I still remember the sound of my own screaming. Not the dramatic kind you see in movies(that still makes my heart drop). The kind that rips your throat until it burns like someone pressed hot metal against it. I was a child watching violence that no child should witness, standing between two adults who were supposed to protect me. My dad, fists and rage. My mom, performing helplessness in a way that confused me for years. I begged them to stop. I begged so hard that my body learned a terrible lesson… when you speak, nothing changes. When you scream, nobody hears you. When you try to stop the chaos, you only get swallowed by it.
So I learned to go quiet. Not politely quiet. Trauma quiet. The kind of quiet that gets glued to your nervous system.
From school till in college, the idea of raising my hand felt like standing in front of a firing squad. Even when I knew the answer, my throat locked. I’d feel heat in my face, my chest squeezing, like something was physically pushing my voice back down. I thought it was shyness. It wasn’t… It was years of conditioning wrapped around my vocal cords.
It followed me everywhere. I couldn’t ask a stranger for directions. I couldn’t correct a waiter if they brought the wrong order. I couldn’t say a simple “no” without my heart racing.
My voice didn’t disappear suddenly. It faded over years. And the body, being far more honest than the mind, started talking for me.
The body keeps a memory of everything you stayed silent about
In my late teens, I started getting sore throats the way other people get notifications on their phone… constant, annoying, predictable. Every month I’d end up on antibiotics. The tonsils that once carried my screaming became weak, overreactive, inflamed. If I’d taste yogurt or milk with the tip of my tongue, I’d get a sore throat and then that would turn into a whole episode of fever, body ache, and everything that followed.
Then my immune system started acting strange. Fatigue. Low energy. Dry skin. Hair loss. Periods vanished like I am transitioning in my 20s, Mood swings that weren’t just mood swings. My body was waving red flags and I kept pretending it was nothing.
At twenty‑three, all of it exploded. I woke up one day and my voice was gone. Completely gone. No sound. only a whisper. Panic shot through me so fast I could feel it crawling up my spine.
I went from clinic to clinic. took antibiotics. Physicians shrugging. saying “viral infection.” “stress can do that.” Nobody talked about chronic emotional stress or how childhood fear rewires your immune system.
When you grow up in chaos, the body stops trusting the world. And when the world doesn’t feel safe, the body goes into permanent defence mode, and this was just one of the many chronic illnesses I battled through, the rest of my story lives in my other blogs if you ever want to explore how deep this pattern used to run.
How childhood fear becomes adult illness
Science explains this better than any physician ever could. When a child grows up in threat, violence, screaming, unpredictability. their limbic system becomes hyperactive. The limbic system is the emotional alarm center of the brain. It keeps scanning for danger long after the danger is gone.
This constant scanning shows up physically. The vagus nerve, which connects your brain to almost every major organ, loses its ability to regulate your body’s relaxation system. So your heart beats fast even when you’re safe. Your digestion gets weird. Your immune system starts firing randomly.
Cortisol, the stress hormone, stays high. High cortisol over years can weaken immunity, disturb thyroid function, inflame tissues, and blunt neuroplasticity. The nervous system becomes the boss, and the boss is terrified.
This is why my throat kept collapsing. Why my tonsils became over‑sensitive. Why my hypothyroidism developed quietly and then roared. Chronic fear becomes chronic chemistry.
When you suppress your voice, the body raises its own
My body kept trying to get my attention. First through tonsils. Then immune issues. Then finally thyroid’s decreased function, the organ of metabolism and expression. It made perfect sense in the worst way.
Hypothyroidism slows everything down. Fatigue. weight changes. Brain fog. Mood drops. And for me, the worst part, my voice and periods that kept disappearing.
Doctors told me I’d need thyroxine. But deep down, something felt off. I had spent years studying neuroscience, psychoneuroimmunology, and epigenetics long before I ever fully healed myself and all of these symptoms only came to the surface once I finally sat down with myself. I was learning the sciences, applying everything I could, and somehow kept getting new diagnoses.
Even on the days I felt lost inside those episodes where you just want everything to stop, I still got up, did the long scientific meditations, stayed close to my teachers, watched the testimonials, and held on to whatever hope I could find. Nothing in the human body works in isolation. The thyroid doesn’t randomly collapse. The immune system doesn’t misbehave “just because.”
The body reflects the emotional environment it lives in.
I kept thinking back to the girl who screamed for safety and never got it. The girl who learned to swallow her truth every single day. The girl whose nervous system lived in survival even inside a quiet room.
She wasn’t sick randomly it was a result of her being unheard.
The science behind emotional silence
When someone represses emotion, not intentionally but because their body learned that expressing anything is dangerous. the brain changes. which affects everything from heart rate to immunity.
Keeping the fight and flight mode on never lets the body return to its normal setting. Every organism in nature resets after a stressful event. Short bursts of stress are adaptive, they help you survive. But staying in long term stress turns that survival response into something harmful. The organs keep mobilising energy for a fight that never comes, because the threats are no longer real, they’re living in imagination, in memory, in the brain’s old wiring. And while all this is happening, neurons that should communicate calmly start firing in defensive patterns, stress hormones stay elevated, and the vagus nerve loses its ability to regulate the body the way it was designed to. It becomes a whole internal ecosystem running on emergency mode with no actual emergency.
My chronic sore throats weren’t random. They were part of a chain reaction. A frightened child grows into a frightened adult. A frightened adult grows into a body that never fully rests. And a body that never rests becomes ill.
Dr Joe Dispenza’s research helped me connect the dots more clearly, Which states: When you step into meditation. not the pretty Instagram kind but the real internal work, you temporarily step out of your familiar identity. You leave behind the emotional conditioning. The limbic system calms. The frontal lobe activates. The brain waves shift. Alpha replaces the constant beta survival mode. This quiet state gives your body a chance to repair.
Every time I was meditating. I was teaching my nervous system a language it never learned – safety.
Healing wasn’t magical. It was intentional.
There’s this image I see people carry about healing, like after reading a self-help book or realizing your negative thought patterns, you wake up with sunlight on your face and everything is fixed. That’s not how it works. healing is messy and technical and boring and beautiful at the same time.
For me, it started with noticing tiny reactions. The way my shoulders tightened before speaking. how my breath shortened when someone disagreed with me. The way fear of abandonment crept in whenever I thought about setting boundaries.
My body was still living in that childhood room where chaos erupted without warning.
So I began talking to it. not in a poetic way, but in a real way. Sitting on my prayer mat at 5 a.m., after meditation, having immense love in my heart for myself, telling my body, I’m here. You’re safe. we’re not in that house anymore. And alongside that, I did everything I could to rebalance my throat chakra, from blessing it from my heart to listening to healing frequencies, from chanting until my voice softened to doing an inner child meditation to talking out loud about every single thing I thought hurt me. It was my way of giving my voice back its place in my body.
It sounds simple. but safety is a biological event. When the nervous system feels safe, healing becomes possible.
Not instantly but my tonsils stopped reacting. The fevers disappeared. my immunity got stronger. My thyroid numbers slowly improved. One day, I ate ice cream in winter and nothing happened… I didn’t lose my voice or get sick at all.
It felt unreal but also obvious because I have seen others doing same repeatedly and I know for real, when the emotional pattern dissolves, the physical pattern follows.
Everyday moments hold the evidence
You can tell a lot about your emotional history by watching yourself in simple situations. Like when your phone lights up and your stomach drops because you think someone is upset. Or when someone asks, “Are you free today?” and your brain immediately thinks about how to say yes without disappointing anyone. My heart used to pound on hearing someone fight, even though I knew it has nothing to do with me.
These tiny reactions are not personality traits. they’re neurological habits. Learning to feel safe in your own body means catching these micro‑responses and asking, where did I learn this?
I still remember the day I realized I wasn’t reacting from the present anymore. my partner asked me why I stayed so quiet during a meetup with family. I wasn’t afraid of the people in the room. I was afraid of the ghosts from childhood.
The body doesn’t know the difference between past and present until you teach it.
Rewiring is not complicated. It’s consistent.
When people hear about inner work, they think it’s some mysterious spiritual assignment. believe me It’s not. It’s daily self‑honesty…
It’s sitting with your emotions instead of numbing them. It’s letting your chest feel heavy without immediately pushing it down or distracting yourself by scrolling non-stop. It’s choosing one boundary and honoring it even when your brain tries to guilt‑trip you. It’s allowing your voice to shake the first few times you speak up.
Neuroplasticity means the brain can change at any age. The pathways built in fear can be replaced with pathways built in awareness. The vagus nerve can regain tone. Cortisol levels can stabilize and inflammation can settle.
But the most important shift happens quietly. You start trusting your own voice again.
My voice feels different now. Not louder, just freer. I’m not losing it every other month. I’m not running for antibiotics. My thyroid functions normally. my body learned a healthier pattern because my emotions did.
Staying silent was not my personality. It was my survival strategy.
You’re not stuck with the version of yourself that trauma created
If you grew up scared, your body learned to adapt. It didn’t betray you. It protected you. But protection has an expiry date. What saved you back then might be hurting you now.
Maybe you’re still swallowing words, or your throat feels tight when you try to express yourself. Maybe your body gets sick when you stretch your truth. I understand that. I lived that.
Your symptoms aren’t random. Your body speaks the language your childhood never allowed you to speak.
Healing begins the moment you listen. start small by notice your reactions. Give your body one safe moment every day, even if it’s just a breath that isn’t rushed. Let your nervous system feel you returning home to it.
You don’t have to scream to reclaim your voice. You just have to stop abandoning it.
Final thoughts
I’m turning twenty‑eight soon, and I feel healthier now than I did at seventeen. I walk around in winter eating the coldest ice cream without any fear. my throat doesn’t get tight when I have to speak up against wrong. My people-pleasing is gone. This version of me was built piece by piece, through nights where I cried on the prayer mat, through mornings where I forced myself back into meditation even when my whole body felt heavy, through days where I chose honesty over silence even if it scared me.
And I want you to know something that took me years to understand. healing isn’t about becoming a brand‑new person. It’s about remembering the person you were before fear rewired your body. It’s about recognizing the way your chest tightens when you stay silent for keeping peace and learning that the tightness isn’t weakness, it’s a signal. It’s about realizing that your body never turned against you, it was always trying to protect you with the limited map it had.
If my body could relearn safety after decades of chaos, yours can too. Not instantly, not perfectly but consistently. You don’t have to force yourself into some dramatic transformation. Just one honest moment at a time, one breath that you don’t rush, one feeling you don’t run from, one boundary you honour without apologizing for existing.
And if this blog feels like it was speaking directly to you, I want you to know my work goes far deeper than these pages. You can book a 1:1 coaching session through my homepage if you want help decoding your own patterns. You can join my newsletter and if you’re on Threads, I’m there every day sharing the kind of raw, in-the-moment thoughts or stories that don’t always make it into long blogs but still help people feel less alone.
