SPEAKER_00 0:18

I've been sitting on this episode for a couple weeks. Not because I didn't know what to say, but because I had too much to say and I wasn't sure how to say it without turning it into an hour-long rant. But here's the thing about not saying it. Silence has a cost too, and I think I've been the one paying it. I've been watching the news. I've been in my own life dealing with my own stuff, the specific fallout that comes when you decide to stop tolerating someone else's behavior and they don't take it well. I've been talking with other clinicians about the impossible standard that we're held to, being regulated, being present, be a resource for everyone around you, while also just being a human in real time, watching a world that is genuinely hard to watch right now. And I keep hearing the same thing in different versions from different people. Keep your opinions to yourself. Don't get political. You don't want to alienate anyone. Stay in your lane. This isn't the platform for that. And every time I hear one of those, I think about the women that I work with. The ones who have spent years being told exactly the same thing. Not about politics, but about their own lives, about their own pain, about their own needs. Keep the peace, don't make this worse. This isn't the time. You don't want to alienate him. And I have to ask, at what point does silence stop being self-protection and start being permission? At what point do we decide that the discomfort of speaking up is less harmful than the harm it continues when we don't? That is what this episode is about. And I'm not gonna be careful about it. Not today. Hi, I'm Lisa. This is Pattern Breakers Collective. Most of what I do on this show is focused on you, on your relationships, your patterns, your healing, your life. And we're gonna stay in that territory today because I don't think we can actually separate the personal from the political, the individual from the collective, the healing that happens in private from the world that is happening all around us while we try to do it. And today I want to talk about the cost of paying attention, about what it does to a person, especially a person who is already doing the hard work of recovering from relationships where their voice was minimized. To be in a world that is constantly telling them that their discomfort is inconvenient, that their outrage is too much, that their grief is too public, that the appropriate response to injustice is composure. I also want to talk about silence, what it costs, who pays that cost, and why I think the instruction to just keep your opinions to yourself is sometimes the same instruction that kept women in an abusive relationship for years. It's just wearing different clothes. And I want to say something directly to the men who are listening. I know you're here. And today I need something from you specifically. Not later, not when it's comfortable. Now. This is not gonna be a calm episode. You're welcome. Your healing doesn't happen in a bubble. You're trying to rebuild your sense of self, your self-trust, your capacity to set limits and hold them inside of a world that is simultaneously asking you to be quiet, to not rock the boat, to consider whether what you're feeling is actually appropriate, or whether you're being too sensitive, or whether this is really the time. I think that compounds something that's already hard because you know that instruction. You've heard it before, not about the news, about your own life, about your own marriage, about the specific things that were happening behind your closed door. Keep the peace. Don't make this worse. This isn't the time. Think about what you have to lose. Think about how this looks. Think about everyone else. The mechanism that silences women in abusive relationships and the mechanism that silences people in the face of collective injustice are not that different. Both say your discomfort is not worth the disruption. Both say the comfort of the person with more power matters more than the reality of the person with less. Both rely on the same thing, on people being willing to absorb things quietly rather than say out loud what they're actually seeing. And here's what I know about women who have finally started breaking their patterns. They get very, very good at recognizing that mechanism wherever it shows up. When someone tells you to keep your opinions to yourself about something that is genuinely wrong, what they're asking you to do is the same thing your abuser asked you to do. Prioritize their comfort over your reality. Protect the peace over the truth. Stay small so the situation stays manageable. I don't want to do that anymore, and I want to invite you to stop doing it too. The same training that taught you to absorb pain quietly in your relationship is the training that makes collective silence feel like the responsible choice. It isn't. It's the same mechanism, just a bigger stage. I was in a conversation with a group of other clinicians recently, and we brought up the thing that doesn't get talked about enough in helping professions. The expectation that we're supposed to be perpetually regulated, perpetually available, perpetually resourced for the people around us, while also just being people. People who watch the same news everyone else is watching, people who are dealing with things in our own lives, people who get to the end of the week and feel like we've been holding the weight for everyone else, and nobody asked us how we're doing. And I want to say something about that because I think it applies far beyond clinicians. There's a version of telling ourselves to just be strong for others that's healthy. It's what allows us to show up, to be present, to hold space. And then there's a version of us to be strong for others that is this own form of self-abandonment, where strength becomes a costume, where regulation becomes performance, where the expectation of your steadiness is used to justify everyone else's right to not deal with the thing that's making you unsteady. I am not okay with a lot of things happening in our world right now. I'm gonna say that plainly because I think it needs to be said. I am not okay with the Epstein Files. A law was passed, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, that was supposed to bring accountability. The DOJ released about three million pages and withheld up to about three million more. Representatives went to the House floor to read the names of powerful men whose identities were being protected. Survivors of Epstein's abuse stood at a microphone and said the release proved the government failed them over and over and over again. And the response from the people named in those files, the wealthy, the powerful, the well-connected men, has been almost across the board silence, legal maneuvering, waiting for the news cycle to move on. And it is attempting to move on. And I am not okay with that. I am not okay with what's happening in Gaza. I will say that clearly, regardless of what it costs me. The document and death toll as of this recording is over 73,000 people. Researchers estimate the real number when you include the deaths from famine, from disease, from displacement, from the destruction of an entire medical infrastructure to closer to 93,000. More than 21,000 of the confirmed dead are children. Whatever your politics, whatever your position on the conflict, whatever framework you use to make sense of it, 93,000 people, children. And I am supposed to have no opinion about that because it's complicated? No. No, thank you. The murder of that many human beings is not a political position. It is a moral one. And I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I am not okay with what has happened to Title IX on college campuses. One in five women is sexually assaulted during college. One in five. That is actually almost a joke because that is only what is reported, not what we actually know happens. The Department of Education stopped updating its public list of the Title IX investigations for months in 2025. When they came back online, 10 resolutions had been posted, half of them predating this administration. Meanwhile, the rules were rolled back to make it narrower, harder to report, harder to prosecute, easier for institutions to do the minimum and call it compliance. The message to every woman on a college campus right now is we made it harder for you to hold your attacker accountable. And we did it quietly in policy language so it wouldn't make the news. And I am also dealing with something in my own life. I want to finally name it because it belongs in this conversation. I am a graduate student. I have maintained a 4.0 GPA through more than eight years of school. I am a member of honor societies. I have dedicated several years of my life to this current institution, not just as a student, but as someone who has shown up fully and consistently and done the work. And when I spoke up about someone's inappropriate behavior, a man with higher external classifications, someone who means nothing to this institution beyond his title, my institution responded by prolonging my education, not because of anything related to my academic performance, but because a man made claims against me because he didn't like that I hurt his ego. Claims that arrived only after I named what he did. And my institution, the one I have given years to, decided that those claims deserved weight. His words unsubstantiated against my evidence and my experience and my record. I want to ask that question out loud because I think it deserves to be asked. What does it say about an institution when a man who has no real stake in it, no history, no investment, no relationship can make a claim, and that claim is enough to stall the education of a female student has given everything she has. What exactly are they protecting? Who exactly is being served? I'm not going to go into detail on everything because some of it is still in motion and some of it isn't mine alone to share, but I will say this. I know exactly what it is to be the woman who raised her hand, who named the thing, who provided the evidence, and then watched a system decide that her discomfort was less important than his defense. And then to be told, both explicitly and implicitly, to handle it professionally, to be patient, to not make it a thing. I have spent my entire career telling women that when a system asks you to stay quiet to protect the person who harmed you, that is not professionalism. That is the same mechanism, just wearing institutional clothing. I've made the decision to stop tolerating that. And that decision has had consequences. And those consequences are extremely painful. Even when the decision was right, even when I would make it again, even when I am sitting here recording this episode and feeling every bit of the cost. And what I've noticed sitting with all of that at the same time is that the personal and global are not separate experiences for me. They are related. They're all asking me the same question. How much are you willing to absorb quietly before you say something? How much is the maintenance of someone else's comfort worth? What do you owe the peace of people who are not bothered by things that should bother them? Those are not rhetorical questions. They're ones that I'm actively living. Being a helper does not mean being a container for everyone else's discomfort while you have nowhere to put your own. You're allowed to be affected. You're allowed to be unsteady. You're allowed to be human loudly, visibly, in real time, without it meaning that you failed at your job. Because I think it gets dressed up in a lot of different costumes, and I think it's worth recognizing them. Stay in your lane means the people most affected by something should be the least vocal about it. It positions the person with the most at stake as having the least authority to speak. Keep your opinions to yourself means your discomfort makes me uncomfortable, and my comfort is the priority here. This isn't the platform for that. Means I have decided that the platform you have built is not appropriate for you to be fully human on it. You don't want to alienate anyone. Means protect the people who would leave you if you told the truth at the expense of the people who need you to tell it. None of those instructions are neutral. Every single one of them is doing something specific. They are maintaining a comfort that is built on someone else's silence, and they are asking you to volunteer for that silence, cheerfully, in the name of professionalism or reach or brand or keeping the peace. I have heard versions of these instructions my whole life, and every woman in this community has too. Maybe not about the news, but about her own experience, her own pain, her own marriage, her own body, her own sense of what was happening. Are you sure that's what happened? That's the gaslit version of stay in your lane. You don't want to make this worse. That's the relationship version of you don't want to alienate anyone. Well, think about how this looks. That's the domestic version of this isn't the platform for that. The mechanism is the same. The request is the same. Stay quiet, absorb it, don't make this difficult. Your reality is less important than my comfort. And pattern breaking, the whole premise of this show is about learning to say, no, not like that, not anymore. Pattern breaking in your personal life and pattern breaking out in the world are the same act. They require the same muscle, the muscle that says, I see what's happening. I am not gonna pretend that I don't. And I'm gonna say something, even if it costs me something, because the alternative is becoming someone who looks away, and I cannot be that person. Every time you were told to keep the peace in your relationship, you were being asked to protect someone else's comfort at the expense of your own reality. The instruction to just stay quiet about injustice is the same request, different scale, same mechanism, same cost. Standing up does have a cost. That doesn't mean that it was wrong. And I want to spend some time here because I think this is one of the most important things I can say today. When you decide to stop tolerating something in your relationship, in your workplace, in your family, in the world that you participate in, there are consequences, sometimes really significant ones. And those consequences can make you doubt yourself. They can make you wonder whether the stand was worth it, whether you read the situation correctly, whether a smarter version of you would have found a way to say the same thing without paying as high a price. I want to say something about that self-doubt because I have really been feeling it personally lately. Self-doubt after taking a stand is not evidence that the stand was wrong. It is evidence that that stand caught something, and those are not the same thing. When you finally tell the truth about what's been happening in your relationship, there are consequences. He doesn't take it well. The family system responds, people take sides, things you built together become contested. That fallout is painful, and the pain of it can feel like a signal that you shouldn't have said anything. Like maybe the cost proves the choice was a mistake. It doesn't. The cause proves the thing was real, that it mattered, that the silence was actually doing something. It was keeping a version of peace that depended on your willingness to absorb the reality of the situation alone. The same thing is true at a larger scale. When people speak up about injustice, when they name what they're seeing, refuse to normalize it, insist on its reality, even when they're being told they're too much, too political, too loud, there are consequences. Relationships get complicated, opportunities close, people who are comfortable with your silence become real uncomfortable with your voice. That discomfort is not proof that you were wrong. It is proof that the silence was serving a purpose for someone, and that someone was not you. I think about this so much in the context of the women this show exists for, because so many of them have finally done the thing, finally said the thing, finally left, finally told the truth, and are now living in the consequences. And the consequences are hard enough that some of them are questioning whether they should have, whether the peace was actually better, whether staying quiet was actually a reasonable trade. And I want to say this directly. Not because being right makes the consequences hurt less, of course they still hurt, but because the alternative was continuing to pay a price no one was acknowledging, continuing to absorb something that was damaging you, continuing to protect someone else's comfort at the expense of your own reality. That is not a reasonable trade. No matter how much the aftermath makes it feel like it might have been. The cost of speaking up is not evidence that speaking up was wrong. It is evidence that the silence was doing something, that it was serving someone, and that someone was not you. The pain in the aftermath is real. It is not a verdict on whether you should have stayed quiet. So I said at the beginning that I wanted to say something specific to the men who are listening, and I meant it. So here it is. The abuse that happens in relationships, the course of control, the emotional manipulation, the systematic erosion of another person's experience of self and reality does not only happen because abusive people exist. It continues because the people around it stay quiet, because his friends don't say anything, because his family makes excuses, because his colleagues don't ask hard questions, because the culture around him treats his behavior as a private matter, not their business, as something that happens between couples and shouldn't be interfered with. And because the women in his life, mothers, sisters, friends, have also been trained to keep the peace, to not rock the boat, to give him the benefit of the doubt. To assume that if something is wrong, must be complicated. This is what I need men to understand. Your silence is not neutral. It's not staying out of it. It is a boat. It is a vote for the way things are. And the way things are is not acceptable. I'm not asking you to become someone who lectures other men in every social situation. I'm not asking you to go looking for conflict. I'm asking you to stop performing the same kind of silence that we've spent the entire season of this podcast talking about women unlearning. Because the silence they're unlearning, the keep the peace, the don't make it worse, the this is none of my business silence, you're doing it too. And you have more access to the spaces where it needs to be broken. When you hear a man talking about his partner in a way that makes you uncomfortable, say something. Not a lecture, not a speech, just hey, that doesn't sit right with me. Six words. You can do six words. When you see a colleague, a friend, a family member treating their partner in a way that makes you cryingly think, hmm, this doesn't really look healthy. You don't have to become their therapist, but you can stop pretending that you didn't notice. You can ask a question, you can make space for the conversation, you can be the person in his life who doesn't just go along with it. And when you look at what's happening in the world, at the institutional protection of powerful men, at the systems that consistently fail women and children, and anyone who isn't in a position of most power, I need you to feel that. Not as someone else's problem, as something that's happening in a world that you participate in. A world that is partly this way because good men have decided that staying quiet is the same as being uninvolved. It is Staying quiet is a choice. And right now, it's the wrong one. Women have been doing the work of pattern breaking. They've been doing it in their own personal lives and their relationships and how they raise children and how they show up in the world. And they have been doing it largely alone or with each other. That changes when men decide it changes. Not because women need rescuing, they don't. But because the culture that allows this exists in spaces where women often have less power. Locker rooms, boardrooms, sports teams, religious communities, educational institutions, family systems where men's authority is assumed. Those spaces need men who have decided that tolerating this is no longer something they're willing to do. That is the ask. It is specific, it's achievable, and it is long, long overdue. Your silence is not neutrality. It is a vote for the status quo. And the status quo is hurting people that you know, people that you love, people whose names you would know if anyone in their life had decided to stop looking away. Be that person instead. Collective silence is just abuse at scale. The mechanisms that allow one person to harm another inside of a relationship, the culture of not naming it, the protection of the person with more power, the pressure on the person being harmed to manage how their pain lands on everyone else, those exact same mechanisms operate in institutions, in governments, in sports organizations, in religious structures, in the legal system, in media, in the way stories get told and whose stories get treated as important. When a young black man dies and the conversation is more about liability than about his life, that is the institutional version of let's not make this a bigger deal than it is. When people in positions of power continue to cause harm because the people around them have decided that their comfort is worth more than accountability, that is the societal version of he's a good man, he just has some issues. When the instruction to stay quiet comes with a threat, spoken or unspoken, that speaking will cost you something, that is coercion, whether it happens in a marriage or in a culture. I'm not saying that all suffering is the same. It isn't. The specific experience of intimate partner violence, the specific experience of racial violence, the specific experience of communities living through war, those are not interchangeable, and I won't pretend that they are. What I'm saying is that the mechanism that allows harm to continue in each of those contexts has something in common. Someone has to stay quiet. Someone has to decide that rocking the boat is worse than what the boat is floating on. Someone has to absorb the cost of status quo so that the people benefiting from it don't have to feel it. And pattern breaking at every scale begins when people refuse to be that someone. That is what we are doing in our personal lives. And it is what we need to be doing in the world. And those two things are connected. They are the same act, made at different sizes. And the muscle you build doing one makes you more capable of doing the other. So I want to come back to something I said at the beginning. I have been very out of sorts, doubting myself, caring a lot. And I almost didn't record this episode. Not because I didn't know what to say, because saying it is uncomfortable. Because some of what I'm saying will make some people in this community uncomfortable. Because there will be a lot of people who think this isn't the right platform for this conversation. And then I thought about the women who this show is for, who spent years being told they were too much, too emotional, too political, too outspoken, too whatever. Women who were taught that the appropriate response to discomfort, to their own and everyone else's, was to manage it, to reduce it, to make themselves smaller so the situation could stay more comfortable for everyone else. And I thought that I cannot ask them to stop doing that while I sit here doing it to myself. So I'm gonna say this. I am not okay right now. I am doing the work, my own work, and this work from inside a season that is genuinely, truly hard. I am carrying things in my personal life. I am watching things in a world that are genuinely painful, and I am not regulated about all of it. I am trained as an advocate and a therapist and a relationship coach and a human being and a woman, and all of those things are running simultaneously, and some of them are running in direct conflict with each other, and that is not a failure of professionalism. That is just what it looks like to be a person who pays attention. Paying attention has a weight, and you're allowed to feel that weight, you're allowed to be moved by what's happening in your own life and in the world. You're allowed to be angry, you're allowed to be sad, you're allowed to be unsteady. None of that means that you're doing it wrong. In fact, I'd be a lot more worried about a person who is watching what's happening right now and feeling nothing, who is perfectly regulated and undisturbed, who had found a way to make peace with all of it. Some things should disturb you, some things should make it hard to sleep some nights, some things should make you want to say something even when you've been told not to. That's not instability, that's your conscious working exactly as it should. You're allowed to be unsteady and still standing. You're allowed to be uncertain and still speaking. You're allowed to not have it all figured out and still refuse to go along with something that is wrong. That's what courage actually looks like, by the way. Not certainty, not perfect composure, not knowing all the answers, just I can see something is wrong and I'm gonna say so even though I'm scared, even though it might cost something, even though I have not figured out how to fix it at all. That is enough. It is more than enough. It is exactly what this moment requires. You are allowed to be undone by what you're seeing and still be the person who names it. You are allowed to be in the middle of your own hard season and still care about what's happening to other people. You are allowed to be human, fully, messily, loudly human while also being someone who shows up. Those things do not contradict each other. They are the same thing. It looks like naming what you see, even when you've been told it's not your place, even when the people around you have decided to look away, even when speaking up is going to cost you something that you'd rather not lose. It looks like refusing to protect comfortable silence in your family, in your friendships, in your workplace, in whatever community that you're part of. It looks like deciding that your discomfort with injustice matters more than your fear of being the person who named it. It looks like standing with other women. Not because we all think the same things, not because we all have the same politics, not because our experiences are identical, but because we understand something together that we cannot unknow. We understand what it costs to stay quiet. We understand what it does to a person to absorb things indefinitely. We understand the specific damage of being told that your reality is less important than someone else's comfort. And we have decided, many of us at great personal cost, that we're not doing that anymore. That solidarity is not weakness. It's not division. It is the specific kind of power that forms when people who have been isolated by the same mechanisms finally see each other and refuse to go back to being alone. And to the men who are here, and I genuinely mean this as an invitation, not an accusation, you have a role in this. Not as saviors, not as the primary voice, but as people who have access to spaces and conversation where this needs to be said and who have been choosing up until right now to be quiet in them. That choice is available to you again today. I am asking you to make a different one. Not for us, for your daughters, for your sisters, for the women in your life who have been carrying things along for a very long time while the people around them found ways not to notice. For the communities whose pain is on the news cycle right now and whose names deserve to be held with more weight than a news cycle. And for yourself, because the capacity to look away from something that is wrong, to train yourself to not be disturbed by things that should disturb you, that capacity has a cost too. It costs something in your character, something in your sense of who you are. Something that, once spent, is genuinely hard to recover. Don't spend it on keeping comfortable what does not deserve to be kept comfortable. Some things are supposed to be hard to hold. That's not a sign that you're doing it wrong. That is how you know they matter. Share this episode not just with the women you know who are doing the personal work, but the people in your life who are tired and unsteady and still showing up. Who are watching the news and feeling something that they don't know what to do with, who have been told to keep their opinions to themselves one too many times and are starting to wonder why they keep doing that. Tell them there's a name for what they're feeling. Tell them their weight is real. Tell them being disturbed by what is disturbing is not a malfunction. And tell them they're not alone because they're not. If you've been finding value in this podcast and if you're in a position to support it, the link to do so is in the show notes. This show is free and it's going to stay free because the women who need it most often can't pay for it. But every contribution makes it possible to keep going. Leave a review if you haven't. It helps more people find this space. And if you're ready to do this work for real, the personal pattern work and community with support, Pattern Breakers Collective is there. All of the details are in my social support, Patternbreakers Collective.com. Until next time, stay on steady if you need to. But stay standing anyway, and keep breaking patterns that were never yours to carry, including the one that told you that your silence was the responsible choice.