When Being Seen Feels Like a Threat (Part 1)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
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a member fd see. So you're about to unmute yourself
on the zoom call. Your idea is solid, you have

(02:11):
rehearsed it three times, and you know what you're going
to and what you need to say. But the second
your hand hovers over that button, your throat tightens, your
heart races, your mind goes blink, and you think maybe
someone else should say. Maybe I'll sound stupid, Maybe I'm

(02:31):
too nervous and I'll just hesitate.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
Maybe it would be too much, maybe not enough. Who
do I think I am? Anyway, So you stay muted.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
You type your idea in the chat instead, and someone
else reads it out loud and everyone loves it, and
you sit there thinking, why couldn't I just say it?
Here's what I invite you to process. This is not
a confidence problem. This is your visability wound because your

(03:02):
body learned very very early, very very clearly, that being
seen is dangerous, that speaking up invites criticism, that visibility
costs you safety. And until you understand that this is
happening to your nervous system, not just to your mind,

(03:22):
you're going to keep white knuckling your way through presentations
while your body screams danger, danger, danger.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
You know it's going to.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
Be an alert system just telling you it's dangerous. Today,
we're going to talk about why being seen feels like
a threat, what's actually happening in your body when visibility
activates your nervous system, and where this wound really actually
comes from. Because spoiler alert, it didn't start with you.

(03:50):
So bum guorubyez this cefakombam.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
Let's do this.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
So your visibility wounds are not about lacking confidence. They're
about your nervous system that learned being seen equals being criticized, judged,
or even abandoned. And when cultural trauma lives in visibility.
When you've been taught that good girls say quiet, that

(04:18):
speaking up is disrespectful, or that your accent marks you
as other, your body's threat response is not necessarily that
you're losing your mind. Your body's threat response. It's actually smart,
it's intelligent, it's working for you. And the work is
not to just be more confident. The work is to

(04:40):
give your nervous system a new information. It's to give
your nervous system new data which is being seen can
be safe. So that's what we're gonna explore today and
the next episode in two weeks. Episode I'm going to
give you some practical steps to start to your body.

(05:00):
This truth by a Brimeto. We need to understand what's
actually happening. This is part one of two, So I'm
breaking this episode into two because there's so much information
that I think it's important for us to break it
down first and then move into the second part. So
what exactly is the visibility wound and my body of work,

(05:22):
my methodologies. I talk about the five wounds of Kaieta culture.
And if you're new here, Kaieta culture is conditioning the
top first generation women like us to stay small, to
stay silent, to be compliant. Not because our parents met harm.
It's never to blame our parents or grandparents or whoever.

(05:44):
It's because silence was literally how they survived, and one
of the five wounds is the wound of worse. Usually
it shows up as struggles with value and visibility. And
this is what happens when you learn that being seen
being just when you internalize the message that taking up
space was actually dangerous, when you figure out, probably before

(06:07):
you can even name it, that safe that the safest
version of you was the smallest version of you. I know.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
And here's the thing.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
This wound doesn't show up as I have low self esteem.
It shows up as over preparing, as rehearsing what you're
going to say forty seven times before you're meeting, as
waiting to feel ready before you raise your hand, before
you ask for the promotion, before you ask for more money.
Except that ready, I was going to say, never comes,

(06:39):
We're ready?

Speaker 2 (06:40):
Has you always have been ready?

Speaker 1 (06:42):
It also shows up as knowing your idea is good,
but you still look around the room to see if
someone else will say it first. This is not a
confidence gap, it's a visibility wound. So the story of
You're Gonna Mute Yourself that I started telling it the
beginning that was me.

Speaker 2 (07:02):
I was sitting at a.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
Meeting and there were a lot of people very smart
people in that meeting, and someone asked for feedback, and
I was actually invited to be a mentor for a
group of business owners and somebody the business owners would
present their business and then we would give them feedback.

(07:26):
And so I had ideas on how this business could
improve in so many ways. But my throat started tightening,
my mind was going blank, my heart started racing when
I was about to unmute myself, and instead of speaking freely,
I just still decided to unmut myself because I was

(07:50):
kind of like it was one of those like all
the mentors went and everyone looked at me, like you
don't have nothing, you have nothing else to say, or
do you have anything to add? And finally I was
like okay, and my comment was minimized by me, not
even by others. And because when I decided to finally
speak up at the end, I was so insecure and

(08:11):
I was it felt over rehearsed, and it just didn't
feel like me.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
And knowing what I know.

Speaker 1 (08:21):
Is that my body was simply responding to what it
perceived as a threat, which was not the fact that
I didn't know or I was lacking knowledge. Is that
the environment that I was in was a threat for
my body. So now let's talk about where this wound
actually comes from, because.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
We already know this. You didn't start it.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
If you grew up Latina, you probably heard some version
of this phrase. Kay was masona. You look prettier when
you're quiet. And this is more than a referend This
is more than a saying. It's a cultural script that's
been passed down for literal generations as author Ismelda Aaron writes,

(09:05):
Latin Us have heard this phrase regardless of socioeconomic status,
country of origin, or educational background. This phrase is embedded
in the roots of Latin American culture. This idea that
a woman's beauty is tied to her silence and compliance.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
And here's what's wild, this.

Speaker 1 (09:26):
Idea, this principle goes way back. Historians note that even
in pre Hispanic times, girls were raised to be, as
one Franciscan missionary documented quote blind, deaf, and mute end quote.
The silencing of women is ancient, and your body carries

(09:50):
that inheritance. But here's another layer. If that wasn't enough,
especially for those of us who are first gens, our
parents taught us to stay under the radar because that's
what kept them safe. Drawing attention could invite discrimination, being targeted,
being told to quote, go back where you came from.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
For some families, visibility meant risk for deportation. For others
and meant social consequences. And I would say, it's still
dust to this date, more so now the times that
we are living in when I'm recording this twenty twenty five.
So invisibility became survival, and you inherited the nervous system template.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
It's a mold.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
And this is what researchers call intergenerational trauma. According to
a scope and review published in Social Science and Medicine,
Latines Latinos Latinas Latin Latins are particularly vulnerable to intergenerational
trauma due to legacies of colonialism, political violence, and migration

(10:55):
related stressors. The collective trauma carries for not just in
our stories, but in our bodies. Doctor Rachel Rahuda's research
on international transmission of trauma shows how a parent's fear
can literally become a child's nervous system baseline. So when

(11:16):
you freeze before speaking up, it's not your body responding
simply to this moment, it's your body responding to generations
of data points that we have in our.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
Bodies that say being seen is not safe. So don't
take it as weakness.

Speaker 1 (11:32):
It's simply biology meeting history. It's data the body. I've
been saying this, it always goes back to the familiar.
It's biology meeting history. And here's another piece of this
that I want to make sure I name, because for
many of us, visibility is not just about being seen.

Speaker 2 (11:53):
It's also about being heard.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
It's about how we sound. Gloria and Saldua, the brilliant
Chicana scholar that we all know about and if you don't,
please go to some research, wrote about something she called
linguistic terrorism. In her book Borderlands La Fronda. She described
how Chicano, Spanish, and frankly any language that's not standard

(12:20):
English gets attacked, the legitimized, and that is how we
internalize the attack.

Speaker 2 (12:26):
But Ojuana, she wrote.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
About being scolded for her accent, being told her Spanish
wasn't proper enough, being corrected and criticized for how she spoke,
and she named what that creates low self esteem, shame,
and a diminished sense of self.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
So, if you've.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
Ever been corrected on your pronunciation, mocked, for your accent
or told quote speak English. Your nervous system learned how
you sound, determined whether you are safe. So every time
you speak up, there's an underlying calculation happening in your brain,
in your body, saying, will my voice mark me as

(13:08):
other as less than as not belonging here? And this
happens even among ourselves. Research from the University of Texas
Rio Grande Valley shows that young Latin adults experience linguistic
terrorism from both English speakers.

Speaker 2 (13:28):
And Spanish speakers.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
They're told their English isn't American enough and told their
Spanish isn't Mexican or brown enough. And as we know,
they're caught in between worlds.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
We all are.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
So when you hesitate before speaking up, there's a part
of you calculating which version of my state myself is
safe to show, which accent is acceptable here, and which
words are they going to understand. This happens to me often.

Speaker 2 (13:59):
This is why I.

Speaker 1 (14:01):
Sometimes I say things and it's my because I I mean,
that's how they come. And I know the people that
listen to me, and I'm focused on my listener, whom
I know will understand the few words here and there.
But if I'm in a corporate meeting. If I am
in a different space, it's different. It's the safety piece

(14:26):
gets a little bit more reduced depending on the environment.
And it's not imposter phenomenon.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
Maybe it is the way that I.

Speaker 1 (14:34):
See it is the way of navigating multiple worlds while
your nervous system tries to keep you safe in.

Speaker 2 (14:38):
All of them. It's a lot, It's a lot.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
Okay, So now that we understand where this comes from,
let's talk about what's actually happening in your body when
visibility feels threatening. Because here's what most confidence work gets wrong.
It treats this like a mindset problem. Just think positive,
fake it till you make it, believe in yourself, but

(15:03):
you can't think your way out of your nervous system response.
Doctor Stephen Porgis developed something called polyvagal theory that explains this.
Before his work, we mostly understood the stress response as
fight or flight. When you face a threat, you either fight.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
It or you run from it.

Speaker 1 (15:22):
Batto. Doctor Stephen identified a third response. Doctor Porgis identified
a third response freeze. And this is what happens when
fighting seems dangerous and flean is in't an option. Your
nervous system essentially shuts down. It's a survival mechanism, one
of the most ancient ones we have. And here's how

(15:45):
it works. In a visibility moment. But he meto, you're
a migdala or alarm system, the threat detection detector, and
our brain picks up potential danger. And I do this
every time I talk about the amygdalabrity because I imagine, like
I don't know, like this, like flag almost that's always

(16:08):
constantly looking at scanning all the information is like a scanner.
That's the way that I imagine the amygdala. And so our friend,
the amygdala, picks up on potential danger and wanting to
note and or remember. Is that the amygdala loves historical data.

(16:29):
The amygdala loves going through the archives and saying, what
does this feel familiar to? And that data for the
amygdala says that being seen.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Equals being judged.

Speaker 1 (16:43):
No matter else, your sympathetic nervous system activates. That is
your fight or flight. This is when your heart rate increases,
when your breadth breathing gets shallow, when your body prepares to.

Speaker 2 (16:55):
Respond to a threat.

Speaker 1 (16:58):
Because remember, the body does an that it's not a
bear chasing you or that is simply a notification that
you just received. For the body, it's the familiar feeling
of history that it's connecting it to.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
Here's the issue.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
You can't fight your way through a team meeting and
you can't run out of a presentation. So what happens
You freeze. Your nervous system hits the brake so hard
you feel immobile, You feel like you cannot move, and
doctor Porgees calls this dorsal vagel shutdown. It's your body's

(17:35):
last resort, survivable strategy. And here's the piece that explains
so much. When you're in doors or vago shutdown, your
frontal cortex, your decision thinking, you're planning, you're articulating. Part
of your brain literally say says I'm out. That's the
part of the brain. In psychology they call it when

(17:57):
your hood gets lifted. So basically like this part is
like I'm going on vacation, offline shut down done, and
you literally cannot access your words. It's happened to me
many times, and that's why you can rehearse something perfectly
thirty times and then go completely blank in the meeting,

(18:20):
because it's not that you forgot, it's the part of
the brain that holds the words simply took a break,
and that's how your nervous system.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
Perceives this threat. So I have a.

Speaker 1 (18:31):
Client story of one of my clients who, instead of
in her case, instead of being silent because you know
the wounds, the five wounds of Kadia, the culture you
could be under developed in them, are overcompensated, and in
her case, she was on the overside. So she would

(18:54):
over prepare, like over prepared to the point where I
would she would tell me that she would go into
this meeting and she had like stacks of literal stacks
of like emails and like she would come with the
receipts for everything, because she held a pretty high title

(19:15):
in the company that she worked at, and in case
somebody needed to come after her, she needed to bring
all the receipts.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
So she was over prepared.

Speaker 1 (19:27):
And as she would be in these meetings and people
would question, then she would fiddle through the paper, like
the over preparing of notes and papers and things that
she brought in, she would completely lose the actual like
she didn't need to have paper to prove her work.

(19:52):
But she became this overprepared because her body would go
into freeze and she would forget. She would go her
mind would go blank, and then she would be like,
I have no data, I have no evidence of the
work that I have done, because her brain is just
like out. When we worked through her body response and

(20:14):
when we did some exercises to make sure that her
safety piece first and foremost was addressed, that's when she
realized it wasn't that she was failing. It wasn't that
she wasn't smart enough. It wasn't that she didn't know enough.
It wasn't that she wasn't prepared. It's simply that it
was her nervous system responding. And so when she understood

(20:39):
that this wasn't about her competence, then right before a meeting,
she was able to do some exercises to make sure
that she was calm. She like, we did so much,
and we also worked in her certainty because we needed
to create new evidence in her brain to let her

(21:00):
brain know that this meeting that it was like a
weekly meeting that the team had, was not a you're
gonna die threat, you know, It was simply a check in.
It was simply a how is your team going doing
with this project? And she simply had to say a
very simple report, Are you in progress?

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Are you stuck?

Speaker 1 (21:23):
Do you need help with anything? Those were like literally
the questions, and so once she was able to tune
into the foundation of where she didn't feel safe, we
were able to go into her subconscious to explore where
that feeling of unsafety came from. She was six years

(21:45):
old when something happened in her life, and then we
were able to shift that to reprogram that from a
subconscious level, and then adult self was able to show
up to those meetings in a very different way because
the evidence that her brain have had the amygdala was
no longer going back to that moment when the traumatic

(22:06):
thing happened, saying see, when you speak up, you're not safe,
you get in trouble. So that was a really cool
transformation that we were able to achieve by creating awareness
around first and foremost to body. Your body is simply responding.
And then we explored why this happened, and we chose

(22:29):
she chose to rewrite this story and give her her
body safety so she could show up in the best
way possible. And now she runs the meetings and it's
like I'm like, who are you when she tells you
how to it's great. So now, for first gen folks
and anyone navigating multiple cultural contects, there's an additional layer

(22:51):
here that compounds everything we've talked about, and this is
what we all know. It's called code switching. And according
to the Society of Human for Human Resource Management, sixty
six percent of Latinos report having to code switch at work.
More than half sixty six percent of us have to
code switch at work. This means we have to adjust

(23:12):
our language, our behavior, and our presentation based on who
we are with. But here's what the research also shows.
Code switching is cognitively exhausting. A study published in the
journal Effective Science found that sustained code switching adds significant
cognitive load and reinforces what they called quote self productive

(23:36):
quote behavior. The researchers noted that noted that code switching
leads to reduced opportunities for authentic self presentation, increased emotional effort.

Speaker 2 (23:48):
And stress.

Speaker 1 (23:51):
So when you're about to speak up in a meeting,
you're not just deciding what to say, you're deciding how
to say it, which version of yourself is safe to show,
and which references will land. How many of you have
had tavel Loo in your head and you're in a meeting,
You're like, yeah, nobody's gonna get it, and so then
you have to switch to like an English show, which

(24:12):
I never have them, so I just don't bring any references.
But it's exhausting. Also, you may think whether your accent
is noticed, whether you're gonna pronounce pronounce words good. I'm
pretty sure I've done so many miss pronunciations today just
like that, And it is what it is. The constant
translation exhausts your nervous system before you even open your mouth.

(24:35):
There's a lot of thinking and processing we have to
do before we even act on it. And that's when
your nervous system feels so depleted. Because when you are
already under resourced, when you're already tired, then it's so
much easier for your body to tip into freeze. It's
so much easier for your body to be like, let

(24:57):
me just like freeze. There's no more energy there. And
this is why visibility feels so much harder for us.
We're not just managing the moment, we're managing centuries of conditioning,
intergenerational patterns, linguistic navigation, and cultural translations. Timbo, all in

(25:20):
real time, all while trying to make a point about
Q three projections. No wonder, your throat closes up. And
here's one more piece. I know, I keep saying one more,
one more, one more piece I want to name before
we close today's episode. I promise this is the last one.
When you're the only or one of the few Latinos

(25:42):
in the room, visibility feels different. It's not just what
will they think of me? It's what will they think
about all of us based on what I say? Finding this,
reading about this, I was like, holy moly. Because research
on something called stereotype threat, which was pioneered by psychologists

(26:05):
Cloud Steal at Stanford, shows that this is real. When
people are aware of negative stereotypes about their group, their
performance suffers not because of lack of ability, but because
of the additional cognitive burden of warrying about confirming those stereotypes.
One study found that Latin students chose easier problems when

(26:28):
they were told a test measured mathematical ability, but not
when the same test was framed as a simple problem
solving exercise. Because what happened there is that the framing
is what activated the threat, and the threat is what
then moved the students to change their choices. And it's

(26:50):
not a paranoia. It's not that you are just like.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
Being paranoid.

Speaker 1 (26:56):
It's truly it's the reality of being in spaces when
you're present is still considered exceptional, when you're just not
representing yourself but caring the weight of the entire community
you come from every time you open your mouth. Of course,
your body learned to be careful about visibility because the

(27:16):
stakes have always been higher.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
So here's where we are.

Speaker 1 (27:24):
Your visibility wound is real, and it makes sense. It
makes sense because of gay the culture, because the generations
of conditioning that taught women like us to stay small.
It makes sense because of intergenerational trauma, the way your
parents' survival strategies became your nervous system default setting. It

(27:45):
makes sense because of linguistic terrorism, the way your voice
and accent have been policed and judged for generations. It
makes sense because of code switching, its exhaustion, the cognitive
load of constant translating yourselves between worlds. And it makes
sense because of stereotype threat, the weight of representing more

(28:09):
than just yourself every time you speak. So we're not broken.
We're simply protecting ourselves based on old information. Yahagan, we
get to give our bodies new information.

Speaker 2 (28:28):
And this is what the two.

Speaker 1 (28:30):
Episodes from now are gonna be all about. So are
you gonna be on the episode title Part one and
part two so you'll know which one it is. We
don't do back to back episodes because we do an
episode a guest in between. So two episodes from now,
we're going to talk about a practice I call the
first three minutes of visibility, and it's a way to
build safety in your nervous system in small doses your

(28:54):
body and your can actually handle. Because I believe confidence
is not something you may manufacture through willpower. I believe
confidence is something that emerges when your nervous system feels safe,
and when you can teach your body that visibility can
be safe, slowly, gently, and one micro moment at a time.

(29:15):
Believe me, I've been doing this for nine years and
finally I feel like I can be visible.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
So I'm my.

Speaker 1 (29:22):
First always my first project. So if this episode resonated,
or if you recognize your visibility wound and what we
talked about today, I would love for you to let
me know and I invite you to take the Kayita
culture quiz. So I have a quiz govacompalm dot com

(29:43):
for a slash quiz where you can take the kaya
Hita culture quiz. Uncover your wound, the one that's running
your life at the moment, because one thing, I will say,
healing begins on the other side of awareness. You cannot heal,
you cannot.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Name if visibility is your wound. You're not alone.

Speaker 1 (30:03):
I'm right there with you, promise, and we're not broken.
We're just learning, maybe for the first time, that being
seen doesn't have to cost us our safety because our
truth is our medicine. And even when our voice shakes,
even when our hands tremble, especially when your voice shakes. Actually,

(30:28):
that's probably really important to voice our truth and our power.
What thank you so much listeners for being here. SAM
is created by our small but mighty team. Content production

(30:52):
by Nancy Kaimes, podcast management by Marulinardi, social media and
marketing by Brenda Figuero and your host Vampko. To keep
the Kavasito brewing and the healing flowing, join the Supporters
Club for only five dollars a month and access early
episodes behind the scenes vibes and exclusive minnesotes you won't

(31:14):
hear anywhere else. Screenshot this episode and tag me and
share what resonated.

Speaker 2 (31:19):
I love seeing your takeaways.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Follow on your favorite podcast platform and subscribe to our
YouTube channel. Let's keep the conversation going with us on
social media at Kapa Compump podcast because your voice always
matters there.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
We love being on Instagram and Facebook.

Speaker 1 (31:35):
Grasias for listening to Kafa combum has spread ideas, move people,
production for Bird episodes, guest info or resources, visit.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
Kefakombum dot com.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
And if you're healing from Kadiehta culture and don't know
where to start, you can take the quiz gafa coombum
dot com Ford Slash Quiz for Tia Wisdom and Kaarino
just for you

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When Being Seen Feels Like a Threat (Part 1)

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