Acknowledgement. Action.
Growth does not come from force—it comes from conditions.
Protecting the Sapling
When voice first emerges, it is fragile. A sapling. Easily trampled. Easily uprooted.
So part of reclaiming our voice is learning discernment. Vulnerability with safe people. Boundaries with unsafe ones.
Paying attention to who listens without minimizing, rushing, or fixing. Protection is not unspiritual. Protection is often mislabeled as defensiveness, selfishness, or ungodly. It is not. In fact, it is necessary for growth. Roots deepen when the environment allows them to.
As we learn regulation, understand our triggers, gain tools to move through big emotions, and practice speaking in relationships, the roots strengthen. Some stress is good. It is the wind that tells roots to go deeper.
Not all pressure is harmful. But safety must come first.
Becoming the Oak
Over time, that sapling becomes something else. An oak.
Not because life stopped being hard, but because identity grew deeper and survival was no longer required.
We are safe inside ourselves—and we get to live.
When we reach that place, our voice no longer needs permission to exist. It flows from being grounded in who we are.
Grounded in love. Grounded in how we were designed. This is the long work.
It cannot be rushed.
Reclaiming My Name
I now call myself Musa the Wild.
Musa is my middle name—a Swahili name, because I was born in Africa.
Wild was once used against me. I reclaimed it.
Because the truth is: there is a wildness to me.
I love the wilderness. Trail-running in a snowstorm feels holy to me. And it isn’t only physical landscapes I love. It’s the wilderness of people’s stories. The places where everything gets exposed.
Where tears fall, rage burns, and truth finally breathes.
I reclaim my wildness because it holds beauty, gifting, and a fierce love I was designed to release into the world. Thank you for reading.
Daniel — Musa The Wild — www.musathewild.com
If you’d like to know more, I share that story in a post called Why Musa The Wild.
I’m a trauma and transformation coach—a healing guide and tracker of the authentic self. I walk with people into the hard places of their stories.The places people avoid for good reason. If you’re there right now and need someone to journey with you, reach out. Let’s see if it makes sense to walk together.
With love,
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