The Voice That Protects, and the Voice That Invites

How emotional suppression, performance, and mimicked safety keep us from what we truly long for

I. The Personal Landscape

I grew up surrounded by anger. But not the clean kind.

Not the “this hurt me and I need to say it” kind.

It was weaponized. Directed outward. Used like a tool—sharp, chaotic, loud.

Both of my parents wielded anger, differently but persistently. And something in me recoiled. It felt unsafe. Ugly. I decided—without ever consciously deciding—that I wouldn’t be like them. I wouldn’t raise my voice or cross a line. I would suppress my own rage and aim it inward instead.

Migraines.

An ovarian tumor.

Self-blame disguised as emotional control.

It felt like the kinder road to take.

But what I didn’t know then is that turning anger inward isn’t peace—it’s self-erasure. And eventually, the body keeps the score.

I spent years in therapy cataloging all the ways my parents had failed me. But somewhere along the way, I began to see the deeper thread:

How could they have been different?

They, too, were raised without attunement. They were children who never got to be felt, seen, or safely expressed. Their neglect was not personal—it was generational. Inherited. Unexamined.

So I adapted. I learned to self-edit.

To show only the versions of me that wouldn’t be “too much.”

Because that’s the message I got—especially from my mother.

You’re too emotional.

Too intense.

Too loud.

Too much.

And if I wasn’t polished, curated, poised… then maybe I was broken.

I became brilliant at performance.

But I was starving for presence.

The most painful part wasn’t that I wasn’t loved.

It was that I was near—but never felt.

That’s what emotional neglect does.

It doesn’t scream.

It doesn’t bruise.

It just leaves you absent from your own experience.

And so began a lifetime of fawning.

Worrying about how I was being perceived.

Bracing for impact.

Smiling through collapse.

Frozen—literally and figuratively.

I thought I was going through menopause when my body finally began to heat up again. But it wasn’t menopause.

It was thawing.

It was the return of sensation after decades of dissociation.

It wasn’t until I read The Body Keeps the Score that I understood:

I wasn’t broken.

I wasn’t too much.

My body loved me.

It had been protecting me. Because if I had felt more back then, I would have collapsed.

II. The Cultural Mirror

We are hardwired for connection.

But more often than not, we make decisions that set us up for disconnection—because we were never taught how to hold space for what is.

We learn what’s safe not from being loved in theory, but from being neared in practice.

Attuned to.

Felt in real time.

Mirrored back to ourselves with clarity and care.

Most of us never got that.

Instead, we were handed performance scripts. We learned to mimic the emotional postures that earned approval.

Smile. Be agreeable. Don’t be too loud. Don’t be too much.

Say what others can accept—not what you actually feel.

This is what Rene Girard called mimetic desire—the idea that we learn what to want by observing what others value.

But it goes deeper than that.

We don’t just imitate desire.

We imitate safety.

We imitate who we think we need to be in order to belong.

That’s why so many people are living lives they don’t feel connected to.

They’ve built identities not around their truth, but around what was rewarded, or tolerated.

And this fragmentation isn’t just personal—it’s cultural.

In our current emotional landscape, we are split:

• Some are taught to feel freely, to express and emote and process.

• Others are taught to mock feeling, to control, suppress, and push through.

Liberals, as a broad generalization, are seen as emotionally fluent—but also overly sensitive, fragile, indulgent.

Conservatives often pride themselves on grit, stoicism, self-discipline—but are accused of emotional repression, brittleness, and projection.

One side accuses the other of feeling too much.

The other accuses the first of not feeling at all.

But the truth is—they’re both protecting something.

Both are managing unprocessed emotion.

One through expression that sometimes lacks ground.

The other through composure that sometimes lacks heart.

And race and culture deepen this complexity.

White women are often trained in emotional performance—likability, composure, control.

Black women are handed endurance, strength, and a kind of near-mythic resilience—expected to hold the world together without asking for too much.

Latina women are often assigned roles of emotional passion and caretaking, praised for fire or sacrifice, but rarely offered space for nuance, rest, or contradiction.

Asian women are stereotyped into quiet competence—expected to be emotionally self-contained, deferential, and strong in silence.

Middle Eastern women often grow up navigating strict expectations of modesty, obedience, and family loyalty, where emotional suppression is tied not just to gender, but to cultural honor—and any expression of vulnerability can be mistaken for shame.

Each of these memetic blueprints reinforces a kind of emotional invisibility.

Each asks something different—but denies the same thing:

The right to be felt fully.

To fall apart safely.

To be complex without penalty.

And underneath all of it? No nervous system regulation safety net.

No real space to fall apart.

No collective model for what it means to feel deeply and still be held.

This is the legacy of emotional neglect—not just in families, but in culture.

We know how to mimic connection.

We don’t know how to embody it.

III. The Invitation

So where do we go from here?

If our nervous systems have spent a lifetime rehearsing safety instead of feeling it…

If our identities have been curated for approval, not chosen in authenticity…

If the voice that protects us has become louder than the one that could invite us back into ourselves…

Then the invitation is not to abandon that protective voice.

It’s to listen to it.

To ask it what it’s afraid of.

To thank it for keeping us safe.

And then… to offer it something new.

Because underneath every performance is a part of us that is still hoping to be seen—not just as polished or perfect, but as whole.

The voice that protects says: “Don’t say too much. Don’t need too much. Don’t show too much.”

The voice that invites says:

“What if the thing you’re most afraid to reveal is the key to being fully met?”

The voice that protects braces.

The voice that invites breathes.

And this shift isn’t conceptual.

It’s somatic.

It’s nervous system literacy.

It’s learning to feel what’s real without collapsing.

To choose presence over performance.

To welcome contradictions.

To speak even when the voice shakes.

To ask:

What am I protecting right now?

What would I invite in if I weren’t so afraid of being misseen?

What does safety feel like—not just look like?

I know this intimately.

There was a part of me that gripped—white-knuckled everything.

Because I truly believed that if I let go, I would lose everything I’d worked for.

I would collapse.

I would have to start over from square one.

And life already felt so overwhelming…

The idea of starting over was more than I could bear.

But letting go isn’t collapsing.

It’s learning to feel what’s real—without unraveling.

It’s saying:

“I don’t have to hold myself together in ways that keep me apart from myself.”

Because real safety doesn’t come from gripping.

It comes from presence.

From choosing to feel what’s real—without collapsing, without performing.

It comes from remembering that the voice that protects once saved you…

But the voice that invites?

That’s the one that will bring you home.