Finding your voice in unequal relationships

Are things good in your relationship because you’re silent about your feelings?

Here are some phrases, and l wonder if you choose to be in relationships where these are often said to you? They usually begin with, You are:

• "Too sensitive"
• "Too emotional"
• "Always wanting to talk about feelings"

Sound familiar? Quite a lot of the time, you are caught “between a rock and a hard place” because there is never a good time to talk about your feelings. If you try when things are good, then you are spoiling things.

If you try when things are bad, then you are either causing a row and accused of harbouring resentment or being the problem and the cause for their lack of mutual communication. You’re perpetually in a kind of no man’s land emotionally.

Are you silenced in your relationship?

Ironically, though, when there is any kind of upset for them or with them, you are there, all ears, trying to make things better for them. Of course you are. But the resentment is racking up. And the suppression feels like you are carrying a bag of rocks on your back.

So when things are good, they actually really aren’t good for you.

Why? Because you’re silenced by the fear that being authentic, being yourself and expecting mutuality and having your feelings cared about isn’t happening, and worse still, you are kind of okaying it!

If any of this sounds like what is going on for you, then this is what is going on...

Why silence feels familiar

Things aren’t equal. This sounds kind of obvious, but there is so much around this. Firstly, if you unpack this either through listening and reading about one-sided relationships or by being in therapy, then you will discover that it is familiar. 

There will have been a need to be silent. The status quo of suppression for continuum and the ditching of your own authenticity for safety and love will be how you survived in your childhood. Please let me say, though, this does not mean your parents didn’t love you; it might have had more to do with the fact that their own situation, for a myriad of reasons, took a toll on their focus and time. However, if it happened, it happened, and the early survival alteration you had to instinctively make by being good, or quiet, or silent took hold, as when we grow up, our romantic relationships and friendships too replace those of our parents in their dynamics.

The cost of self-betrayal

So instead of the self-betrayal that is involved, and yes, it is exactly that, via the conduit of your compliance through your silence. Instead of the “breaking” this causes you internally, to awaken through awareness. When this happens, you will become steadily uncomfortable with the space you have allowed yourself to be placed in.

Reclaiming your voice: The benefits of equality in relationships

You matter. Your comfort matters. Your feelings matter. Your needs matter. 

With this incremental change through awareness, your own narrative is rewritten. 

Change can feel pretty weird and unnatural at first, but small changes that are made accumulate over time, and before you know it, you change with them, and the lowered unequal standards that you felt were the norm and all you deserved are no more. The normalisation of what has probably in all truth never worked well for you really does stop; this happens gradually, but in a surprisingly short time can be really felt. 

You reclaim your voice. 

Yes, it is still there, you know, despite having been silent all these years, and your gut has always been its barometer. Others quickly realise where you stand if you stand there, and where they stand with you because of that.

What follows is:

• less resentment
• better emotional and physical health
• a wonderful sense of reclamation 
• freedom
• better quality relationships with better quality people 
• equality. 

There are some natural flower remedies that can also be of great help.

The Bach flower remedies centuary, cerato, larch and willow can greatly help with moving away from the inner narrative that can perpetuate this problem.

• Centuary - allows us to say what we really think and feel.
• Cerato - awakens our inner voice and soul connection.
• Larch - bolsters our self-confidence.
• Willow - lowers feelings of built-up resentment.

There is also more helpful information about these flower remedies on my profile on the Therapy Directory.

I stand in my own truth, my voice matters, and I speak my truth with confidence and grace.