A Healing Voice Has No Gender

For the past few days, I have been hearing Heal Me From Me by Nyssara repeatedly, and every time it plays I am taken back to the first time I heard it. I remember sitting there with tears pouring down my face because something within that song reached a part of me that already understood what it meant before I could properly explain it. It felt connected to trauma, healing and the realisation that sometimes the person we need healing from is not only somebody who hurt us, but the version of ourselves that was created while we were trying to survive what happened.

Then A Man Can Cry by Noah Nine began moving through my awareness too, and my thoughts started travelling somewhere else. Of course, it made me think about particular men and the things I know they have carried, but it also awakened that part of me that wants society to become more aware that men are allowed to feel. We speak so much about women finding their voices, healing their wounds and stepping into their power, yet there still seems to be something uncomfortable about a man openly admitting that he is frightened, heartbroken, traumatised or simply not coping.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this is not really about finding a male voice or a female voice. It is about finding a healing voice, because pain does not first stop to ask what gender we are before it enters our lives. Men can experience abuse, abandonment, manipulation, sexual trauma and the loneliness of raising children alone, but so much of it remains unspoken because they have been taught that sharing it will make them appear weak.

That does not mean I believe men should be excused when they cause harm, because anybody who does something wrong must face the consequences of their actions. What it means is that we should be capable of listening before we automatically decide who is the angel and who is the devil. Human beings are far too quick to choose a side without asking questions or taking the time to understand what actually happened, and recognising a man’s pain does not mean dismissing a woman’s pain. Compassion should be able to hold space for both.

As a mother of two sons, I have never wanted my boys to believe that being strong means becoming emotionally unreachable. I have taught them that anger, fear, sadness, frustration and happiness are all normal human feelings, but how we respond to those feelings is where responsibility begins. If they are angry, I want them to ask what has frustrated them before taking that anger out on somebody else. If they are upset, they are allowed to cry, let the emotion move through them and then talk about what happened, because I have never understood why laughter is considered an acceptable release while tears are treated as something shameful.

I have also wanted my sons to know that they are allowed to question me. If I have shouted or said no to something and they believe I am wrong, I want them to tell me why rather than quietly accepting it because I am their mother. I hate the phrase “because I said so,” because it closes down communication and teaches children that the person with the most authority does not have to explain themselves. I would rather they learnt how to speak up respectfully than become adults who allow somebody to railroad them simply because that person refuses to have an honest conversation.

At the same time, I do not automatically assume that my child must be telling the whole truth simply because they are mine. If something has happened, I ask questions and try to understand every side before deciding what I believe. My boys know that I will stand beside them, but they also know that if they have done something wrong, they will have to face the consequences. Giving them permission to express their emotions has never meant teaching them that those emotions excuse the way they treat other people.

I have tried to teach them to consider what somebody else may be carrying too, because we do not always know what pain sits behind another person’s behaviour. That does not mean accepting cruelty or remaining silent when somebody causes harm, but it does mean trying not to judge before we understand. To me, emotional strength is being able to recognise what you feel, communicate it honestly and still remain aware that the person in front of you has feelings of their own.

Perhaps raising my sons this way is part of the reason I feel so strongly when I see grown men who were never given that same freedom. If you are a man who has recently begun a healing journey, you may be facing trauma, unfairness or a lack of nurturing that you have carried silently for years. You may have spent your life believing that being male meant remaining tough, unapproachable and strong, and that providing for everybody around you was enough to hold everything together.

But providing does not replace emotional presence, and strength cannot always mean carrying everything alone. The moment you begin accepting that crying is as natural as laughing may be the moment you finally allow yourself to heal properly. You cannot work through feelings that you are still judging yourself for having, and you should not have to become cold or unreachable simply to prove that you are a man.

I think this is where so many relationships begin to struggle. A man may believe that he is doing everything expected of him because he works, provides and keeps his worries to himself, while his partner feels shut out because she cannot reach him emotionally. At the same time, he may feel deeply alone because nobody asks what it costs him to remain strong or whether he needs somewhere safe to place what he is carrying. Two people can love one another and still become lonely within the same relationship when neither knows how to cross that emotional distance.

This is also where women need to recognise that the man beside them may need nurturing and a safe space to be vulnerable. We often understand the importance of nurturing ourselves and our children, yet still expect our partners to remain the ones we go to for strength without considering where they are meant to go when they need support. If we encourage our children to bring their problems to us because we do not want them to suffer alone, why should the person sharing our life not be allowed to do the same?

I am talking here about healthy relationships in which vulnerability is expressed without abuse, threats or intimidation. Nobody should be expected to remain in a situation that makes them unsafe, and trauma can never become an excuse for harming another person. I am talking about the quieter moments when somebody finally says that they are frightened, overwhelmed or struggling and needs the person they love to listen without judging, laughing or immediately trying to shut the feeling down.

Nurturing a partner does not mean becoming their parent or taking responsibility for healing everything they have been through. Sometimes it begins with simply listening, asking why they feel that way and trying to understand where the feeling has come from. It also means taking the time to understand that both people entered the relationship carrying different childhoods, different experiences and different examples of what love and communication were supposed to look like.

This care has to move in both directions. A man who needs his partner to listen without judgement must be willing to offer her that same emotional safety when she needs it. It cannot become the woman’s responsibility to carry her own feelings, nurture the children and then take on the full weight of her partner’s healing as well. A healthy relationship is not one person endlessly pouring into the other; it is two people learning when to offer strength, when to receive support and how to stand beside one another without either person disappearing beneath the other’s needs.

This is why I do not believe masculinity and femininity should exist in a constant push and pull within a relationship. We each carry both masculine and feminine energy within us, regardless of gender, and our own spiritual healing asks us to find a healthier balance between the two. That balance also needs to exist between partners, where both people are allowed to offer strength, receive nurturing, communicate honestly and be vulnerable without feeling that they have failed at the role society assigned to them.

Understanding where we and our partners have come from is another important part of this. Many of our responses as adults were shaped by what we watched and learnt when we were young. If somebody grew up watching adults avoid difficult conversations, explode when challenged or disappear emotionally whenever life became uncomfortable, those responses can become familiar even when they are unhealthy. We can then find ourselves repeating the same patterns or feeling strangely comfortable around dynamics that resemble what we already know, not because they make us happy but because we learnt how to survive them.

Those patterns do not disappear simply because we meet somebody new. We can leave one relationship, walk into another and still recreate the same emotional situation because the unhealed cycle came with us. We do not need to be perfectly healed before we deserve love, but we do need to be willing to learn about ourselves, recognise our triggers and take responsibility for what we do when those triggers are activated.

Fear can keep the cycle alive in two completely different ways. It can make us run from a healthy connection because we are frightened of another person’s reaction, frightened of being truly seen or frightened of what genuine intimacy will ask us to reveal. It can also keep us in a familiar but unhealthy situation because remaining with what we already know feels easier than facing the uncertainty of what may come next.

Healing begins to change that when we stop allowing fear to decide the outcome before anything has had the chance to be communicated. Instead of immediately running, shutting down, lashing out or remaining stuck, we can pause and breathe while we look at what we are actually afraid of. That pause gives us time to recognise whether an old wound is reacting to the past or something within the present situation genuinely needs our attention.

This is where uncomfortableness becomes important too. As we heal, we begin learning what we genuinely like, what we do not like and what we are no longer willing to accept simply to keep somebody else comfortable. If we begin a new relationship and feel uncomfortable with what is expected from us, the role we are being placed into or the way we are beginning to lose ourselves, that feeling may be showing us where a boundary is needed.

For me, fear and intuition do not feel the same. Fear tends to arrive as an anxious, nervous feeling, while my intuition speaks through my heart, solar plexus or sacral chakra, and where I feel it helps me understand what the message may be connected to. Butterflies, excitement or an unexpected need to smile can tell me that something feels right, while rolling nausea, a change in my breathing or a heavier feeling can make me pause because something does not feel right or I sense that somebody I am connected to is having a difficult time.

That is my intuitive language, and somebody else’s may feel completely different. Spiritual healing is partly about learning how your own intuition communicates with you, while also taking physical symptoms seriously rather than assuming that every sensation has only a spiritual cause. The more we understand ourselves, the easier it becomes to recognise the difference between fear trying to repeat an old cycle and intuition asking us to notice what is happening now.

Perhaps society really does need a reboot, but that reboot will not begin by deciding whether men or women are more deserving of compassion. It begins in our homes, within our relationships and in the way we raise our children. It begins when we normalise nurturing, communication, laughter, tears and the freedom to express emotion without using it as an excuse to cause harm.

We do not need a patriarchal or matriarchal society in which one gender must become smaller for another to feel powerful. We need to recognise the strengths and weaknesses we all carry and learn how to work alongside one another with love, honesty and support. Healing has no gender, and neither does the need to feel heard, understood and safe enough to cry.

Those two songs arrived in my awareness because there was something within me ready to listen. One took me back to the tears that came when I recognised how deeply trauma can change us, while the other reminded me that tears belong to men too. Perhaps healing begins when we stop asking who is allowed to feel and finally give every human being permission to do so.

Sending you so much Light and Love

Cindy 💗🧚🏻‍♀️💜