A short excerpt from a YouTube video by Dr. Don Wood ("Tired of Being Walked Over?") in which he recounts a client anecdote: a woman who, as a child at about six in church, was struck with a hairbrush by her grandmother and told to "stop talking," an event she later realised had 'taken her voice' and led to lifelong people-pleasing and not standing up for herself. Dr. Wood's point: adult patterns like being pushed around often trace to early beliefs set by specific events, so effective change requires addressing those original sources.
Chapters
I had a lady that came in, she didn't believe she had any trauma. She felt like her life was pretty good. She had a good childhood. And I said, can you think about a time where something happened to you? When you think about it now, you feel an emotion. Because if you feel an emotion, then it means your mind is still running that data. So she said to me, okay, well, I was in Church about 6 years old, and I was talking to my siblings and my grandmother took out her hairbrush and hit me on the head and said, stop talking, you're in church. And as she was telling me that story, I could see her eyes filling. And then when she said that her grandmother hit her and told her to stop talking, she just started sobbing. What she said when she caught her breath was, I lost my voice that day. She had never recognized that. She goes, people push me around all the time. I'm always trying to please other people and nobody really listens to me. Now, was her grandmother trying to do that? No. But a six year old doesn't have enough life experience to understand what she said. So she comes back to hearing, stop talking, you're in church. She interpreted that, stop talking. If you're in a situation where you feel like you can't stand up for yourself, the solution is to get to the source of where that started. Because that's just a belief that got set in at some point in your life that people aren't interested in what you have to say.