Authentic Silence, Authentic Voice

Learning to love out loud

How do you move from authentic silence to authentic voice?

For years as a therapist, I held space for my clients’ beliefs and worldviews without ever sharing my own.

My favorite era of my work as a trauma therapist came when I shifted my entire caseload to a team of content moderators, the people who spend their days reviewing the worst of what the internet produces so the rest of us don’t have to see it. I’ve written elsewhere about what that experience taught me about the human-animal bond, and about how that would eventually lead me to veterinary social work. But there’s another thread from those years I haven’t written about yet. It’s another reason I cherish that time so deeply; it’s about how my clients exposed me to the myriad global beliefs that exist in our world, all of them brought into my office. Shared from the couch. Taken in from the therapist’s chair.

Before that, I had grown up Catholic, went through a long period of falling away from God, then a period of finding Him again. I had gone to seminary. I was strong in my faith. I had worked with clients of many backgrounds, but mostly with Christians.

Then suddenly I was working with pagans and witches and Muslims and Buddhists. With nihilists and refugees and hidden high-functioning addicts. With political activists, members and allies of the LGBTQIA+ community, and so much more. And I loved every second of it. My clients brought me content from cultures and contexts all over the globe both from their own lived experiences and from what they were viewing for work, much of which the public will never see. And in so many of our sessions we were discussing things that stood in direct opposition to what I believed, though most of my clients didn’t know that at the time. I held space when clients were angry. When they used offensive language. When they criticized or mocked the very things that made me who I am.

And they loved me. The person they knew me to be — they loved her, and were deeply grateful for her. None of that was inauthentic. I was authentic in everything I said. And when moments came where full authenticity would have meant harm to them or imposing my own beliefs onto them, I chose instead to be authentically silent. To hold them — not physically, of course, but emotionally and spiritually and genuinely — in that room and in my heart.

Because I loved them too. Genuinely and authentically. No matter how differently we saw the world. No matter what words they chose to describe a belief or a value I held dear, I held them.

And I’m not saying that was always easy. There were times it hurt to be called names because of identities I held that they disliked, or to feel judged and misunderstood. But they had also been hurt by those things and I didn’t love them because of any one of their particular views, and I couldn’t possibly hate them for any one of their particular views either. I loved them because of who they were, whole and complete, which included the fear, grief, or anger that came with their lived experiences, even the ones that stood against mine. I have long believed that underneath our differences, we are more alike and have more shared values and commonality, than anything else. It’s what allowed me to stay present with them and not take anything that was happening in that space too personally, so that I could stay close to them rather than losing them. I would sit, co-regulate, witness, and stay true, even if that was truth expressed in authentic silence.

Sometimes they would ask directly about my beliefs. If it was appropriate, if I was invited in, I would share. But that was rare, and when done, any personal disclosure always happened with the focus returning to them, and always with the understanding that the space was never about anyone believing what I believed.

But now my work is leaving the therapy room. Now my work is about having a voice for those who don’t. For animals as well as for people who work to save and care for them in so many hidden spaces and systems in our society. And I am not quite sure how to speak authentically.

How do you move from authentic silence to authentic voice?

I’ve been turning this over for a while. I am far from having all the answers, though my antenna is up and I am downloading all the information that I can about it.

I have ideas, and resources, and when I scan my memory, I also have stories and moments to pull from. Where voice worked, even in the presence of tension and disagreement. It doesn’t always go that way. It hasn’t always gone that way for me. But it can. I know that authentic voice can work even if disagreement remains. What I am not sure of yet, is how that authentic voice shows up in the space I am more fully entering. The animals don’t have a voice at this table, or anywhere in this conversation, and silence here is not the same as the silence I practiced before.

I’m not trying to hold authentic silence for them, because if I did, neither of us would be speaking, and everything that needs to be said would go unheard.

With clients it was me and them. They spoke, I listened and witnessed. With animals, I’m the one that needs to try to speak, to be listened to and witnessed as a stand-in for them. But there isn’t much therapeutic silence going on in our society. To speak — really speak, about what we do to animals — means being met with aggression, ridicule, and attack from people who often haven’t thought carefully about why the subject makes them so angry.

Because of this for years, I’ve tried to show up with what I know, with authentic silence, trying to hear from the opposition and holding it quietly when countless conversations have attacked the very things I believe in, but this time breaking my heart more deeply because it is not just my identity on the line, but their lives, the lives of so many innocent animals.

That tactic isn’t working in this new space. So I need to learn now, how to hold someone in that same place of safety, and trust, and rapport, and non-betrayal that my client felt but with strangers and with voice.

I am in control of how I speak my words. I cannot control how they are received. I don’t have it figured out yet, and would love to learn from others who have ideas.

What I’m learning so far is that authentic voice is not nearly as welcome as authentic silence.

But silence has to become voice when the living beings you’re holding space for are not the only ones in the room. We have moved from dyadic conversation to mediation. When there are two parties opposed, silence for either, however well-intentioned, leaves someone unheld.

So maybe the move from silence to voice isn’t really about learning to speak. Maybe it’s about learning a new way to take on suffering. A new willingness to be misunderstood and ridiculed and to receive blows. The same way I once held space for grief, or shame, or rage in the therapy room. Rage that was often aimed at me, at my identity, at my values. Rage that needed a place to land. So I let it.

In therapy, silence allowed the hurting soul to be heard and held; it was silence that carried the blows and the healing. In animal advocacy, voice is what will allow the hurting souls to be heard and held; it will be through my voice that I carry the blow and the healing, while still, somehow, not leaving the voiceless unheld.