Something I wish I had been told when I was experiencing SM as a child
I watched a documentary on YouTube about selective mutism – Children Trapped in Silence by Selective Mutism. At one point in it, a therapist told the little girl something that stayed with me after watching the video. I want to share it here. It’s not an exact quote, but the main parts that resonated with me:
Your voice comes out when you’re at home, because everything is nice and how you like it to be at home. But what happens to lots of children is that they go out to different places, and they get really worried. And the funny thing is, it’s not their voices they’re worried about. It’s everything else they’re worried about. And they get so worried that their whole body goes tight and worried. And when your body is tight and worried, your voice can’t come out.
I wish someone had told me that when I was younger. With the exception of my speech therapist, all the adults in my life who were concerned about me focused on the speaking part and approached it backwards, like “you must be worried about what to say,” and tried to help me that way. And it was always wrong. I always felt very misunderstood. I knew they were wrong about me, and I knew their advice didn’t work for me. But inside, I didn’t actually understand my own behavior.
And it would have been helpful if I’d had an adult version of that explanation when I was a young adult. I didn’t realize I still had SM then, and not only did I continue to receive advice from other people that was mismatched to me (like, “You need to have more confidence.”), but I also ended up trying to interpret my own nonsensical and random inability to speak or perform, and I kind of believed a lot of things about myself that weren’t true and also weren’t very nice.