When Silence Lives in the Body: An International Women’s Day Reflection

International Women’s Day is often filled with celebration — stories of strength, achievement, and progress. And those stories.

But there is another reality that sits quietly beneath many women’s lives.

Silence.

Not the peaceful kind, but the kind learned early. The kind that comes from knowing that speaking too loudly, asking for too much, or expressing anger might make things worse. So many women learn to smooth things over, to keep the peace, to hold their feelings inside.

Psychologists have a name for this: self-silencing — the habit of suppressing needs, emotions, or opinions in order to maintain relationships or avoid conflict.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that this silence does not stay only in the mind.

Research is now linking self-silencing to serious health consequences. Chronic stress responses, autoimmune conditions, digestive disorders, cardiovascular problems, and depression have all been connected to long periods of emotional suppression. When anger, fear, or pain are continually held back, the body remains in a state of internal stress, with elevated cortisol and adrenaline slowly taking their toll.

Trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk writes in his book The Body Keeps the Score:

“Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies.”

It’s a simple sentence, but it explains so much.

When the nervous system learns that the world is unsafe, the body does not easily relax. Silence may protect us in the moment, but over time the body carries the weight of everything that was never said.

Many women are still living with that weight.

International Women’s Day is not only about celebrating women’s voices in public spaces. It is also about recognising how many women have spent years — sometimes decades — learning to quiet their own.

Breaking self-silencing is not always dramatic. It doesn’t always look like a protest or a speech.

Sometimes it begins quietly.

Saying no when we mean no.

Expressing anger without apology.

Writing the truth in a journal.

Speaking honestly in a conversation that once felt impossible.

These small acts are not just emotional. They are physical acts of healing. They tell the nervous system that it is no longer necessary to stay silent in order to survive.

On this International Women’s Day, alongside the celebrations and achievements, there is another quiet form of empowerment worth honouring:

Women learning to trust their voices again.

Because sometimes the most radical thing a woman can do is simply refuse to stay silent any longer.