How does a woman go from a successful career with promotions, a strong following, and a track record of success to feeling like a failure on the verge of death? An even more important question, how does one get put back together again? What are the steps in that process?
Recently I was reviewing a call for papers that the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health posted. As of April 2018, they were collecting research to publish a special report on stress and health. The guest editors say this in their request: “We know a lot about the causes of stress but much remains unknown about the progression from stress to illness or how we assess and explain this process.”[1]
They go on to request multiple perspectives on the concept of recovery and welcome empirical, theoretical, laboratory, fieldwork, and new methodologies to make sense of this dynamic of stress and health. Embedded in their quest for research is my same question. How does one return to a preexisting baseline of normalcy after experiencing deep psychological stress? I promise you, it is not a quick vacation to a sunny location—rarely is that a lasting cure.
This journal is just one of the hundreds that focus on the concepts of stress and health. From the fatigue of healthcare workers caring for the sick, to bus drivers getting yelled at by their riders, to the stress of combat or preparing for deployment, we want to understand the causes of occupational stress on wellness. Researchers continue to wrestle with nuances and how to measure and correlate what we intrinsically know is happening—that stress makes people sick.
Dr. Sharon Horesh Bergquist is a physician, teacher, and researcher at Emory University. She has a short Ted-Ed video with over 2 million views that boils down how stress affects the body. She explains how stress triggers our adrenal glands to release the hormones cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine. Cortisol messes with our blood vessels, and if there is no return to a healthy baseline, it can increase the risk of heart attack or stroke. Unnecessary adrenaline links to higher blood pressure and heart rate that can cause nervousness and ultimately heart damage. Norepinephrine is a stress hormone that can cause sleeplessness, loss of libido, gastrointestinal problems, and potential disease resistance.[2]
These hormones in healthy doses help the body regulate and stay alive, but like anything overused, they can be damaging. Stress can shift levels in the body and tilt the equilibrium needed for a healthy routine like breathing, digestion, vision, and rest. We do not require extensive research to know stress makes us sick. What we need is to understand the triggers of stress, how stress may muffle or suppress us, and what our healthy preexisting baseline looks like so we can find a way back.
I argue that a healthy preexisting baseline, first and foremost, is having agency and voice!
The stress of silencing and the silencing of stress is cyclical and hidden. Part of the cure is to shed light on this phenomenon and bring it out in the open, so it loses its potency on our brains, hearts, and bodies. This chapter covers some of the ways feeling silenced hits the body like a virus.
The Silencing Virus Causes Physical Pain
The pain is real, and it is physical. The majority of women I spoke to were able to describe how silencing impacted them physically. Before everyone begins to assume that silencing and disease in some regions of the body are directly correlated, let me clarify that I never had two participants explain their physical symptoms in the same way. Instead, I saw patterns. The pattern was breath, digestion, and overall body pain.
I did not lead women to these answers. As a researcher, my job is to ask open-ended questions and see what emerges. So, for instance, I asked, “How did feeling silenced impact you physically?” Here are some of the things I heard that were specific to breathing or the throat.
“My throat would constrict in situations like that. That’s a real interesting physical response to silencing when your voice doesn’t come out,” said an education executive.
A highly accomplished attorney told me, “I hold the pain in my throat, right here [pointing to her voice box], and I try to keep my voice even; I try not to cry.”
Another executive in healthcare said, “[gasp] Oh, I get that Globus Hystericus. It is painful—it is chest and throat. I mean, it just hurts. It’s funny that it hurts physically. It’s the weirdest thing.”
Let me pause here and talk about this Globus Hystericus, which is the medical definition of having a lump in your throat. The “lump” in most cases is not physical; it feels like a lump, but there is nothing actually there. If there is a palpable lump, it is often mucus that is cleared with coughing. The fake lump is emotion causing a genuine impression of physical swelling or tightening in the throat or chest. Romance authors love to describe the groom as having this sensation. He waits for his bride to walk down the aisle, and his eyes well with tears as he swallows the lump in his throat upon seeing his soulmate make her way toward him. I have never read a book that said the groom had to gulp his Globus Hystericus, or if we are literal—his glob of snot.
This Globus, otherwise known as a globe or sphere, can be painful. It can sit precisely in the spot that our vocal cords reside and if we feel psychologically silenced, it makes sense that this part of the body might experience a physical manifestation. However, this is not the romantic phenomenon we experience at weddings. For some women, this can be a painfully regular and consistent occurrence in the body.
If an aching lump in the throat is at one spectrum, the other end holds things such as severe bronchitis, pneumonia, mononucleosis, tracheal stenosis, thyroid disease, and various respiratory ailments. We have to remember that two essential bodily functions are reliant on the small channels in our neck. We swallow food, and we breathe air. If we hold stress in that part of the body, we are likely to experience some adverse impact with those functions. Another participant, who is a hospital CEO, shared this regarding her issues with breath.
I still get it; it’s when I’m stressed. And I have asthma, so I always wonder when I lay in bed, is this asthma? I can’t take a deep inhale, and so I went in to see my physician, and he said it was stress. When I felt trapped in that [silencing], one of the physical manifestations was my body just wasn’t even functioning right.
I had one particular participant who was an executive in finance talk to me about how silencing would literally take her breath away. It was incomprehensible that her peers could treat her with such disdain or with such marginalizing behavior. She explained that not only did it feel like a punch to the gut, it also often felt hard to breathe. She would catch herself engaging in shallow breathing and had to remind herself to breathe deeply. “I always felt winded.”
As I author this book, I am cautious about sharing too much of my own story because I want it to be about the research. However, as a leader, I also wrestled with breathing when I was in the height of my silencing experience. At the time, I did not have the label for “silencing.” I just knew I was suffering from a lot of psychological stress and did not feel I had a voice that was valued. The specifics of my story are not necessary; in many ways, they are similar to the women I interviewed and will be comparable to my readers. I had a professional relationship that silenced me.
Amid that silencing, I found myself constantly breathless. At times, I literally could not catch my breath to speak, and I was not exercising at these moments to explain the sensation, nor was I overweight or diagnosed with anything specific to explain it. This breathlessness became difficult for me as I was in a position that required public speaking and the ability to project my voice. However, I could not do it without severe pain in my trachea or chest, and taking a deep breath was an effort—it
