How can therapy help me speak up?
The difficulty of being unable to speak your mind can come from many places. If it has been with you for decades and since you were a young child, it may take time to get to a place, even in therapy, where you feel you can speak up and be the authentic you.
Speaking up starts in a safe relationship
The type of “speaking up therapy” I do with people is not a quick-fix assertiveness course or a “rewiring of negative beliefs” with homework prescribed.
Homework is often given in cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). I am a narrative therapist with a psychodynamic approach and work differently with a strength-based approach, empowering you in finding inner resources to speak up.
If speaking up or being able to speak your mind and be more authentically you is your goal in therapy (make contact if you are interested in hearing more), we will touch on different areas of life as they become relevant for you to bring up in therapy sessions. This happens gently and gradually, as you bring to mind what pains you, working through the difficult situations you face in your everyday present life and relationships (work, school, family, friends and community), where you find your voice silenced.
The pacing and the regular time set aside for you to come to therapy in a safe space will, over time, spill into your other relationships as you find internal resources and steadiness to speak up. In the way we work, there is time and space for changes to take deep hold in your psyche.
Speaking up starts from different vantage points
Some people may already have some solid ground to stand on and build on. We can find storylines that have people in it from our past, who might have allowed you a space to speak up and feel safe and supported. In narrative therapy, we aim to bring forth those connections that were positive and re-member them.
Other people may not have much of a place to start, finding safety to speak up. This is why a present relationship with a safe other, such as a therapist, can be the foundation to build upon. For example, you might find it difficult sometimes to speak up in my company. If so, this is something we cultivate by noticing when it happens. For those wondering what it means to heal in the therapeutic relationship, using the therapy session as just described is exactly what it is. We are shaped in relationships, and we heal in relationships.
Speaking up should not be a confessional or forced exercise, but a place where you feel safe enough over time to say what is on your mind
I want to touch on the potential pressure or expectations to “confess” or force speaking up, especially if you have experienced severe breaches of trust and someone in power silenced you by threatening you.
It can feel triggering if you have had traumatic experiences to speak up. Dread, terror and spacing out (dissociation) may wash over you when recalling memories, where you were silenced. Trying to put words to what it means for you and slowing things down in a co-regulated space in therapy makes it possible to work through, and panic and stress will lessen over time.
Speaking up and naming cultural and societal injustices
Therapy for speaking up is a process, and naming social and interpersonal injustices is also part of healing (Pederson, 2024). We should also, over time, be able to allow anger and deep feelings of injustice to be known in a cultural and societal context.
For women, patriarchal practices that are part of workplaces, their own homes and our court system are in particular harmful, albeit patriarchal norms also prevent boys and men from speaking up as they are asked to “toughen up” and “don’t be a crybaby”, which also ends up silencing men. Carol Gilligan describes how patriarchy hurts both women and men.
References
Pederson, L. (2024). Honouring resistance and building solidarity: feminism and narrative practice. Dulwich Center Publications.
