I heard screams outside my clinic window.

Not the ordinary kind. Not the toddler-meltdown kind that rises and falls and disappears into the noise of a street near a train station.

This was different.

Sharp. Sudden. Piercing.

A woman’s voice cutting through the day.

Get out. Get out of the car. Get out of the car.

That was the first truth.

Her voice.

Not a concept. Not a campaign. Not a statistic. Not a panel discussion about violence against women. A woman, in the street, saying no with everything she had.

And what still sits in me like a stone is this: she was loud enough to be heard, and still the world around her kept moving.

Cars passed.

People walked.

The street did what streets do when we have trained ourselves not to be interrupted by another human being’s distress.

For a moment I did it too. I half-listened. I hoped it would resolve. I hoped it would become ordinary.

But it didn’t.

When I got outside, my mind tried to protect me with a stupid story: maybe it’s just a mum trying to get her teenage son out of the car.

That story lasted less than a second.

It wasn’t her son.

It was her partner.

She was standing in the street, exposed to traffic, exposed to strangers, exposed to that awful public-private blur where something can be clearly wrong and still somehow not become anyone else’s business.

And she kept saying it.

Get out.

Not politely.

Not diplomatically.

Not in a tone designed to make everyone comfortable.

As a boundary.

As a refusal.

And still the street did not reorganise around her voice.

That is the part I cannot shake.

Because this is not only about one man in one car on one day.

It is also about the way culture trains us to stop hearing human voices properly.

Carol Gilligan has spent decades trying to help us hear what gets buried. In In a Different Voice, she listened closely enough to girls and young women to notice something devastating: they often know what they know, feel what they feel, sense what they sense, and then slowly learn not to say it. Not because it isn’t real. Because it becomes dangerous. Because attachment can come to depend on silence.

That is one of the first heartbreaks.

A girl with a clear voice learns to soften it.

To second-guess it.

To call it too much.

To swallow it before someone else punishes her for having it.

Gilligan and Naomi Snider later name this more directly in Why Does Patriarchy Persist?: culture asks people to give up relationship with parts of themselves in order to belong. Judy Chu saw something similar in boys before the hardening. Niobe Way heard it in adolescent boys longing for closeness, honesty and tenderness, then learning that tenderness will cost them status, safety, masculinity.

So girls are often trained to betray voice.

And boys are often trained to betray tenderness.

Then we wonder why, later, a woman has to scream in the street to make a boundary real.

Then we wonder why a man cannot receive her no.

Then we wonder why bystanders freeze.

I walked toward the car and asked him to get out.

He was angry. Irritated that I had crossed some invisible line and entered the scene.

“Do you want to go, c…?” he said.

A small sentence. A threat inside it.

I told him again to get out of the car. She doesn’t want you in the car.

He called me four eyes.

And I want to be honest here: I was scared.

Not abstractly. In my body.

My body was already doing what bodies do when threat enters the field. Scanning. Mobilising. Calculating. One part of me was clear. Another part of me was a mess. I was frightened and steady at the same time.

I asked her if she wanted to go to the police station up the road. She didn’t respond to me.

I don’t hold that against her for a second.

In that moment, I knew something I have seen many times in the therapy room: survival is not always loud, and it is not always easy to read from the outside. Sometimes the safest thing a person can do is not visibly align with the stranger trying to help. Sometimes not responding is strategy. Sometimes it is wisdom under pressure.

I stepped away and called 000.

When I came back, he was finally getting out, yelling that he’d be speaking to his parole officer, that he’d be informing them about what she was doing.

Even then, the same pattern.

Control.

Threat.

Reversal.

Making her the problem.

And all around it, the strange deadness of public life. A woman nearby with her phone out. A man across the road, silent, unreadable, maybe frozen, maybe menacing, maybe both through the eyes of my fear.

I feel fear now, as I write this.

And grief.

Because the deepest wound in this scene was not only his aggression.

It was the loneliness of her voice.

A woman saying get out with clarity, urgency, force.

And the world taking too long to answer.

International Women’s Day has just passed.

I have been thinking about courage.

But courage is not a slogan.

Courage is not a pastel graphic. Courage is not something we admire in women while leaving untouched the conditions that make courage necessary.

The first courage in this story was hers.

Her voice.

Her boundary.

Her refusal.

And if we are serious about ending violence, then women’s voices cannot keep being treated as background noise until a situation becomes catastrophic enough for everyone else to feel permitted to act.

Gilligan’s work matters to me because she keeps returning us to voice, to relationship, to the cost of disconnection. In In a Human Voice, she writes toward the possibility that what has been buried can be heard again. That we are not beyond repair. That the deadening is real, but not final.

I need that hope, because otherwise this story is unbearable.

Because what I saw outside my window was not only coercion. It was a culture of disconnection in miniature.

A woman’s no struggling to count.

A man unable or unwilling to be moved by it.

A public space numbed enough to keep flowing around it.

And underneath all of it, the long training.

Girls taught not to be too loud, too clear, too disruptive.

Boys taught not to be too tender, too open, too affected.

Adults taught to doubt their instincts, manage discomfort, avoid involvement, keep moving.

This is how voices get lost.

Not all at once.

Slowly.

Systematically.

Relationally.

And if that is how voices are lost, then connection is how they are found again.

Not sentimental connection. Not vague kindness. Real connection.

The kind that teaches children that what they feel matters.

That no is a complete sentence.

That tenderness is not weakness.

That directness is not a crime.

That repair is possible.

That bystanders are part of the nervous system of a community.

I do not want a world where women have to scream get out of the car in the street while everyone keeps walking.

I want a world where a woman’s voice changes what happens next.

A world where girls do not have to betray what they know in order to stay connected.

A world where boys do not have to amputate tenderness in order to belong.

A world where adults can bear the shock of another person’s distress without turning away.

A world where courage is shared.

Because courage requires connection.

This is also the thread that runs through my work.

Across therapy, supervision, parent work, school consultation, and community conversations, I keep returning to the same questions: How do we help people stay in relationship with themselves and each other? How do we create homes, classrooms, workplaces, and communities where voice can be heard, boundaries can be respected, and repair can become possible?

I work with individuals, couples, parents, educators, school leaders, clinicians, and communities who are trying to make sense of disconnection and build something more honest, more regulated, and more human.

If this piece resonates with you, you are welcome to explore more of my work.

And without connection, human voices go missing right in front of us.

References

• Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development.

• Gilligan, C. (2023). In a Human Voice.

• Gilligan, C., & Snider, N. (2018). Why Does Patriarchy Persist?.

• Chu, J. (2014). When Boys Become Boys.

• Way, N. (2011). Deep Secrets.

• Hill, J. (2025). Losing It.