Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Healing the Witch Wound

Creativity has never been the issue for me.

I have loved to write since childhood. I have been self-publishing my books on Amazon for almost ten years. And yet, the people closest to me often do not even know when I have written something new.

For a long time, I told myself this was a confidence problem. But as my writing improved, that explanation stopped working. Even after years of publishing, each time I prepared to share new work, a deep, familiar fear resurfaced—an invisible barrier that lingered no matter how often I pressed publish.

That is why the Substack article Fear of Being Seen: The Witch Wound and How to Heal It resonated so immediately with me. The idea that visibility itself can feel unsafe was no longer abstract; it now had a name.

Being Seen Has Never Been Safe

For women, especially, visibility has never been safe.

Historically, being seen has led to backlash, punishment, and violence. When attention consistently results in harm, the nervous system adjusts. Avoidance becomes protection, and silence becomes strategy.

Over time, this fear becomes a wound. And like all wounds, it carries history, intelligence, and the possibility of healing.

Naming the Fear Across Disciplines

The experience of deep-rooted fear and self-protection can be described across disciplines, each providing a distinct perspective. Clinically, this is known as hypervigilance—a trauma response marked by heightened alertness, where the nervous system is constantly scanning for threat, often leading to anxiety and a feeling of being perpetually “on guard.”

From a literary standpoint, this phenomenon is described as being haunted, referring to the persistence of the past and the way unresolved trauma or memory continues to influence the present, even if it remains unnamed. Spiritually, this fear is often named the Witch Wound, capturing the collective and ancestral dimension of this experience.

What Is the Witch Wound?

The Witch Wound is a collective, intergenerational spiritual trauma rooted in centuries of punishing feminine power, intuition, sexuality, and spiritual authority. Even if it is not about something you have personally experienced, your body remembers it anyway. This is a shared wound born from historical witch hunts, religious extremism, and patriarchal oppression, living in both cellular and cultural memory. It is inherited from ancestors who were exiled, silenced, tortured, or killed for being healers, wise women, or simply “too much.”

The Witch Wound often shows up as:

• Fear of speaking honestly

• Shame around intuition or spiritual gifts

• The urge to dim your light or stay agreeable

It is the lingering self-suppression created by centuries of punishment for embodied feminine wisdom.

Silence is not a Survival Strategy.

“Your silence will not protect you.”

These words come from Audre Lorde’s essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action." In her essay, Lorde does not ask us to wait until we are fearless. She asks us to speak anyway.

She writes that when she was forced to confront her own mortality, what she regretted most were not the risks she took, but the words she never spoke. The things she postponed. The truths she kept repressed while planning to speak “someday.” Instead of keeping her safe, it led to a slow erosion of self.

Contextualize the Fear

Lorde urges us to understand the fear of being visible, acknowledging that while speaking up carries risks, remaining silent is even more dangerous. “The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger,” she wrote in that same essay.

The Witch Wound warns that visibility leads to harm, but Lorde reminds us that silence does not protect us—society will try to grind us down either way. The real choice is not between safety and speech, but between silence and life.

Every instance of speaking, even in fear, forges connection and begins to heal the wound. Healing does not require perfection or confidence, but it does require choosing to speak, even when it’s difficult. With every word, we break a silence that was never going to keep us safe.