Get Up: Finding Your Voice After Years of Silence

There’s a moment in every healing journey where the truth finally clicks.
Where the pattern you’ve carried for years—maybe even decades—finally reveals itself.
Where you see, with absolute clarity, why you do what you do.

That moment happened for my client, Mari, in our very first session of The GRACE Process™, during the phase called Get Up. This is where awareness begins. This is where you stop pretending everything is fine. This is where you admit: I’m done living this way.

And for Mari, what she realized was this: Changing a lifelong pattern is a lot harder than she thought. Not because she isn’t capable and not because she isn’t strong. But because for the first time, she was truly seeing what she had never allowed herself to see. 

When I asked Mari what she had become aware of, she said something that so many women silently live with:

“I’m always doing, and I don’t even pay attention. I keep everything in… and then one day it all bursts out.”

For years, she believed that her lashing out, her explosive moments, her “firecracker” energy were just part of her personality. But they weren’t.

They were the result of a childhood where speaking up wasn’t safe. Where using her voice resulted in consequences. Where silence became survival in order to feel love and acceptance from her mother.

So she learned to stay quiet and didn’t speak up to communicate her needs, which resulted in her avoiding conflict to keep the peace. And like every suppressed truth, it eventually boiled over—only ever coming out when she was furious, overwhelmed, or breaking–when it was too much to handle. This is the pattern so many of us live in: We don’t speak… until we’re so full that we explode.

Before our conversation, Mari thought, “this is just my personality.” But none of that was who she really was. It was conditioning. It was survival. It was the only way she knew to stay safe as a child.

And here’s the truth, when the world teaches you it’s unsafe to speak, you start believing silence is your identity. But silence isn’t who you are, it's an adaptation of your character, a behavior you learned was necessary to display so you could gain acceptance and love as a child. It’s a wound. And wounds can heal.

The moment Mari finally connected the dots—the childhood memories, the withheld words, the anger she didn’t understand—a flood of clarity hit her. She saw all the times she said yes when she wanted to say no. The times she went along to avoid disappointing someone. The times she quietly absorbed pain until she couldn’t take it anymore. She saw how this pattern shaped everything—friendships, relationships, and even her real estate business.

And she saw the deepest truth of all: she wasn’t quiet, she experienced feeling fear when she would speak up as a child and it is a pattern that has silently been running in the background of her life.

Fear of speaking up, conflict, fear of not being loved, of being judged, fear of disappointing someone, fear of being “too much” to handle.

Fear keeps you silent. Silence keeps you stuck. Stuck eventually becomes resentment or anger at those around you. The good news? Once you see the pattern, you can no longer unsee it and that’s when the transformation begins.

As part of her homework, I asked Mari to spend 24 hours simply noticing: When have I stayed quiet out of fear? When did I explode because I held too much? When did I abandon myself to avoid discomfort? These moments are access points to healing. This is how you start breaking the pattern. Not with force and not with shame, but with awareness.

One of the most powerful moments in our session came when Mari told me about how she had been pushed out of her partner’s funeral after 16 years together. She didn’t speak up, she didn’t fight for her voice to be heard. She stayed silent—because silence was familiar.

When you let others push you to the curb, it’s because somewhere inside, you already pushed yourself there. Not intentionally or consciously. But because the pattern was operating on autopilot.

When you do not know your worth, you accept behavior from others that matches the way you treat yourself. This is why the inner work must come first. This is why The GRACE Process™ begins with awareness, truth, and emotional bravery.

Breaking a pattern you’ve lived with since childhood can feel like death. It feels unfamiliar. It feels scary. It feels like you can’t survive something different, even if the new different thing is healthy. You will want to go back to your old ways because they are safe—even though they hurt.

But on the other side of that change is where the magic lives. That’s where you meet the future version of yourself—the one you don’t know yet. You don’t know you yet. But you’re on your way to you. And that journey is amazing and there is joy on the other side of the work.

Once you learn to use your voice, everything shifts. You improve your communication in your relationships, your business, and you learn to set boundaries and your confidence and energy increase!

• When you stop abandoning yourself, you no longer attract people who abandon you.
• When you stop silencing yourself, you no longer attract people who ignore your needs.
• When you start honoring your worth, you stop negotiating yourself away.
• And survival strategies can be unlearned and this is the freedom The GRACE Process™ offers.

Awareness of the pattern, Understanding where it came from, Feeling what you’ve avoided, Releasing what you’ve carried, Rebuilding your self-trust, Becoming the version of you that was never developed because you were shut down at such a young age.

We are done surviving. It’s time to live.

We all have patterns we didn’t choose:

• Silence.
• People-pleasing.
• Avoidance.
• Exploding.
• Overgiving.
• Self-sacrifice.
• Shrinking.
• Performing.
• Pretending.

These aren’t character flaws, they are wounds from childhood development. And wounds heal when they are finally seen.

Mari’s journey is just beginning—but she’s already breaking the cycle of silence, fear, and self-abandonment.

And if you’re reading this? It means your journey might be beginning too, on your way to you.