The Visibility Wound

A last-minute request to speak on local news should’ve been easy for me. I’ve spent decades studying childhood development, attachment, parenting, and teen mental health. Instead, my body slammed the brakes: panic, tight chest, throat closing, tears. That moment opened a door I couldn’t ignore, not into credentials or confidence, but into the deeper question of why being seen can still feel unsafe.

I unpack what a somatic trigger really is, and why visibility hits differently when the audience didn’t “opt in.” We move from inner child basics to the inner teenager, where identity, belonging, and self-exploration are supposed to be protected, not punished. When acceptance becomes conditional, visibility turns into a threat, and adulthood can bring that fear back the second we step into authority, leadership, or public expertise.

I also share the personal roots of my own visibility wound, including growing up in a rigid religious family system where deviation came with judgment and rejection. Then I talk through what helped me come back to the present, including grounding, EFT tapping, and a reparenting mindset that says: I’m allowed to take up space, and I don’t have to be perfect to be accepted.

If you’ve ever felt your nervous system revolt right when you’re about to be seen, heard, promoted, or publicly known, this will resonate. Subscribe to And Still We Rise, share this with someone who’s learning to be visible, and leave a review so more people can find this healing work.

Thank you for tuning into And Still WE Rise! If you would like to learn more about me or the work our practice is doing, feel free to follow us on Instagram at:

@atltherapygirl and @risetherapycenter

Or check us out at www.risetherapycenter.com

Disclaimer: And Still We Rise is meant to provide perspective and meaningful conversations around mental health topics. It is not meant to provide specific therapeutic advise to individuals. If anything in these podcasts resonates, ASWR recommends consulting with your individual therapist or seeking a referral from your primary care physician.

Transcript

Solo Update And Setting

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello. Welcome, welcome, welcome. It's good to have you guys back. I'm solo today. So something different. Um, and I'm using a different mic because I'm at home and uh I've got the golf course behind us, so got a bunch of bros back there hitting the ball and dropping some F-bombs. So I'm trying to minimize any background noise. But welcome back to Unstill We Rise. Uh, as you can see, I'm solo today, and I just had such a good, really healthy situation pop up today that I wanted to share with you all that uh I just feel like it's too good to pass and part of my own healing journey, which I think will resonate with some of the rest of you all. But welcome back to the podcast and still we rise. I'm your host, Christine Seidel, and this podcast is all about becoming aware and conscious of the inner work that we're doing and finding community to be with others in that. With that said, let's get started. I'm still a little, I don't know, a little shaken up, a little reeling from this, which I think is good. It's been a lot for me to process today. Um, but I'll tell you a little bit about the incident and then we'll kind of process it together. Um, so Tuesdays are typically my admin days. I have just meetings lined up. It's pretty much, you know, as needed, clients, but mostly just allocated towards admin, leadership, uh, just you know, things I need to take care of as a business owner. Um and I love it. I love it because I can just kind of dig in and do some deeper work. Um, but it's also an opportunity for things to not always go as scheduled. So as I was getting ready to go into a meeting, one of my admin um staff sent me a text that was like, hey, how about we pivot? And in about 30 minutes, you uh do an interview with this local affiliate news station around um teenagers and you know, at-risk teenagers and and things that parents can do to help support uh a healthy connection to protect their teenagers. Um yeah. Can you come on out here? I went into a full-blown panic attack as I was going into a meeting with one of my other leadership or senior therapists, and I was so taken aback by that. Like genuinely taken aback by that, because let's be honest, I have 20 years of formal education, practice, and experience of working with children, teenagers, adults, working within the attachment and ego development stage. I do CEs, um, I have a podcast. Yeah, hello, yes, I'm on here. This is my topic. I know that I was put on this earth to talk about childhood, child experiences, healing through childhood, parenting, parent-child relationships. And yet that message literally hit me like a train and I went into straight fear mode. Luckily, I was able to respond enough to say, hey, I'm in a meeting, I'm not gonna be able to do it, but reach out and see if they can do 1230 or one or something along those lines. Um it they had a deadline that they had to get this piece out on. But I really, after that meeting, had to go to a place of grounding myself and figuring out what was actually coming up for me. So when we talk about a somatic experience, that's what we're talking about, this physiological response to a trigger that is incongruent to the information that is coming to you. So, like I just said, like clearly, this is my wheelhouse. I I do it all the time through one-on-one work, CEs, blogs, podcasts. But there is something so different about that request. And it was this request that I was going to be visible to people that didn't necessarily ask for my information, right? So if people come to see me, if people join the podcast, if they take a CE, there's some endorsement that whatever I am sharing, they too have an interest in that and and they trust my judgment or they trust my expertise, whatever it is. But this request to speak on a platform that was so fundamentally outside of people that are are already saying yes to me really hit a wound for me. And so when we talk about somatic work, it's the physiological response, and that's what I had. I literally felt like I was about to be in trouble. That's why I said, like, I felt like there were sheriffs at the door waiting for me. Like I was in trouble. I had done something wrong, and I was about to be seen for that. And my body literally experienced the heaviness in the chest, the tightness in my throat. I started crying after I had kind of done my grounding exercise, um, which for me I did an EFT script around being safe and being visible and all of those things. Um, and there was this release that really took me back into a season of my own childhood and of my own experiences. I don't even want to say a season because it was pretty much still going on. So what I want to talk about, and we talk about the inner child a lot. We talk about, you know, childhood experiences, but what this was was a visibility wound. And this is something I've been working on with my therapist. I've been aware of it. There's you know always layers to different things. And I have a girl, another girlfriend who is um in psychology too, and we've been talking a lot about it, but this was so interesting because it hit from that somatic place. Um, and it's vis it's a visibility wound. This really goes back to the inner teenager. So going into adolescence, and I think it's so funny, like the universe is so you're so smart and wise and loving and kind, you always know what we need. But uh, it's no coincidence that this uh TV affiliate was wanting me to talk about teenagers. And uh there you go, it was hitting my my inner teenager wound. So when we go and we look at childhood needs, you know, we have these different developmental stages that we go through that our emotional needs, they do change, you know. In attachment, we need safety, security, stability, regulation, um, and then ego development. We have, you know, we need to have boundaries, but autonomy within boundaries and all these different, you know, needs. But the inner teenager, the adolescence time is really about identity. And it's about like self-exploration and really being in a space where you know we can find belonging in who we are as we explore who we are, and that's that's identity, right? Like, that's why we have so many parents and teenagers at odds because parents are kind of like, well, wait, this is who I know you to be, or this is who I want you to be. And a teenager is like, Yeah, but like this is who I'm trying to become, this is who I want to be, this is who I want to try on, this is the group I want to fit in. Like, how many parents get frustrated when their children start changing their style or their extracurricular activities and they start freaking out? But like that's normal. That's part of what adolescence is. And when the inner teenager isn't able to develop and or explore that self, that identity, that belonging in safety and security, meaning there isn't going to be this conditional acceptance around that exploration. If they don't get that, they do become very conscious that being visible can often risk relational dynamics. And that means like I can be rejected, I could be abandoned, I could be judged. And you know, we understand that this happens with peers, right? Like, that's why at that age we're so like concerned with what everybody else thinks, what everybody else is doing. But where a wound really becomes um deep and um and harmful is when that same level of rejection or lack of acceptance or judgment comes from our parents or our caregivers. And, you know, I'll give you a little bit of background as to why this hit me so harshly. Um I come from like those of you that I don't know, I don't really talk about it much on the podcast, but I come from a very religious family. So one of seven, raised very, very Catholic. And um, there was no deviation from that. Like you were a practicing Catholic and you believed in the in the Catholic Church and the Catholic dog uh dogma. And as I became a teenager or an ad adolescent, really, I really started exploring the side of me that was much more expressive versus compliant. I really loved dancing, I loved acting, and you know, as I started exploring these things, I really shared it specifically with my mother. But, you know, within my family of origin, I would share that. And one of the very first messages I got was that that profession is immoral. And that if I were to pursue that career, I myself would be immoral and be participating in immoral things. And that was at a very young age. It was right around fourth or fifth grade that that message was given to me. And that was really like that hit so hard that in a in a space not only where I was sharing something, but I was sharing something about a profession or a hobby or something where I was going to be seen that there was something wrong with me if I actually desired that. Not only if I participated in it, participated in it, but if I desired to be in that. And being in that family meant that that was something that was regularly, you know, projected onto me, not just, you know, in things that I desire, but like, you know, experiences I was exploring. You know, I was going to church with other friends, and so I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue to be a practicing Catholic. And, you know, it was fundamentally that if you do not participate in this family in that way, you are rejected. And that is how it is to this day. Like I am very much not part of my family of origin because of my own self-growth that has led me to no longer be able to suppress a level of identity within myself and beliefs that I hold. I can no longer be compliant. Uh, but decades of that occurring, but this specifically was really hitting the somatic wound that was still in me, that to be seen with some level of expertise and authority meant that I was running the risk of rejection, of judgment, of a lack of acceptance. Even in something that I've invested decades of my life learning, teaching, facilitating. I'm a mother, like a therapist, a former teacher. Like childhood is my jam. And yet I had a sense of terror being seen and heard with authority and expertise in that space, which really just hurt my heart. It it genuinely hurt my heart because my body remembered that wound, it remembered the risk it was to actually be seen and to be heard in my family of origin. In fact, I wasn't, you know, like you just shoved it back down. And so although it was like this moment of deep sadness, it was also this moment of acknowledging that I am no longer in a situation where that exposure or that embarrassment can harm me or I can be separated from myself from that. I had to back then, but I don't now. And so this podcast right here is actually an act of self-compassion. It's an act of reparenting, it's sharing with you all in my own visibility that I'm allowed to take up space. And I don't have to be perfect to be accepted. And neither do you. Thank you for taking the time to listen to my story, to explore your own visibility. And I hope that something from this resonates. If it does, please like, subscribe, follow, share. We would love for you to share. And I hope you enjoy the rest of your week. Take care. Listen to Libirdies.