Taking Back My Voice: Reclaiming My Power

By Dr. Wil Rodriguez for TOCSIN Magazine

“Taking Back My Voice” is the first in a weekly article series based on the book The Respect Shift, written by Dr. Wil Rodriguez. Each piece is drawn from a chapter of the book and forms part of an unfolding campaign of healing, clarity, and empowerment. Every week, we’ll publish one article unpacking a chapter—a steady journey toward reclaiming the voice, dignity, and worth that our toxic relationships try to erase.

There’s a moment when you realize you’ve been holding your breath for months. Maybe years. Not literally, but emotionally — walking through your days with shoulders tensed, words carefully measured, waiting for the next dismissal, the next eye roll, the next time someone makes you feel like your very existence is an inconvenience.

I call this the moment of recognition. It’s when the fog lifts just enough for you to see that what you’ve been calling “difficult” or “complicated” has a name: disrespect. And more importantly, it has an antidote.

The Invisible Architecture of Diminishment

Disrespect rarely announces itself with fanfare. It doesn’t kick down your door or leave visible marks. Instead, it moves like smoke — seeping into the spaces between words, settling into the pause that lingers too long after you speak, crystallizing in the shrug that greets your pain.

It’s the joke made at your expense, followed immediately by accusations of being “too sensitive.” It’s your legitimate concerns being labeled as “drama.” It’s being told to “calm down” when what you really need is to be heard. These aren’t personality quirks or communication styles — they’re precision instruments designed to make you smaller.

What makes this particularly insidious is how it masquerades as normal relationship friction. After all, every relationship has its challenges, right? But there’s a crucial difference between conflict and systematic erosion of your sense of self. One seeks resolution; the other seeks submission.

The Neurobiology of Being Dismissed

Here’s what nobody tells you about chronic disrespect: it rewrites your brain. When you’re consistently invalidated, your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between emotional and physical threat. Your amygdala — that ancient alarm system — starts firing as if you’re being chased by a predator, even when you’re just trying to have a conversation about your feelings.

The stress hormones that flood your system during these interactions don’t just disappear when the conversation ends. They accumulate. They alter your sleep patterns, compromise your immune system, and keep you in a state of hypervigilance that’s exhausting to maintain but impossible to turn off.

Your body keeps the score, as trauma researcher Dr. Bessel van der Kolk reminds us. And the score it’s keeping includes every dismissal, every minimization, every time your reality was questioned until you began to question it yourself.

The Gaslighting Disguised as Good Intentions

Perhaps the cruelest aspect of emotional disrespect is how it hides behind plausible deniability. “I didn’t mean it that way.” “You’re being too emotional.” “You’re misinterpreting everything I say.” These phrases don’t just dismiss your experience — they make you doubt your own perception of reality.

This is gaslighting in its most common and devastating form. Not the dramatic movie version where someone is deliberately trying to drive you insane, but the everyday erosion of your confidence in your own mind. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts, each one so small that you can’t quite justify calling it abuse, but collectively lethal to your sense of self.

The person doing this might not even be conscious of the pattern. But consciousness isn’t required for damage. Impact doesn’t depend on intention.

From Self-Advocacy to Self-Doubt

The progression is predictable and heartbreaking. You start strong — advocating for yourself, setting boundaries, expressing your needs clearly. But each time you’re met with dismissal, mockery, or that particular brand of exasperation that makes you feel like you’re the problem, something inside you recalibrates.

You begin to pre-edit your words. You apologize before you’ve even spoken. You accept treatment that makes your skin crawl because you’re too exhausted to explain why it’s wrong, and frankly, you’re no longer sure your judgment can be trusted.

This isn’t weakness — it’s a trauma response. Your nervous system, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that it’s safer to shrink than to fight. Safer to disappear than to risk another confrontation that leaves you feeling crazy.

The Respect You Give Versus the Respect You Get

Here’s the most painful irony: in relationships where you’re consistently disrespected, you often find yourself working harder to understand, accommodate, and forgive the other person. Your empathy increases as theirs decreases. You give third, fourth, tenth chances, hoping that your loyalty will eventually earn you basic human decency.

But respect isn’t something you can earn through good behavior. It’s not a reward for being easy to deal with or a prize for never causing problems. Respect is the baseline — the foundation upon which healthy relationships are built.

When someone consistently treats you with contempt while expecting your continued patience and understanding, they’re not loving you. They’re training you.

Recognizing the Invisible Bruises

There’s no MRI that can detect a fractured sense of self. No blood test that reveals chronic emotional invalidation. But the symptoms are there if you know where to look:

• You second-guess every decision, no matter how small

• You flinch at certain tones of voice, even from other people

• You apologize reflexively, even when you’ve done nothing wrong

• You feel responsible for other people’s emotions while your own go unacknowledged

• You’ve developed an almost supernatural ability to read moods and adjust accordingly

These aren’t character flaws — they’re adaptations. Survival strategies developed in response to an environment where your emotional safety was constantly under threat.

The Anatomy of True Respect

Real respect isn’t complicated. It doesn’t require advanced degrees in psychology or years of therapy to recognize. It looks like:

• Being listened to without interruption or immediate correction

• Having “no” accepted as a complete sentence

• Your emotions being met with curiosity rather than criticism

• Your boundaries being honored, not negotiated

• Mistakes being addressed without character assassination

• Conflicts being about the issue at hand, not your inherent flaws as a person

If these basic demonstrations of human decency feel foreign or unrealistic to you, that’s not a reflection of your expectations being too high. It’s evidence of how low the bar has been set in your relationships.

The Slow Return to Self

Healing from chronic disrespect isn’t about building thicker skin or learning to communicate better. Those suggestions place the burden of change on the person who’s been harmed, implying that if you were just stronger or clearer, the disrespect would stop.

The real work is about returning to yourself — not the version of you that learned to walk on eggshells, but the one who remembers their own worth. The one who knows that needing respect isn’t needy, that having boundaries isn’t selfish, that taking up space isn’t a crime.

This return isn’t linear. Some days you’ll feel strong and clear about what you deserve. Other days, the old patterns of self-doubt will creep in, whispering that maybe you really are too sensitive, too demanding, too much.

On those days, remember this: You were never too much. You were simply in spaces that needed you to be less.

The Revolution of Self-Respect

Taking your voice back isn’t just about speaking up in the moment (though that’s part of it). It’s about the deeper revolution of believing that your inner experience matters. That your feelings are valid data, not inconvenient noise. That your needs are legitimate, not burdensome requests.

It’s about understanding that people who truly care about you won’t need you to provide a dissertation on why their behavior hurt you. They won’t make you prove that your pain is justified. They’ll care because you care. They’ll adjust because your wellbeing matters to them.

And for those who don’t? For those who meet your requests for basic respect with eye rolls, defensiveness, or accusations that you’re being dramatic? Their response tells you everything you need to know about their capacity for genuine connection.

Your Voice Was Never the Problem

The world may have taught you to whisper when you should speak, to apologize when you should stand firm, to doubt when you should trust your own experience. But your voice — that authentic expression of who you are beneath all the conditioning — was never the problem.

The problem was a world that needed you quiet to feel comfortable. People who needed you small to feel big. Systems that required your diminishment to maintain their power.

But you’re not required to stay small for anyone’s comfort. You’re not obligated to whisper in a world that needs to hear what you have to say.

Your voice matters. Your experience is valid. Your respect is non-negotiable.

And taking it back isn’t just healing for you — it’s revolutionary.

Follow the Series on TOCSIN Magazine

This article is part of an ongoing weekly series. Follow along through TOCSIN Magazine, where each piece is a mirror, a movement, and a message that you are not alone—and never too much.

We will soon announce where to find the book The Respect Shift by Dr. Wil Rodriguez, for those interested in reading it in full.

Let this be more than a reading—

Let it be a reclaiming.

A call.

A TOCSIN. (tocsinmag.com)