Recovery: the Practice of Rediscovering Your Lost Voice

Exploring the Practice of Voice Finding and Its Therapeutic Power

Amy Punt
9 min readApr 12, 2024
Three tiny red leaves on an otherwise dead poinsettia to communicate of regrowth and hope.
A poinsettia returning to life after loosing all its leaves. Photo by author.

Following trauma, particularly the prolonged suffering of abusive relationships and events, you lose your voice. What no one tells you is that finding it again takes practice. You don’t just see it once, and it remains with you. Depression, hypervigilance, and the brutality of living in the world as a sensitive person will repeatedly rob you of it. You think you’ll never recover it. Finding it was a fluke, an accident. The world doesn’t want it, so why should you? I’m learning that the world will want it when you want it badly enough to keep fighting the forces within to find it.

Yesterday, the suffering and pain of lost confidence and loneliness made me sick. It’s hard to describe soul sickness, how it impacts your body and mind, and how it feels like a flu that grounds you down and keeps you in bed. How you can barely move beneath the weight of it. How much physical pain it can cause. And then, you cannot speak; you can barely breathe. I lay on the couch and watched Star Trek: The Next Generation again and felt the warming embrace of the numbing sensation that comes when you successfully disassociate from your suffering and give in to the idea that nobody will ever love you and you must stop trying because it’s the…

--

--

Amy Punt
Amy Punt

Written by Amy Punt

Writing about Personal Growth, Trauma, Recovery and the cultural moments that reflect our hidden traumas.

No responses yet