#141 From Silenced to Empowered: Reclaiming One’s Authentic Voice

Transcript of Interview

Find Your Voice, Change Your Life Podcast

Podcast Host: Dr. Doreen Downing

Free Guide to Fearless Speaking: Doreen7steps.com

Episode #141 Linda Dieffenbach

“From Silenced to Empowered: Reclaiming One’s Authentic Voice”

(00:00) Doreen Downing: Hi, this is Dr. Doreen Downing, host of the Find Your Voice, Change Your Life podcast. Today I have a new friend. This is something that I love about my podcast is that often I’ve had some conversations back and forth, but never in person. And actually, this isn’t really in person, but it feels like it, nowadays that we’re doing Zoom. Hi, Linda. 

(00:25) Linda Dieffenbach: Hi, thank you for having me on. 

(00:27) Doreen Downing: Yes, I’m going to introduce you and have a bio that you sent that I’d like to read out loud. Linda Dieffenbach is a devoted and empathic personal transformation coach and holistic practitioner. She is deeply committed to assisting individuals in overcoming the detrimental effects of trauma and toxic conditioning, while guiding them towards self-actualization. 

Linda’s personal healing journey from childhood trauma led her to recognize the transformative potential of Reiki, sparking her enthusiasm for holistic healing practices. 

Leveraging her background in social work, Linda offers a distinctive approach that blends trauma awareness, energy healing expertise, compassionate guidance, and intuitive assistance to empower her clients in attaining clarity, self-awareness, and self-empowerment on their healing and personal growth pathways. 

Oh, Linda, this is just a wonderful mixed array. I feel like I just opened up a basket and it’s springtime here in California and I feel like, look at all these wonderful blooms and blossoms. This is great. Look at what you’ve been able to do and what you bring.

I love some of what you wrote about the compassionate guidance. I feel like that’s something that we bring to creating moments or environments for people to feel like they’re safely guided. 

And then the intuitive. Ooh, I look forward to uncovering a lot more about you today. 

(02:23) Linda Dieffenbach: Thank you. It’s been a wonderful journey and I find that compassion is, as you said, it’s one of the most important pieces to bring to the table when you’re supporting people, because it does create safety, creates space, and opens the opportunity for them to just be where they are and not feel like they have to be something different and have expectations upon them.

That’s such an important part of what I do, and it’s been an important part of my own healing journey as well, is to be surrounded by compassion so that I could be free. 

(02:52) Doreen Downing: Yes, where I’m starting is usually about getting into your early history, but I like where we’re starting right now because I just read something about the difference and made me feel the difference between those of us who are more listening as opposed to coaching. “Do it better. Quicker. Get on the ball and start rolling through life.” 

This listening. “When somebody listens to me, I can feel my pain, and my pain begins to move naturally” as opposed to “I got to push myself out of my pain.”

I know it’s two sides of the same coin of healing, but so far I really love hearing what you do around being with people in such a way that they feel seen and heard. That’s lovely. 

(03:41) Linda Dieffenbach: Thank you. There’s a quote I heard once and I do not remember who said it. I heard it through somebody else, but I don’t remember who originally said it. Being listened to is so close to being loved that for most people, it’s virtually indistinguishable.

(03:54) Doreen Downing: Oh, my body just got all sorts of little tingles. Every now and then I just feel like, wow, this is a person, a woman, a being who really knows something deep. And I feel like I’m already learning from you. Not only do my listeners get nourished, but I also get some goodies. Thank you.

(04:15) Linda Dieffenbach: You’re welcome. Thank you. 

(04:17) Doreen Downing: But there is a journey. I was going to say you didn’t pop out like this, but yes, we all pop out like this, right? We have this potential and we’re just given life circumstances. You mentioned trauma. That’s the way in which we learn something, so let’s look back, please. Take us to an earlier life for you. 

By the way, where did you grow up? 

(04:44) Linda Dieffenbach: Primarily, I grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania. I was born in North Carolina, and then was in Ohio for a minute, and then we moved here to southeastern Pennsylvania when I was 6, so most of my life was spent in this area. 

(04:57) Doreen Downing: All right. Now, open up that chapter and tell us some stories about what it was like for you. 

(05:06) Linda Dieffenbach: So, there are really three key things that were both my deepest challenges and probably my biggest lessons on my journey. The first was my father who carried a lot of deep, painful, unrecognized, and unresolved trauma himself.

He was the child of an alcoholic. He was severely abused by his mother, and he came from a generation at a time where that was unrecognized, unacknowledged, and where you didn’t talk about these things. So as we all know, hurt people hurt people, and therefore he was very emotionally detached and distant within the family, but he was also abusive himself.

I carried a lot of pain wounding around that, and it was through an environment where you didn’t talk, we didn’t talk about things. There was no space to give voice. And if you were upset or if you cried—a common phrase that I heard as a child was don’t cry or I’ll give you something to cry about.

There was a lot of silencing going on, and that really was highly impactful because then I was not allowed to have my emotions. I was not allowed to have my anger, my pain. I was not allowed to have a voice. I was punished when I did. 

In school, I was bullied by my peers from first grade all the way up until about the end of junior high. What was so difficult about it was there was no place to stand. If I did well, if I excelled, if I participated in class and raised my hand, I would be shunned, bullied, and ridiculed. 

If I did poorly, I would be shunned and ridiculed. So, I had to try to make myself invisible so that I wouldn’t be seen and noticed and therefore be drawn out and receive the ridicule and the pain and the shaming that was coming at me from my peers. I just tried to not be anywhere. Cause like I said, it was like being in quicksand. There was just no place to stand where I felt safe among my peers. 

Coming from those experiences when I was 15, I had attempted to take my life and what happened then was probably most profound because I was hospitalized for a period of time, and when I tried to give voice to my history and my pain, what I was met with by the people who were supposed to be helping me was basically that everything that I said was negated and there was nothing wrong with my family and everything that was wrong was me and it was very traumatizing. 

I internalized that and I remember a moment very distinctly while I was in the hospital because I basically was being reflected back to me that I was the problem, I remember locking myself away that part of me that was in pain, that part of me that was crying out for help, locking her away and saying, “Okay, well, if I’m the problem, then I’m going to just put that away and I’m going to try to help these people around me who clearly need help, these other people who were hospitalized along with me.” 

I remember one day, I actually made a point while I was there to do something for each person, while I was in the hospital, to help them because I was not worthy of help and so I shut myself down completely at that point and became a shadow.

When I returned to school, everybody was afraid of me, so no matter what was going on in my life, I had to pretend that I was happy and everything was fine. I couldn’t be sad. I couldn’t be off. I couldn’t be moody because everybody would be like, walking on eggshells around me for fear that I would do something.

It was a really devastating experience for me and it took me a long time to come out of that. I lost my voice. I became very externally focused. I really lost a sense of self. I would literally look to other people to tell me who I was and to help me understand myself. 

I just abandoned my power. I abandoned myself. I just deferred everything to the rest of the world around me at that time. I carried that for quite a while and it was extremely painful, but I didn’t understand it. 

(09:33) Doreen Downing: I really appreciate your vulnerability because it’s riveting as you talk about it and the way that you talk about it feels so close to what really happened.

That’s part of integrating into our beings. We’re not distancing ourselves. We are saying, yes, this has happened to me. I’m not going to go into specifics about what exactly the abuse was from your father, because you’ve already just really given us the feel of it, what it’s like, that phrase about, I’ll give you something if you don’t shut up.

And then the bullying. It’s like damned if you do damned if you don’t kind of bind that you were in. And to top it all off to finally be in a place where you might have been heard or helped and to then feel like you were blamed. 

But I want to point to something because I know you said that the pain is also our lesson, the blessings to the lessons. What you did instinctively or naturally is to look around you. I know it came out of survival, and it was a technique or a coping mechanism. You looked at others and said, “Oh, here’s a need.” That to me feels like partly what was natural about us. We call ourselves the wounded healers.

We know, we recognize where wounds are, so that gives us a lot of not necessarily responsibility, but it gives us something that gives compassion, that we know that somebody is suffering and we know how to move towards them without scaring them away. 

So, what you just did, my dear, wow, you just gave us, and my listeners, us, me, a real—it was so, your portrayal of that pain, was so authentic. I am very moved by it. Thank you so much. 

I know that listeners now say, Yes, she must have done something somewhere along the line because look at her now. What about that? What about the lessons then? 

(11:55) Linda Dieffenbach: Before I get into that, I just want to thank you because it feels really good to be received so beautifully by you, so thank you for that. That really means a lot to me. I can feel that in my heart very deeply. 

(12:04) Doreen Downing: Linda, you may have some other whatever is coming up now too. We don’t have to jump into lessons. There may be something. Just naturally let yourself be led to whatever wants to be said. 

(12:17) Linda Dieffenbach: Because you said turning my attention towards others, it was definitely my survival strategy and my coping strategy. I do have a lot of Chiron in my chart, so wounded healers are very big in my field, but it was certainly what led me into working with and helping others. 

The challenge was that I was coming from such a wounded place myself that I was more of a caretaker and a fixer and I wasn’t able to be present with myself, so I wasn’t able to be fully present with others and their pain in the way that was accepting and allowing them to just be where they are.

I wanted to make them better. That was my pattern initially, but I went into helping professions. When I initially went into school, I went for special ed. I was very interested in working with kids who were emotionally disturbed, who had behavioral issues, and I didn’t know if I could do it, so I went and worked for a company called Vision Quest. 

I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but at the time, it was a wilderness program for adjudicated youth, kids who had gone through the court system, and I loved it. I loved working with these kids. They were amazing to work with, and they were great teachers for me. I learned so much from them. 

It was a very powerful experience working with them. But I was still in that space of being a fixer, so I worked 24/7. It was a wilderness program, so you live there and you’re with them. I burnt myself out so badly there because I poured my heart and soul into trying to support and help these kids and protect these kids and take care of these kids. I loved the work, but it was not exactly healthy for me because I wasn’t in a healthy place. 

Their traumas were so triggering. I worked with boys, which was a good thing because I knew instinctively, the idea of working with girls was terrifying to me because I knew their traumas were going to be way too close to my own that I couldn’t touch.

I was terrified of that aspect. I’d never said that aloud at the time. It was just like, I’m going to work with the boys over here. I’m good. I can deal with the boys. But yes, their traumas definitely brought a lot of things into my awareness that I wasn’t at the time willing to, or didn’t have the capacity to understand or touch or work with or deal with.

But I learned a lot as I said, but it definitely led me on my journey as a healer. When I left that company, I was burnt out. Went into IT and did technical stuff and just went into a totally different direction. 

(14:50) Doreen Downing: Yes. Bounce. Just like a bounce into something totally different. Take me away. 

(14:57) Linda Dieffenbach: Turned opposite direction. I needed to work with people. And so I went back to school. I hadn’t finished school before I went there, so I went back to school for social work, and while I was in school, that’s when I started learning Reiki. After I graduated, I met my 1 mentor, Elizabeth Frediani, and started working with her and started learning about the chakra system.

When I went to see her and work with her privately, I did a series of 3 sessions with her and I made more progress than I had in my entire lifetime because she was bringing me in, again, speaking of compassion, speaking of that safe container, she created a space where I could actually go in and touch this pain that I carried and helped me to see it because I was blind to so much of it.

That was such a huge turnaround for me in starting my own healing journey and doing my inner work, because I was starting to be able to understand what had happened, because I wasn’t really consciously aware these things that happened in my life were that much of a problem. I started to understand what had happened and also started to understand how it affected me and learn how to reconnect with self and to bring that terrified little girl out of the shadows and nurture her and give her love and help her to heal. 

(16:19) Doreen Downing: I love that. The inner, the little one inside that was waiting to be rescued. Well, I’m going to take a quick break. We’re in the middle of you finding your voice. It feels like what happened to you earlier is finally being integrated, or at least seen and heard and somebody else’s allowing you to not feel like you have to hide it anymore or ashamed of it. It was just like a really beautiful kind of hello in there. So we’ll be right back.

Hello, we’re back with Linda Dieffenbach and what a deep and meaningful journey we’ve had so far. If you’re just tuning in now, I would encourage you to go back to the beginning because the profound way in which the trauma showed up early in Linda’s life is something that, now that we’re talking about her healing journey and what she did to find and deal and come to, perhaps, we’re going to call it integrate those traumas so that it isn’t just a bad thing that happened.

Yes, it was painful, but how do we have pain in our lives and then make something positive for ourselves? How does our pain empower us? That’s a good question, a good title. From pain to empowerment. You and I could do a workshop together. Let’s do it. 

(17:59) Linda Dieffenbach: I’m totally down for that.

(18:01) Doreen Downing: So, you were talking about the 3 sessions with this type of healer that it felt like you were beginning to come to terms, not only get some perspective, but some deep connection. That was the word you used. So, yes, please. 

(18:17) Linda Dieffenbach: So I should clarify, 3 initial sessions. I certainly did not get fully healed in three sessions. There’s no quick fixes like that. I want to make sure I don’t put that out there in that way. But the three initial sessions that I did with her was a huge catalyst for me because I made tremendous progress at that time.

It led me on a very powerful healing journey and I was able to learn so much through working with her, but she also had taught me or had offered to teach me and another group of women how to do what she does.

And, of course, I had such a profound experience with her. Sign me up now, please, because this is amazing and I want to know how to do this and just through the education that I received from her, learning about the chakras and really understanding the consciousness of them, understanding how trauma impacts them and being able to tie all these different pieces together was very powerful.

Because just through the education, in addition to the private one on one work that I did with her, I learned so much about myself and my life and how to use these tools to support others, but the perfect word you said was to integrate, to bring healing from these old wounds, and it’s been a journey.

It has been a very big process and a very big journey that is many, many layered. We get to a point and then something new comes up and it’s like, okay, there’s another piece and another layer that we have to work through. But each step you’re stepping forward and closer to clarity and to wellness and to a place where in my relationships, I show up very differently.

I’m actually aware of who I am and what I want. I don’t need to give up my power to others all the time and defer to others all the time. I can connect in. I can be self-referencing. I am able to advocate for myself and have boundaries and all these things that I could not do when I was younger. 

(20:20) Doreen Downing: And that sounds like a voice. You have a voice. 

(20:24) Linda Dieffenbach: I found my voice for sure, on a lot of different levels. Yes. I found myself first and in the process of finding myself, in the healing through that process, I found the courage to connect with my voice and to actually learn how to speak up. 

I remember watching a movie one time and it hit me deeply. It was Trudy Chase, the lives of Trudy Chase, I think was the movie. It was one of those types of movies, but I think it was her and she was an artist. When she drew faces, it didn’t have a mouth. I have no mouth. And I remember, this was years before I started my healing journey, that hit me so hard.

I have no mouth. And I was like, oh, yes, I have no mouth. I felt that way so profoundly. So, learning how to reconnect with that and to take those courageous steps, those first steps of saying no, or going up to somebody and saying, I’m not happy with this, or this hurt me, or this didn’t feel good to me, and having those vulnerable moments of exposure through my voice and through self advocacy was really hard, but every time, it was so empowering and so strengthening. 

(21:36) Doreen Downing: What a clear journey you’ve illustrated for us and the power of finding your voice. Specifically, the ways in which you’re saying things like for advocacy and even saying no. I had a situation where I was driving somebody. This was a long time ago when people smoked everywhere and the person was smoking in my car and I didn’t want that. 

But I was afraid to say, “Stop smoking in my car. You can’t do that.” That was early on for me, my first assertiveness training. We’re calling it other things now, like advocacy, self-advocacy. But it’s assertiveness. It’s not aggressive and it’s not passive. It just is me speaking up in this particular moment and being clear. 

(22:22) Linda Dieffenbach: Yes. There’s so much power, when we have a voice, when we are able to connect because it is our expression of will. It’s our expression of self. It’s our expression. Stifling the voice is such a way of disempowering and harming somebody, but when you find your voice and you’re able to speak up, and open your mouth and let yourself flow, it changes everything. 

(22:49) Doreen Downing: I love the way you just did that. The way you just illustrated it. For those who are only listening, you didn’t get to see Linda do it on the camera with her hands opening up from her heart like this. You just did that. It was lovely to watch you demonstrate. Finding your voice and having your voice come through you in an easy, effortless way.

Well, this is wonderful. I just want to keep going, but we’re coming to the end. How do people find you and what is something you might want to point people to?

(23:31) Linda Dieffenbach: So, to find me, I have 2 websites. I work on 2 different levels. I have a healing path and then an empowerment path. The healing path is kind of the starting path to really work through the old stuff. The empowerment path is the growth path. The healing path is wellnessinharmony.com and the empowerment path is lindatransforms.com. 

One of the things that I have that’s actually ongoing right now is a class that I’m doing through the wellness universe called Heal Your Chakras, Heal Your Life. We’re in our second year. Each month we have a 90-minute class where we talk about the chakras. We talk about different healing modalities. 

We go in and have opportunities for some coaching and guidance on individual questions and stuff, but look at different ways to delve into these different healing processes and how understanding how the chakras are impacted by our traumas and our experiences and our conditioning.

The class coming up in June is on the inner child and healing the inner child, so that’s 1 of my favorite things to teach about, healing the inner child. I would definitely encourage people to jump on if they’re able to. 

(24:39) Doreen Downing: Great. Well, we’ll definitely have something in the show notes because I really want to offer people the opportunity to catch up with you and learn from you and take one of your courses.

Since we’re at the end, if you want to say one last thing to the folks who are gathered here today, what might that be?

(25:03) Linda Dieffenbach: It is so worth it to do your inner work. I know it’s scary. When you’re starting out and you haven’t had the compassion and the support and the resources that you need or you’re just afraid, but taking those first steps and finding the resources, finding the people who can really support you along the way to help you to heal your past, to find your voice is worth every step.

It will liberate you from so much pain and so much hurt, so much self-doubt and shame and all these things that we carry, and it does truly open you into a path of freedom and empowerment, and it is worth every step, so don’t let fear stop you.

(25:50) Doreen Downing: Period. Thank you so much. 

(25:55) Linda Dieffenbach: Thank you. It really has been an honor to be here with you. Thank you so much, Doreen.