There are things we carry quietly for a long time.
Not because we don’t want help.
Not because we don’t know something was wrong.
But because we didn’t have the words, the safety, or the permission to speak when it first happened.
For me, that silence began in childhood.
What happened to me didn’t come with language. It came with confusion, shame, and a deep instinct to keep going as if nothing had happened. Only a few people knew. Even fewer understood. And for decades, I lived with the belief that staying quiet was somehow safer than telling the truth.
It wasn’t until I was forty-three years old that I finally told my parents what had started when I was seven.
Saying it out loud didn’t erase the past.
But it changed my relationship to it.
What I learned — slowly, and sometimes painfully — is that when we talk about what happened to us, something shifts. Not because the story becomes easy, but because it becomes shared. The weight stops living only inside our bodies. The shame begins to loosen its grip.
Speaking doesn’t make us weak.
It makes us less alone.
That’s why this episode with Richard mattered to me so much.
Richard’s story is different from mine, but the thread is familiar. Childhood trauma. Silence. Coping through addiction. Years of survival before understanding what the body was still holding onto. His work — especially the way he separates the younger self from the adult self — offers one more way of understanding how healing can happen without reliving everything all over again.
His method won’t be for everyone. No single approach ever is.
But for someone who is struggling — someone who feels stuck in a younger version of themselves without knowing why — it might be a doorway. A pause. A place to breathe for the first time in a long while.
Healing doesn’t come from pretending nothing happened.
It comes from acknowledging that something did — and that it wasn’t our fault.
When we speak, when we listen, when we let ourselves be witnessed, we begin to understand that what happened to us does not define who we are.
It’s simply part of the story.
And sometimes, telling the story — even quietly, even imperfectly — is how healing begins.
Your healing podcast host,
Heather
