Ever been told to 'keep a stiff upper lip' or 'remain strong' in the face of adversity? What if, instead, we acknowledged our pain and allowed ourselves room for self-care? We're taking a deeper look at a powerful quote by Zora Neale Hurston, "If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it." This conversation examines the burden of silent suffering, challenging the idealization of the 'strong woman' and emphasizing the significance of shared struggles and self-care.
As we approach 2024, we're shifting our focus to empowerment and the importance of raising our voices against societal pressures, discrimination, and oppression, particularly for women and people of color. We're urging you to join us in a collective effort to spark change, while also highlighting the importance of self-worth and self-care. Let's dive into the new year with a fresh perspective, prioritizing ourselves and setting an example for others. By tuning in, you'll gain valuable insights on self-care, empowerment, and standing up for what's right.
Ever been told to 'keep a stiff upper lip' or 'remain strong' in the face of adversity? What if, instead, we acknowledged our pain and allowed ourselves room for self-care? We're taking a deeper look at a powerful quote by Zora Neale Hurston, "If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it." This conversation examines the burden of silent suffering, challenging the idealization of the 'strong woman' and emphasizing the significance of shared struggles and self-care.
As we approach 2024, we're shifting our focus to empowerment and the importance of raising our voices against societal pressures, discrimination, and oppression, particularly for women and people of color. We're urging you to join us in a collective effort to spark change, while also highlighting the importance of self-worth and self-care. Let's dive into the new year with a fresh perspective, prioritizing ourselves and setting an example for others. By tuning in, you'll gain valuable insights on self-care, empowerment, and standing up for what's right.
Welcome to the Self Care Society podcast with your hosts Celia Williamson, ashley Kutcher, louis Guardiola and Carrie Shaw. A podcast devoted to those whose job it is to help others get or remain mentally, physically and emotionally healthy, but who also need to take care of themselves. How we're going to do this? By first showing you the filtered, pretty version of success and then the real struggles, real work and raw grit it took to get there, how they took care of themselves and also achieved their goals while doing it Together. We will work with you to improve and maintain your internal health and growth, while helping you achieve your external goals and your next professional achievement in life. And we're excited to show you how to follow your own individual and unique path and achieve the dreams you have, while taking good care of yourself. So let's get started. Welcome to the Self Care Society podcast. This week, you're with me, dr Celia Williamson, and I just have one quote for you, and then we're going to discuss it, coming up on the new year 2024. New year, new perspective, perhaps new you. So let me read the quote. It's if you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it. Let me read it again If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it. That's a quote written by Zora Neale Hurston. So what does that quote mean? What does it mean individually and interpersonally, as you interact with people that you love and who love you? It means that if you don't acknowledge your pain to them, one, they don't know about it and so they assume you're not in pain or that you enjoy what you're doing in your life, so they certainly won't work to relieve you of that pain. They may even think that you enjoyed it. So if you don't say ouch, when something hurts you, then how will people know? Then take on a lot and we say that you're a strong woman. Right, there's a saying going around like women are so strong. Women are stronger in some respects than men. That's well known.
Speaker 1:But are we, or do we just wear our pain? Well, do we just never acknowledge our pain? Do we just assume that this is our lot in life, that we have to carry all these burdens that the opposite sex doesn't have to carry, and oh well, that's just us? We are silent about our pain. Sometimes we're going through emotional pain that we don't share with other people because we're like well, they don't care or we don't want to burden them with it. Well, when you don't share your pain, you're silent about your pain, you can't assume that people will know you're in pain until you tell them. And you should tell trusted others, not just anybody and everybody.
Speaker 1:There's something called conditioning in psychology and what it means is you become conditioned to it, you become familiar with it, you get used to the pain. It's not like you like the pain. You're just. The pain is familiar to you. It's a burden. It's a 50 pound burden on your back. You're used to carrying it. You continue carrying it. But life doesn't have to be that way. If you say something, you might not only save your life or increase your joy in life, but you will mentor and guide to other people that it's okay to share your pain.
Speaker 1:The saying I like the least is strong black women, because I'm a black woman and people go around saying strong black women. I don't like that saying because if I'm strong, no one will ever help me. We don't help the strong. So I don't want to be known as a strong. But I don't want to carry burdens that are unnecessary and I certainly don't want to carry burdens that are mine. So we need to speak up again to trusted others, people who are trustworthy people who we can share our heart with, people who we can share our pain with, so they will know the times to step in and relieve us, so they will understand why we have to set this burden down, because it is too heavy now to carry. Maybe you might want to take that into 2024. Or do you want to be known as the strong woman who carries everything?
Speaker 1:Sometimes we're doing stuff for people. You know how we do and they can't learn because we're jumping and doing it all. They can't learn the life lessons that they need to learn because we're over here making sure everybody's laundry is done, making sure everybody has money in their pocket, making sure everybody has good time, making sure everybody gets embarrassed, stepping in to say, oh, they didn't mean to say that, they meant to say this. Oh, you know, they're just a joker all the time. Oh, you know how they are. Stop doing that. Allow people to learn what they need to learn. Allow people to experience the consequences. They say something stupid that offends somebody. Let that person put them in check. That's the way they learn.
Speaker 1:Don't say, well, that's just how they are, they could be different. Quit saving people so much. Turn that inward and help yourself. Take care of yourself, because you know what happens when you take care of yourself. You teach other little ones that are in your house or in your extended family how they should treat themselves. See, that's a hidden lesson. If we go around taking care of everybody and everything, then people learn that well, you don't value yourself Instead of what you want them to understand is your sacrifice, the sacrifice that you're making because you love them. But the lesson they often take away is well, she doesn't care about herself. So why should I care about her? She doesn't care if she experiences joy. She doesn't care if she's able to relax. She says so. I'm not going to set up situations and scenarios where she can relax and experience joy, because she doesn't care.
Speaker 1:If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you liked it, you enjoyed it. Because you're sending mixed messages. Don't be upset, don't be mad at them when they don't come through to support you and they'll help you. If you've been sending out the signals that you don't need help, there are times you have to step in and you help people because you're a nurturer, because that you consider that your role and that's fine. It's when you overburden yourself with it. It's when it's no longer necessary that these people need to learn their lessons in life and you prevent them from learning them. That's when it becomes troubling. That's when you're helping them to be disabled in some respects. They're not able to learn what they need to learn to be fully functional. Now if we say, if you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:That's also in a larger sense, in a macro sense, in a societal sense, it's the mistreatment of those in power, of those who don't have power, for instance, slaves singing as they're working in the fields. Larger society could say, well, they enjoy what they look at, their singing. But we understand that singing in the fields took your mind off the heavy labor and the heavy burden of your life. Getting into that rhythm of the chant of the song helped you to continue to do your work in the field. That's why it was a survival technique in the moment.
Speaker 1:But because you couldn't have a voice, some people would say well, you enjoy what you're doing, you're singing. Same thing happens to us as women in society, to us as people of color in society. If we're silent about our oppression, about our discrimination, they'll kill us and say we enjoyed it. We have to speak out, sometimes individually in the moment, although that doesn't always work out, but collectively In 2024, consider joining some collective, some coalition, some organization, so that you have a collective voice, so that you have power, so that you can say these are the ways that our population of women, of people of color perhaps, are in pain. We don't enjoy it and we're going to use our collective voice and our collective works to change it, to no longer be silent.
Speaker 1:So I hope you welcome 2024 in a way that allows you to take care of yourself Again, not just a bubble bath and getting your nails done, but in sitting and recognizing all the ways that you've given yourself away. But in 2024, how can you recoup a little bit of that for your own self? It's not selfish again, it's self care. We say that all the time. Sometimes, if you've given yourself away for years, it feels selfish, but it's self care, because if you take care of yourself, other people around you will value you. Because you value you and you teach young ones how to value themselves, you teach them not to give all of themselves away right To have some self worth. So I hope you'll go into 2024, brand new you, brand new perspective on life and I hope you take a lot of 2024 for yourself. Happy holidays. That concludes this week's episode. And remember it's not selfish, it's self care.