The Stories We Lock Up: What Silence Does to Your Body

For years, I walked around with pain I could not fully explain. For Black women, trauma healing often begins not with a diagnosis but with finally being allowed to speak the thing that has been sitting in the body for years. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in 2006. Chronic muscle pain, fatigue, the kind of ache that lives in your body like a resident. Doctors named it. Nobody told me what was underneath it.

It was only later, after years of therapy and reading and sitting with things I had spent a long time trying not to feel, that I understood something that changed the way I think about health, about silence, and about what trauma actually does when it has nowhere to go.

The stories we don’t tell stay in the body. They do not disappear because we decide not to speak about them. They go somewhere into the shoulders, the neck, the gut, the jaw. They show up as symptoms that medicine treats without ever asking what they are made of.

I had a conversation with Breanna Chanelle Phillip, a registered social worker and psychotherapist who works with Black individuals, families, and communities in Canada, that brought all of this into sharp focus. Breanna said something I have not been able to stop thinking about. We talk so much about how central storytelling is to our cultures. And yet we lock up so many of our stories.

“Storytelling is such an important part of our cultures. And yet we lock up so many of our stories.”

 

What We Were Taught to Carry Quietly

Breanna works primarily with Black youth and families, and she named something plainly that most people only feel around the edges: we normalize things in our community that are not normal. Emotional abuse. Sexual abuse. Domestic violence. Spiritual abuse. She said she cannot think of things we do not normalize that are traumatic.

This is not a criticism. It is a diagnosis. And Breanna rooted it historically, which is where the real understanding lives. She said that during colonization and slavery, Black people were called insane for wanting to be free. Unwellness was made our norm. Systems worked deliberately to make it so.

That history does not stay in the past. It moves forward through generations in the form of silence. In the idea that you should just be happy you have a roof over your head and food on the table. In the parent who knew something was wrong with their child but was too ashamed to name it. In the woman who did not tell anyone about her abuse because she did not want to burden the people she loved.

Breanna shared something personal here. She is a sexual trauma survivor herself. When she was ready to tell her mother, she held back; her mother’s birthday was coming, and her mother had just started a new course. She did not want to knock her off course. She swallowed it. She protected everyone else. And the story stayed inside her.

 

When the Body Speaks What the Mouth Cannot

Breanna described a client she was working with who kept saying the same thing in sessions: I always feel like I am choking. Breanna said, simply: that is because you are.

Not physically. Not medically. But internally. The woman had stories in her throat that had never been spoken. Things she had carried for years without anyone asking her to put them down.

This is what Breanna means when she talks about storytelling as a healing tool. It is not therapy-speak. It is something grounded and physical. When you do not speak things, they do not evaporate. They settle. They compress. They find expression in the body in ways that look like illness and feel like weakness and get diagnosed as conditions that have nothing to do with what actually happened.

Bessel van der Kolk writes about this in The Body Keeps the Score, a book that Breanna recommends and that I have returned to more times than I can count. My Grandmother’s Hands, by Resmaa Menakem, named something similar: that racial trauma lives in our bodies, passed down not just through story but through flesh.

“When you do not speak things, they do not evaporate. They settle. They compress. They find expression in the body in ways that look like illness and feel like weakness.”

What I understand now, that I did not understand when I was first diagnosed with fibromyalgia, is that the body is not betraying you when it hurts in ways that medicine cannot fully explain. It is telling you something that you have not yet been given the language or the safety to say out loud.

 

The Contradiction at the Heart of Our Silence

Storytelling cultures are not immune to silence. In fact, there is a specific contradiction that Breanna named that I think about often.

Our cultures,  Caribbean cultures, African diaspora cultures have always valued story. Oral tradition. The griot. The gathering. The intergenerational transmission of memory through telling. And yet so many of us carry stories that have never been spoken to a single person. Stories about abuse. About what happened in the house. About what a man did. About what a family member watched and did not stop.

One of Breanna’s grandmothers told her about her sexual abuse story the year before we recorded the podcast episode. She had only ever told one other person. She had carried that story her entire life. In her body. In her silence. In the way she moved through the world without anyone knowing what she was holding.

This is what normalization does. It does not just make things seem acceptable. It makes them unspeakable. And unspeakable things have nowhere to go.

 

What Changes When Someone Finally Hears You

I want to share something from my own life here, because Breanna’s work made me think about it differently.

I have a family member who experienced abuse. For years, people around her minimized what happened. Changed the story. Made it smaller than it was. She grew up and struggled. Depression. Mental health challenges that nobody fully named or held properly.

Then she told her story publicly. My father came from Jamaica to Canada, sat in my living room, and played the video for me and my eldest child. We watched it together, and we cried. We called her immediately. We went to her, not just to apologize, but to witness. To say: we see you. This was real. We are sorry no one protected you.

I cannot say with certainty that our response is why she is doing better now. But I watched a shift happen in her. In her energy, her personality, her relationship to her own life. Something changed when she finally had people around her who were not asking her to carry her story alone.

Breanna said it directly: what is more painful than the actual incident is telling the incident and then feeling like you are not supported. The second wound the one that comes from disclosure met with dismissal is often what keeps people silent the next time. And the time after that.

 

Why This Is a Leadership Conversation

I want to be clear about why I am writing this on a leadership blog and not just a personal healing blog.

Many of the women I work with are high achievers. They are managing teams, running businesses, raising children, and leading in spaces that were not built for them. They are also, in many cases, carrying stories that have never been told. Experiences that happened before the leadership title. Before the degrees. Before anyone was watching.

Breanna made the point that when you are the first in your family to achieve certain things, everyone assumes you are okay. The expectation of competence becomes a barrier to expressing need. If I have needs, it feels like I do not know what I am doing. So you manage the image. You hold the story. You carry it in your body, and you call it something else.

You can do the right thing for the wrong reasons for a long time before it starts to feel hollow. Breanna said this about her own path: she was doing work she was called to, but the why was off. She was leading from the pressure of other people’s praise rather than from her own truth.

Healing the silence is not separate from how you lead. It is the foundation of it. The woman who has told the truth about what happened to her to herself, to a therapist, to someone who was safe enough to receive it leads differently than the woman who is still managing what she is allowed to show.

I have shared many times publicly that my journey with all kinds of intense therapy has made me a better leader. Being vulnerable about my past trauma and sharing my story openly in my books, podcast and in spaces where I am wearing the Executive coach title has strengthened my leadership. It’s made my work more meaningful and impactful.

“You can do the right thing for the wrong reasons for a long time before it starts to feel hollow.”

 

What Black Women Trauma Healing Actually Looks Like

Breanna’s advice to a Black woman who is considering therapy and is not sure if it is for her was direct: she said she understands why Black people think therapy is not for them. The way it has been shown has not included us. But things are shifting. She said: you belong here. You deserve to heal. It is your birthright.

The story you have been carrying the one you have not told because of the birthday coming up, because of what it might do to your mother, because of what people will say, because you do not want to burden anyone that story does not belong in your body.

It belongs somewhere it can breathe.

This post was expanded from my conversation with Breanna Chanelle Phillip on the H.E.A.L. Her Podcast, Episode 260. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are not already subscribed to the newsletter, join us below.