One of the hardest things to hear from others is “I don’t want to hear that”
As a child, when your parents won’t hear your sadness or your wishes. When you run home, heart bursting with pride and are told not to boast, it’s not lady-like. Heaven forbid you become a tall poppy.
As an adult, when your kids, partner or parents repeat that pattern. When your boss doesn’t really listen to you and meet your needs. When your friends expect 300 hours of couch time, free of charge (and while you’re at it, can you help move the couch and everything else) but then they throw it back in your face. And they run a mile the minute you need a friendly ear.
For entrepreneurs and authors, we fear it more than any. After all, we deeply want to make an impact and create income from those very stories. We ask ourselves over and over, what if my audience “don’t want to hear it…?”
After all, how many times have we already heard that old chestnut? Felt its unspoken threads through actions?
In my 20s, I waited three months for a referral to a therapist. In our first session I started to open up about the fact that there was an iceberg or complex, overlapping trauma’s in my childhood and teens, when she said…
“Stop. I’m concerned you are about to share things I don’t want to hear. I have a family at home and I like to be able to walk out of here at 5pm without taking baggage home at the end of the day.”
I felt so cut down. So much shame. So small. So horrible, inside about out. That my story was so unwanted – I was so unwanted.
I had to wait to be referred again. This time I was referred to the top psychiatrist in central Scotland. I didn’t want to go. To feel that again. I curled up in my chair, hiding every inch of my body that I could, just so that I could open my voice.
Something magical happened.
Within minutes, he’d found a shared language with me in manifesting.
In one hour, he taught me that we are ALWAYS manifesting in alignment with our internal beliefs and embodied expectations, including co-creating more of the things we don’t want. That we attract what we believe we are worthy of. That changing my life had to begin with changing my beliefs about myself and how I embodied those beliefs.
He is also the one who taught me this – your story is never too big. It is never wrong. I was never too much. You are never wrong to want to share it.
Sometimes, other people are just too small.
That therapist was triggered. She didn’t think she could handle it, so she didn’t take the chance of actually listening to what I had to say.
If she had, she would have learned what he did. That I have an extraordinary capacity to see the all of the moving parts in things – not just the surface level, but the deep time. That I am a healer who had already healed myself so much, even at 26. Who had been healing others for over 10 years already.
To give her the recognition she deserves, she was actually in high integrity. She recognised it was “her stuff.” It made me feel like crap because I’d never been around healthy boundaries, but she was right to do it. Nevertheless, I do hope she rethought her career path; she’d presented herself as qualified to be there and her actions didn’t back that up at all.
Most people who can’t be with your story don’t recognise that you are not wrong for sharing it. They turn their feeling of being “too small to cope” into the assumption that there is something wrong with you, your story, your choices.
Never play small to match up to anyone’s smallness
If you’re too much for them, they can go and find less!
Never dim your light for people who can’t stand sparkle in you, because they never learned to be with it in themselves.
These voices are the ones of the sister wound.
These voices say “Deep, dark, inner stories are DANGEROUS.” They’re shameful because deeply embodied storytelling is the modality of feminine culture making and for hundreds of years we’ve been punished for it. Conditioned into internalising patriarchal values that support invisible beliefs like:
-Women are nature. Men are culture;
-Women consume. Men create (eh hello? WTF? But this is a huge pillar of capitalism);
-Women are destinations. Men are heroes;
-The emotional realm (feminine) is lesser. The logical realm (masculine) is superior;
-Stories are only for entertainment. Facts are for learning; and
-Having female friends is hard because women are “backstabbers” and “b*tches” and “gossips” and our experience often backs that up, because we’ve only ever experienced the wounded feminine.
These are the voices of women that fear that if you are too much, it is dangerous for them too. Once a stone is thrown at one witch, a witch pandemic is sure to follow.
That day, as that psychiatrist said to me, “you’re not too broken, or too much. She felt too small to control what she feared your story might start in her” something radical shifted one crucial degree for me.
I had always been a storyteller
My poetry was published in adult collections, from age 8 onwards. But I became a story advocate then. It fell into place, how story is not just in our minds, but in our bodies, hearts and souls. How story changes us. How story is meant to start something in us. We’re meant to tell our stories.
AND as much as people have the right to “not want to hear it” that does not mean a story should never be told. It’s just perhaps not meant for them.
I went on to incorporate both stories and facilitating storytelling in my research and, to have a very sizeable paper published.
To co-organise a conference that incorporated movement workshops and storytelling with the being.
To work with refugees, listening to their stories and helping them tell them, in community journalism work with the Red Cross.
To do community work supporting oral history.
To found a movement that gained an international audience, sharing stories of love and connection with the past and reminding the world that the physical world of shared heritage is essential to the human experience of deep belonging.
To work on the cases of the survivors of many hundreds, if not thousands, of Britain’s most complex criminal injuries.
To learn how to find the evidence and read it, and retell the stories of history’s excluded voices (i.e. everyone except affluent white men) and, to understand why they were excluded (note, it’s always about fear and control).
To research and bring profound new understandings into the stories of the witch trials and the conflict, fear and harm, healing and magic of lived experiences concealed within them.
To support exchange students and help them write new stories, in a whole new setting and become the hero again.
To support 100’s of entrepreneurs to step into their own stories in profound ways that change not only their businesses or lives, but their way of being in the world.
Holding people and their stories
Until there wasn’t a story left in me that I couldn’t tell. There wasn’t a story left out there that I couldn’t hear.
Until my own fear that, “nobody wants to hear that” was drowned out by a drum that says, “our stories are our salvation.” Stories change hearts and minds. Stories heal. Stories matter.
For years now, I’ve helped people to find what is them and the special difference in their lived experience that serves others. To navigate the waters that open up the self-love necessary to fully embody their story and call in their soul mate community.
So please trust me when I say this: don’t let the ones who “don’t want to hear it,” because of their fear and need for control, determine how you show up.
Write, speak, dance, pray and BE all in for the ones who are waiting to for you to salve or excite, inspire or heal with your stories. Somebody out there is waiting to hear exactly what you have to say right now. For them, it is life affirming medicine.
xoxo,
Dr. Morgana
