Healing Visibility Wounds: The Truth Behind the Fear of Being Seen

Visibility sounds simple until you actually have to be seen. In this powerful episode, I’m opening up about the deeper truths behind showing up—online, in your business, and most importantly, in your life. If you’ve ever felt like you needed to shrink to stay safe, or like you were performing instead of living, this conversation is for you.

Together, we’ll explore the idea of the visibility wound—what it is, how it shows up in your day-to-day life, and how to begin healing it. This isn’t about growing your platform or getting louder. This is about reclaiming your voice, reconnecting with your body, and remembering that being seen is a sacred act.

What is the Visibility Wound?

It’s the ache that flares when you press “post.” The inner tension between wanting to be seen and fearing what will happen if you are. It often comes from lived or inherited experiences of being criticized, overlooked, misunderstood, or shamed when we dared to show up fully.

This episode invites you to explore the places where your voice feels quieted—and how that may not be about fear of failure, but fear of being truly seen.

The Performance Trap

We talk about how easy it is to perform online: to speak with polish, pose for the algorithm, and hide behind strategy. But when you’re always performing, you disconnect from your body, your intuition, and your truth. That’s not sustainable. That’s not freedom.

Healing visibility wounds isn’t about being louder. It’s about being honest. It’s about learning how to show up with your whole self—and doing it in ways that feel safe, embodied, and true.

Reclaiming Your Voice

I share a personal story about my own unraveling from the “always together” version of visibility. Through nervous system healing, reconnecting with my body, and allowing space to not have it all figured out, I found a softer way forward. A way that feels sustainable, not performative.

If you’ve ever felt tension around showing up for your work—or you’re craving a more aligned, embodied way to share your voice—this episode is for you.

🕯️ Download your free Beginning Again Ritual

📸 https://www.instagram.com/unconventionalbliss/

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The Transcript for The Voicekeeper Podcast:

010: Healing Visibility Wounds: The Truth Behind the Fear of Being Seen

[00:00:00] Visibility sounds simple until you actually have to be seen. I used to think I just had a consistency problem with my content, but the truth was I had a visibility wound. I wasn't afraid to speak. I was afraid of what speaking might cost me, and it wasn't just about my business. It was about showing up in my actual life, honestly and perfectly and fully as myself.

If you've ever felt like you had to shrink to stay safe, this episode is for you.

 [00:01:00] 

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Voice Keeper podcast. I'm Caroline, your guide, and a woman who is learning how to show up as my whole self without apology and performance. And I'm gonna share that with you in this little intro because I just want you to know that this is not. There's not an end to this journey.

It's ongoing. So welcome. Welcome to the Path. In today's episode, we're talking about the fear of being seen not just on social media or in business, but in your body, your truth, and your life. And so before we do, I want you to close your eyes for a moment and take a breath. And I want you to imagine being fully seen.

Without a filter, without a plan, just as you are, notice what happens in your body. Do you soften? Do you [00:02:00] feel a release? Or do you start to feel a tension like you're bracing for something? Visibility isn't just a strategy, it's an energy. It's about being known. And for many of us that hasn't always felt safe.

Take a big deep breath in. Let it out. Release this moment and gently blink your eyes open and come back to this podcast.

A visibility wound is the pain or fear we carry around being seen as our true, like completely true self. You might hold back your opinion to avoid conflict. You might hide your creativity outta fear that it's not good enough. You stop yourself from wearing something bold because it might be too much.

You downplay your joy or passion to avoid [00:03:00] judgment. These are always, we disconnect from being seen and there are little things. Right. These are not huge, huge things, but they're little things that can start to add up. And especially women, like so many of us have been taught to be useful, polished, quiet, agreeable, but rarely real.

And I want you to think about like, you know, the people in your life, the environments you've been in in the past, you know, when somebody was real. How did people talk about them? Right? That also has affected. How you show up in the world. Visibility is vulnerable because it's personal. It's not just about showing up online, you know, it's, it's letting your partner hear how you really feel about something.

It's raising your hand in class. Oh my gosh. Was there anyone who was so scared of raising their hand in class? It was me. That was definitely me. , It might be, you [00:04:00] know, crying in front of your child instead of holding it in and then having a conversation with them about why you're feeling the way you are, right?

It's letting someone witness the real you.

And I want you to think about where are you hiding. Not because you want to, but because you think you have to. Maybe it's in a certain group of people. I definitely have groups of people where I feel like I can be myself and I can't be myself. And now I'm gonna tell you right now that I don't think that's healthy and I have let go of some of those groups.

, Because it's so important for me to live fully, authentically as me, but when I reflect back on the time I spent in those groups, I think about the amount of like performative visibility. I was, I was doing, trying to be a certain person. So they would like me trying to hide certain aspects of myself so they wouldn't judge [00:05:00] me.

Right. And when we get into the habit of doing things like that, it becomes a habit in other places, right? Yeah. Now maybe you have a business or maybe you have a job where you have to speak in front of people and now that has become difficult for you. Not difficult is in the sense of like, I can't do it.

'cause it's hard, difficult is in like, well, shoot, how am I wearing the right clothes? Did I say the wrong thing? Am I, am I, did I post that correctly? Um, nobody liked it. What does that mean? , Oh, I didn't get a good feedback on that talk. Oh my gosh. Like right. We start to spiral.

We have been told a lot, I hear this a lot, just be confident to show up more. Just you just need some more confidence. I mean, I may have even said this to some of my clients and my previous business, but true [00:06:00] visibility really starts with safety. So in the last episode, I talked about your nervous system and why it's so important to have some form of nervous system regulation in your life, whatever that looks like and feels good for you.

But when we don't feel safe, right, our nervous system responds. It's that whole fight or flight. Thing. And you've probably heard people talk about how like a lot of us, um, our fight or flights are like mixed up, or we might go into fight or flight over something small. That's the nervous system.

Deregulation, fight or flight was meant for like cavemen, running from lions, not. From you sitting in your chair trying to decide if you're gonna post something on social media, right? And so that can like really come into play when we talk about feeling safe and visibility. You [00:07:00] know, I know for me, like this has been something I have struggled with my entire life.

, And I will use, I'll, I'll use a couple. , I'm trying to think which example for my life is the best one to use. There are so many. , But, you know, I was a ballet dancer. I was a ballet dancer, and there is a lot of visibility wounds that I carry from that time because, you know, we were told to our faces that we weren't good enough.

And so we would do extreme things to be good enough, which has led me to feel like, you know, to be good enough for you all to even be good enough for the people who are listening to my podcast, or to be good enough for my social media followers. I have to be a certain way. So for a long time in business, I have not shown up as myself, and I'm not.

I'm not chastising myself for that. I'm not gonna punish myself. Life is about growth and [00:08:00] learning from our experiences, and I think that being able to now and this version of myself look back on that time and realize, oh, there were so many unhealthy things I was doing and they've bled into my life now, how can I, you know, take a moment to acknowledge them, accept them, accept and hug the girl that was.

You know, struggling so hard to feel seen in the ballet world and let her feel seen now. Right. And one of the things that has been really important for me is pulling back. Sometimes you gotta pull back, I've talked about this a couple times. On the podcast, I talked once about, you know, not posting on Facebook and then deciding how I'm gonna come back to that.

, I've taken a bit of a break from social media and it, it's really interesting because during that break I was able to really think about how I wanted to show up. [00:09:00] And it's so much easier for me now. Like, I just don't even think about it. I don't worry about it. I just, I just post. I post. It's such a great feeling to just post and not worry.

And then I also think, you know how I present myself to the world. I've been really working on that the last couple, I'd say the last six months to a year because I very much had gotten in this habit of not dressing in a way that made me feel like me. And it wasn't like, again, I'm not gonna chastise myself.

This is just part of what happens as you become an adult and you go through things and. Reclaiming that reclaiming my style and like not being afraid to show up in all the various places I have to show up just as me. It's really interesting because I've actually had people compliment me a few times and I used to never get complimented.

Right. And that's because it's not because of the clothes, it's because they see me being me. You know, pausing a lot of [00:10:00] times and like reflecting on what you need to reclaim. Is a really big step and it's not failure. And I wanna really emphasize that. Like we are not failing at anything, friends. We are growing and evolving.

Okay.

so let's move on to the next thing. Being seen is a sacred act. I really believe this. You know, when you let yourself be seen just as you are, you give other per people permission to do the same. You start performing and you start living and other people go, oh, I can do that too. You know, I really, this has been such an important piece to me.

I knew that if I was going to step into this world, I wanted to be a hundred and thousand percent me, as much me as I could be. And it, it, that takes a lot. That takes a lot of. Like I said, reclamation, [00:11:00] right? Reclaiming who you are, reclaiming, , how you wanna show up, reclaiming what's important to you despite what anybody says.

And so I want you to think about where are you longing to be more visible. Now, maybe you want to have dance parties with your kids more often and not feel weird about it. That's a real thing. As someone who's a former dancer, whenever my kids wanna have a dance party, I get so self-conscious because there is a part of me that is always performing.

But when I let loose and let myself be me, can I tell you the amount of smiles and laughter that occurs in my house when that happens? That's a moment of longing to be more visible, right? And the other question is, what version of you is asking to be revealed? Not curated, [00:12:00] right? Not polished, just real. I wanna share something with you all real quick before I wrap up this episode.

And this is the last episode of launch week. But I am in, currently in, , when this episode goes live, I think I'm actually having my very last. Workshop. , But I'm doing a workshop with an amazing photographer. I will link her in the show notes 'cause I cannot say enough good things about this program.

, But I've been doing a two week kind of intensive and it's been called Sensual Selfies, and it's been all about taking photos of ourselves and learning how to take our own brand photos. But what's so fascinating about this experience is that it has been about. So much more. It has literally been about how do you wanna show up and how can you do that in a way that feels safe and good to you?

A lot of the things that I talk about around visibility and visibility wounds and reclamation we have been talking about in her program, [00:13:00] and it's been interesting as someone who fully acknowledges these things within my clients to fully acknowledge them within myself. And when it came down to take those photos, which I cannot wait, you may have seen, I've teased a few of them.

I've been using them in a few places, but I've got loads more. When it came down to taking them, it was such an incredibly freeing and opening experience for me. Because there is still a piece of me that feels the need to be very performative online feels the need to be very performative in certain spaces.

It's something I'm working through. Like I said, this is not, there's not an end point to this. It's something we're always working on. It's a journey. It's a path. It's a, it's a trip, right. And so it's just been really incredible and when I was working on this episode, I was reflecting on the work that I've done [00:14:00] in the last couple of weeks in, or the last two weeks in this course of just taking photos and how that just ended up meaning so much more to me.

And I am excited because I feel like it's such a good exercise. Like when I'm not feeling like myself, I almost like feel like that's the moment when it's time to set up a little photo shoot, you know? So again, I will put the link, um, I'll put her Instagram link in the show notes 'cause she's incredible.

And, , yeah, be sure to look for those new photos. I'm very excited and I'm also very excited that I took them. So, if you're in a season where it feels hard to show up, if your voice feels quiet or unsure, I created something for you. I created a free gift for this launch week. It's called a Ritual for Beginning.

Again, it's a short guided audio meditation to help you reconnect with your voice, not for performance, but for presence. I really love this as a way to say like, [00:15:00] I'm gonna start this journey, and that's why I created it for you, because this week has marked a big beginning for me and my own journey and my podcasting journey.

And so I wanted to share that with you. So you can head to carolinehull.com/begin to grab that. And I just hope that it's a starting point for you, a breath before the next step. And remember, you don't have to be louder to be heard. You don't have to be more polished to be seen. You just have to be willing to show up gently, honestly, and on your own terms.

Your voice is already enough and the world needs a version of you that isn't performing. Thank you so much for being here with me this week, this relaunch week of the podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to these episodes, which are really some cornerstone pieces to the work that I do.

And I'm gonna keep sharing with you, and I cannot wait till the next one. [00:16:00] See you soon.

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