The Power of Being Heard is about having a voice and how it can invigorate your life, build satisfying relationships and change the world.
Katy’s funny, vivid, honest stories and helpful tools for simple, easy to remember ways to have conversation in conflict will help you, even while sweating through it. Her stories about the cost of unspoken words will inspire you to speak up and listen more respectfully, even when you don’t want to.
Katy became passionate about the reparative power of working through conflict growing up in a family with deadly silences or verbal attacks and criticisms. Through divorce and broken friendships she wondered why personal and political separation, strife and isolation was so rampant.
Witnessing, as a psychotherapist for forty years, the renewed vigor and intimacy possible from building better communication and understanding between couples and families formerly in anguish, she has seen transformations that were more widely possible. These partners often started out with radiant love, then devolved into threadbare tires, going round and round the same arguments with no resolution – before learning, what Katy calls, “relationship 101.” This miraculous shift seemed possible on the globe as well.
Katy admits, nobody wants to enter scary conversations, not even her. “Why bother,” she asks candidly? “Pick your battles,” it’s not your problem that your sister or neighbors are rude. Our natural instinct is to attack or walk away. What we forget is the soothing relief, new safety and circulation in our bodies and the body of the world when we find ways to get along. The problem is that we leave a hole in the fabric of our communities when we don’t bridge gaps, leaving us wearing an itchy sweater.
Any small act of having a voice takes risk, it is the ultimate bravery. “My aim is to encourage this essential paradigm shift, from allowing power over us, to the new narrative – the heroic power of being heard.”