A new podcast from the award-winning body hair and care brand Flamingo, hosted by author, curator, and critic Kimberly Drew. Each week on Unruly, we unpack the quiet ways women’s bodies are commodified, defined, and regulated by social media, the medical profession, the beauty industry, and more. Then we name them, out loud — because information is power, and your body is your business. New episodes drop on Wednesdays.
Episode 7 Transcript | Suffering in Silence
MAYATAL: “Women who did not express their emotions, express themselves in conflict with their partners were four times more likely to die prematurely than women who were able to express themselves in conflict with their partners. So self silencing, this thing that the culture is like expecting of us and celebrating in us not just exposes us to disease, but it could potentially be killing us.”
As a black queer woman, I often find myself being silenced– and then self-silencing–all the time. And I am working tirelessly to undo that.
One of the primary goals that we have with Unruly– and you hear me say it almost every week, is that we engage in conversations with one another. Conversations that are more empowered and informed so that we can say the quiet things out loud. But it’s not always easy.. And today's guest helps us better understand just what’s at stake when we don’t stay vigilant about naming out needs.
I’m your host Kimberly Drew. And From Flamingo this is Unruly: Where we take the quiet ways women’s bodies are commodified, defined, regulated and we name them– out loud. We want to educate and support each other. Because your body is your business.
This is Episode 7: Suffering in Silence
Joining me is Maytal Eyal. She is a psychologist, writer and speaker who wrote a piece for Time Magazine called: “Self Silencing is Making Women Sick.”
Kimberly: Welcome to Unruly.
Maytal: I'm so happy to be here.
Kimberly: It is really such an honor to be speaking with you. Can you tell me a bit about the work you do and tell me how you got to this point? What were some of the, the inflection points? What's your villain origin story?
Maytal: I love it. So I got my Ph.D. in psychology, and when I was getting my Ph.D., my research interest was stress and trauma and the mind body connection. So because of intergenerational trauma in my family, because of personal experiences. I've always been really interested in how stress and trauma sit in the body. So that's sort of the through line, through my work. It always has been. Hopefully it always will be. And when I finished my Ph.D., I started seeing clients through private practice, and I mostly work with women. And I started noticing a pattern as I was sitting across women week by week, listening to their stories, hearing about their lives. And the pattern was that so many of the women sitting across from me were dealing with some sort of physical illness, so ranging from insomnia that just wouldn't stop to things like skin cancer, really aggressive breast cancer, multiple types of autoimmune disease, irritable bowel syndrome. And so I started to get really curious like, what is going on here? Why are so many of the women sitting across from me dealing with illness? And because I have this researcher, Ph.D. background, this is sort of what I do. Like when I see something occurring in front of me, I like, am a dork and look at the research and numbers and see what's happening. And what I started to see when I did that was wild. Really jarring numbers. So I was like seeing in the literature that women are disproportionately bearing the burden of illness in our country. So women are 80% of autoimmune diseases cases, which is wild. Nine times more likely to get lupus, four times more likely to develop multiple sclerosis, three times more likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis. Women are twice as likely to die from a heart attack. More of us have long COVID, migraines, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome. And so what I was seeing anecdotally in my office was this silent phenomenon that's occurring in our culture that I don't think is really being talked about nearly enough. And so. That got me curious to figure out what is going on here. And that's my work. That's what I'm trying to figure out, trying to help people with. And that's where I'm going.
Kimberly: On a recent episode, I had this really incredible conversation about care and treatment for perimenopause and menopause. And one of the, the things that kept coming up was the ways in which we normalize women suffering. In your article for Time Magazine titled Self Silencing is Making Women Sick, I wonder how you got from your research driven approach to finding this kind of maybe throughline. Because, of course, there's these expectations of women having to be genteel or the ways in which to we’re silenced. As a black woman myself, I feel silenced consistently. But it was interesting to see this framework of self-silencing. Can you talk to us a bit about that?
Maytal: I think there's a problem when we normalize women suffering, because I think what we're doing is we allow a lot of our broken institutions to just remain comfortably broken. So what I was finding when I was researching, okay, why are women bearing a disproportionate burden of illness in this country, in our culture? What I found was that it wasn't just genes or hormones. It actually has a lot to do with the culture we live in. And so we exist in a culture, just as you said, where women, women of color are experiencing a pressure to abide by these sort of invisible code of virtues, by these expectations, by these norms. And what are they? So it's the virtue of selflessness. We're expected to be selfless, put everyone before us. We're expected to be emotionally in control, temper our emotions and might feel like too much for other people. And we're expected to be agreeable…. perpetually pleasant and relationally perfect and, you know, go with the flow, be chill. And these things, it turns out, are not just socially problematic. They're actually predisposing us to chronic illness and disease. So there's actually a lot of research about this idea of self silencing. And self silencing is this notion of like sort of shrinking ourselves, repressing ourselves for the purpose of making sure other people are okay and other people are comfortable. And so this thing that's expected of us normalized in us, celebrated in us, it turns out, is actually making us sick. So the research studies on this are fascinating. There's one that came out, I think, a little over ten years ago, and it was with researchers in Framingham, Massachusetts, and they followed a group of like 4,000 people across ten years. And I think about half the sample were women. And what they found was that women who did not express their emotions, express themselves in conflict with their partners, were four times more likely to die prematurely than women who were able to express themselves in conflict with their partners. So self silencing, this thing that the culture is like expecting of us and celebrating in us, not just exposes us to disease, but it could potentially be killing us. So. Pretty terrifying.
Kimberly: I cannot say enough how when I read that statistic, it makes so much sense. And I feel sometimes there is this strange social divide between medicine and statistics and kind of, of course, the ways in which we normalize these things. And it was just such a jarring number. And I wonder if we could talk about what beliefs, what assumptions, get us to these kinds of numbers. What are some of the things in your experience and ways that society really rewards this behavior? Because clearly our bodies don't.
Maytal: Totally. And that's how I started to conceptualize illness. Like I work with girls and I work with women from puberty to menopause, and I see across the lifespan there are these expectations among girls and women. You know, a 22 year old young woman I think is constantly abiding by this pressure to like be chill, not be too much, not try too hard. And that in itself is like a form of self repression. We look at moms, what is celebrated with a mom? It is extreme, extreme selflessness and self-sacrifice. And then we look at like menopausal women. They're just expected to render themselves invisible, essentially. And so I see this come up with my clients. There's one client that comes to mind. I adore this woman. And she was dealing with chronic fatigue syndrome. And so she's sort of like this superwoman mom who's like shoving her kids around town and taking care of her husband, making lunches, making sure all the errands, like holding sort of that cognitive burden of the household. But then she'll get hit with these episodes. Where she for like six, five weeks at a time. It's almost like she has the flu. It is so difficult to do anything. As we were working together, I started to say like, I wonder if this is your body in a way crying out that it needs you to put your needs first. And when I said that her, she looked at me. Her eyes watering up. And she said, but I don't deserve to put my needs first. I'm not the breadwinner. And it's so, it's like these micro examples in women's lives, these micro ways we get messaging and cues from the culture of the way we're supposed to be that is not healthy for our bodies. Our bodies hate it.
Kimberly: I want to talk more specifically about some of the conditions that you found that your client base were coming up with. For myself, and I've talked about this on the pod before, I've dealt with eating disorder in many different ways throughout my life. And for me, it was so much about control because, of course, we're in a world where that agency is constantly picked away at women, you know.
Maytal: So perfectly said. There's this quote, I'm going to butcher it, but it's like, how can you possibly be healthy in a sick world? And that's what I constantly think about when clients sit across from me. When they're dealing with bulimia or anorexia or chronic fatigue syndrome or different types of cancer or irritable bowel syndrome, insomnia. So these are all things that I've seen clients and worked with them through. These illnesses are just demonstrations of how I think the culture in so many different ways is failing us. Like we have to see illness through the lens of institutional failure. There's a researcher over at University of Michigan. I hope I don't mispronounce her name, Dr. Arline Geronimus. And she studies this concept of weathering. And the idea is that women of marginalized identities, Black women, women from low income communities, other women of color, they have health disparities because the everyday experience, the chipping away, the covert and overt ways of discrimination has an effect on health. I think finally now we're starting to understand social determinants of health. We're starting to understand like quote unquote, illness is often an institutional failure. But I think because of that, like mind body dualism, you were getting at- this separation of mind and body, it's taken us a while to get here and it's taken us a while to acknowledge how much the culture is at play when it comes to illness.
Kimberly: Are these things being addressed is my bottom line question? Because I've simply never had this conversation before. And I wonder for you if, if you feel like these conversations are accessible, do you feel like there's a momentum building at all?
Maytal: I think there is. So I think historically there's been this like mind body dualism. So I sort of in my brain call it the bio myth where I feel like we see illness and disease as just like a hormonal genetic inevitability that we can do nothing about. But what we're learning is that culture, environment, trauma has a major impact. And I think the trauma field is the one that's really moving this dialog along. So someone I'm, like, deeply influenced by, I was able to go on like a weeklong learning experience with him is Dr. Gabor Marté, who's a physician trauma expert, author, and I think he's really pioneering this conversation. His book that recently came out, The Myth of Normal, I cannot recommend it enough. It was wildly influential in my writing of this piece, very important that I name that. And he explains what our society is celebrating and normalizing is literally toxic. And luckily he is moving along that conversation. But there are certainly people who I think are afraid to have that conversation. Some for less noble reasons, because I think then the broken institutions can remain broken. But then I also think there's a noble reason behind it. I think people are afraid that if we talk about our emotions contributing to physical illness, that then somehow people feel blamed. Which is a concern. But like, when that comes up, what I say is like, we cannot blame women. The systems are to blame and we have to change them.
Kimberly: Were gonna hear more about the ways that our culture reinforces this behavior in women in just a moment. Normally, this is where you’d hear an ad – and honestly, maybe you’d skip through it. But instead, we’ve got a story from a nonprofit supporting women's bodily autonomy and mental health. It’s one of the organizations that Flamingo donates to as part of its mission to “keep your body in mind.”
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Kimberly: Over the weekend I went to a movement workshop because that's one thing I've been trying to think about in my own journey towards moving past silence. And there's this incredible questionnaire by the poet Divya Victor, and it's called the Audre Lorde Questionnaire to Oneself. And one of the first questions in the questionnaire is what are the words you do not have yet? And the second question is, what do you need to say? And I wonder in your practice, what are some of the questions that you're asking your clients to get themselves there?
Maytal: I think it starts with emotion. Like that's where it begins with all my clients. I think because of this rational, logical enlightenment vibe, culture, we live in, I think we've been trained to not trust our emotions. We've been trained to perceive them as inconvenient. And our emotions are wise messengers. We developed emotions for a reason. We evolved to have emotions so they can signal to us, they can message to us our needs. And so that's where it starts with clients. It's asking them, how do you relate to your emotions? And often what I hear is, I ignore them..
Kimberly: They’re like, are the emotions In the room with us right now?
Maytal: Yeah, but it's like, exactly like you explain. It's like when I imagine someone just, like, carrying on with their lives, I imagine them as like stuffing down their emotions and not allowing themselves to feel it. And so when you start to listen into your emotions, you start to realize they're telling you some important stuff. Like, I'm not feeling anger for no reason. I'm feeling anger because my body is telling me. Hey, something is not right. Something needs to change. When I am riddled with sadness, I'm not feeling sadness for no reason. It's my body telling me hey, you need to go outside or like, hey, stop doom scrolling. Or the community of people you're spending time with is really making you unhappy. So I think that's where it has to start with like understanding that emotions are the language of the body. And that's why movement is so important because it helps us start to listen into our body and tune in to our body in ways that the culture neglects to teach us.
Kimbery: And of course, we're talking about the ways in which this journey can't be fought individually. I wonder if you could talk about some of the cultural changes or institutional changes that maybe you're enacting or you're hopeful for as people are moving through all of these things?
Maytal: I think the greatest change we need to see on the policy level is the medical system. For example, I think so much is coming out about the harms of postpartum and that period and how many complications occur. And there are solutions that the medical system can enact that can make a huge difference. If we, instead of women having a baby, and then becoming invisible and unseen by the medical system- so in many ways being forced to self silence- if we initiate more checkups, if we make sure that a new mom sees an occupational therapist. There's all these differences that can emerge on the policy level, and I would love to be able to contribute that. But right now it's about just starting this conversation.
Kimberly: Right? From both of us I'm hearing like, it's okay to say it plain. It's okay to take the time, to take very seriously some of the patterns that you're noticing. It is okay to, to sit with your disappointment, to sit in being disappointed. We just don't get those permissions. And, and, it's not always about these external confirmations, right?
Maytal: Totally. Yeah, I think anyone listening in, besides the advice I give about emotions being wise messengers, the other thing is like, boundaries are- all it means to put up boundaries is to state your needs. And I think there's this assumption that, like, boundary setting is inherently individualist or selfish. But that doesn't make any sense. We live in a time where we've never been more radically individualist and all of us suck at boundaries. So my advice to people is when you state your needs, you are taking care of yourself and in turn you are taking care of the people in your life, your friends, your loved one, your community, your family. So, be more disappointing because in some ways it is the least selfish thing you can do.
Kimberly: Can you talk about how you actively desilence yourself? How do you actively invite more room even in your personal life and the people in your network? Because of course, it's all about modeling.
Maytal: I think for a really long time I’ve dealt with relational perfectionism, is what I like to call it. This deep concern of making sure everyone around me likes me and is comfortable and is okay. And I'm not disappointing anyone. That has been so ingrained in me for a variety of reasons. I struggled with a pretty severe eating disorder for a long time, and I think that was deeply embedded in that. And I think where I'm at right now is just slowly really letting go of that relational perfectionism. And it's the smallest actions that allow me to do that. So recently, a dear friend canceled on a couple of plans a few times in a row. And I think an old version of me would have just allowed it to happen. Because I wouldn't wanna like, stir up conflict or make her uncomfortable or make her think anything negatively of me. It was the small act of being like, hey, I feel really upset that this keeps happening and I just want to let you know that. And I love you, but like, this isn't okay. And her response to me was so warm and so grateful and so appreciative of the feedback. And it was such like an aha moment for me. It's like when I express my needs, when I, like, tolerate the potential that they might be uncomfortable, when I tolerate that friction, so much growth emerges from that friction, so much energy comes out of that friction. So that's the journey I'm on for sure. It's just trying to temper that relational perfectionism that I think so many women experience, and that is expected of us.
Kimberly: Yeah. It's this enforced societal tidiness. It's like I have to tuck myself away. It's like that thing of, like, how many times a day do you say sorry? Do you know what I mean? It's like my bad, or, does that make sense? You know, these kinds of metronomic ways that we, we make ourselves tidy and make ourselves tolerable. It has to stop.
Maytal: Totally. Can I ask you, like, how do you feel. like you try to not self silence? What do you feel like you try to do? I'm so curious.
Kimberly: I'm in my early thirties. It is the great journey, I think, of that chapter of life as I've determined it for myself, but really trusting my intention. In these moments of okay, I am not saying this to hurt the other person. Trusting deeply, deeply, deeply that you are not moving with malintent. Then being able to say the thing that you need to say and then also knowing in this relationship if it is a significant one, that you are ready and have the capacity to do the aftercare, you cannot be so worried and distrusting of that relationship that you don't say what's on your mind because it is unfair to both parties.
Maytal: Oh my God, yes, 100%. And you know, that's making me think of like, we live in a culture that is so hostile to emotion and because we're so hostile to emotion, we’re hostile to, like feedback, we're hostile to expressing our honest selves to each other, when that is truly the greatest gift. Like, if someone loves me enough to tell me something that I'm doing wrong, which will make me feel uncomfortable, which might make me feel sad, but if we can get through that, that gift is amazing. So I just had this vision, as you were talking of, like us living in a culture where we felt comfortable feeling all emotions, whether they be shame or sadness or discomfort, but being able to tolerate it and move through it. What a world we would live in. And that's a very in some ways a feminine world.
Kimberly: I think these moments feel so charged and especially too, I think about an emotion like anger, which is one that every therapist I've ever had is like, well, what if you were angry? What if you were angry? And I'm like, but over the years of having these continued conversations and finding myself falling out of a comfort level with being enraged is that I realize that I am my most vulnerable when I'm angry. I'm almost liable to not move within the intentions that I, you know, I'm holding myself accountable to. It opens in many ways yourself up to so much more than just sitting with that discomfort that you were describing, sitting with the understanding that if you are in a continuum with the people in your family, in your community, that there is room for repair. I would so much rather everybody who is interacting with this podcast dedicates that reparative energy to these relationships, than to these longer health related consequences of the self silencing. And of course, these things happen. This is the body, our bodies age. This is all things that we need to normalize. But there is a way, hopefully, that we can move to a culture such that that tending is so much more towards these relations.
Maytal: Absolutely. When we are riddled with emotional or physical illness, whatever it might be. We don't have the energy to extend ourselves out to our relationships. So I love what you said. I completely agree.
Kimberly: I wonder if you could tell me. What it means to be unruly.
Maytal: Hmm. Just emotionally, like, messy sometimes. I'm in group therapy with all therapists. It's literally the best thing that's ever happened to me. I'm obsessed with it.
Kimberly: The real, the real house therapists-
Maytal: Of therapy, yes. It's the best thing that has ever happened to me. And they have given me this feedback where I try to be so almost mom-like, very together. And they’ve asked me, like, just be messier. We want that from you. Your messiness, your vulnerability is generous. So that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to be messier. I'm trying to be more vulnerable. Because what I've learned through my work, what I've learned through this group, is there's a generosity in that.
Kimberly: Maytal thank you so much for your work, for your commitment to your practice, and for the permission for messiness, for loudness, for robustness, because it's something that we all deserve.
Maytal: Thank you. So amazing to chat with you.
Kimberly: This conversation with Maytal is the perfect way to end season one Unruly, in which we have been looking at the different ways that women’s bodies are regulated. We’ve challenged them, we’ve upended them. But, as we’ve learned today, sometimes….we are the ones who regulate ourselves. It’s clear that the more that we work in unison together to shift these cultural norms, the healthier in mind and body we all might become. Who knew that so much of this starts in us, and depends on us to be as unruly as we can be. Thank you so very much for joining us yet again. It has been such a pleasure to be with you over the last eight weeks. I’m Kimberly Drew. For more information about today’s episode and more resources, visit shopflamingo.com/unrulypodcast.
Unruly is a podcast created by Anna Wesche and produced by Pineapple Street Studios in collaboration with Flamingo. Our associate producer is Marialexa Kavanaugh. Our lead producer is Natalie Brennan. Our mid episode profiles are produced by Sophie Bridges. Our managing producer is Kamilah Kashanie. Our editor is Darby Maloney. Our Head of Sound & Engineering is Raj Makhija. Our Senior Audio Engineers are Pedro Alvira and Marina Paiz. This episode was Mixed by Davy Sumner. Our Assistant Audio Engineers are Jade Brooks and Sharon Bardales, who also gave scoring assistance. Our Executive Producers are Je-Anne Berry and Aggi Ashagre. Our Music is from Epidemic Sounds.
Thank you again for listening. Signing off, I’m Kimberly Drew- your host. More soon.
