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The Power of Being Heard
The Cost of Unspoken Conversations
by Katy Byrne, M.A., LMFT
Choosing to have those delicate dialogues can heal the world
"The Power of Being Heard captured my spirit from the very first essay. Katy has a way of pulling me in and bringing me to a time and place in my own life when something like that was happening to me. She has always done that in her TV shows and newspaper features, but never better than in this audio book. This is the perfect bedside listening companion, but be careful, you might wake up finally ready to reexamine your life...or possibly to laugh at yourself."
-Alejandro R. Torres, Video Producer
The Power of Being Heard: The Cost of Unspoken Conversations
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.”
Narrated by Becky Parker
Length:
PRODUCED BY PRO AUDIO VOICES
After listening to Katy Byrne’s audiobook, I am convinced that the world is made of conversations.
The Power of Being Heard is for those of us who wake up in the middle of the night haunted by words hastily spoken or left unsaid with loved ones, dreaded ones, and all those in between.
The author does not entertain us, then abandon us. She has compassion—and frustration—about humanity’s lack of basic training in how to talk with and listen to each other.
She mines pivotal conversations in her own life, showing us how moment by moment sharing and withholding of words shapes ourselves, our families, and the world around us. “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” writes poet Muriel Rukeyser.
Her 40 years as a therapist have taught her that most communication methods are forgotten in the heat of the moment. Her antidote? It’s literally looking us in the face every time we speak to someone. I won’t say more, but you can. Her entire book is a conversation-starter. "
Jan Henrikson
Intuitive Counselor / Writer
In this audiobook Katy Byrne lays out a positive and important strategy to confront important issues that we all face in life—those difficult and hard-to-manage conversations we (really should) have with those close to us as well as those we have to deal with at work and in social situations.
If you are looking for tools and approaches that may help you manage emotional minefields, this Audio Book may help you better understand the psychological dynamics at work and how to maybe, just maybe, create a breakthrough.
In a light hearted, approachable and understandable way, Katy explores how can we embrace our fears of criticism and rejection and break through the emotional logjam that prevents us from resolving stressful relationship issues."
Raymond Baltar, Environmental Project Manager
Reader/Listener
“Katy is like the Irma Bombeck of our day. Insightful, deep, funny, connecting and values deep, meaningful conversations. She enjoys exploring your insides with you so you can get to the truth of your own inner understanding.
A Sherlock Holmes of the Heart. She coined the original phrase — Getting your hairball out. It has been a joy and pleasure to receive Katy’s empathic presence and wisdom to unravel what lives inside — to bring it to the fore and to transform and heal past pain.”
Sylvia Haskvitz, MA, RDN
CNVC Certified Trainer/Author/Assessor
About the Author
Katy Byrne has been a licensed psychotherapist for forty years in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. She has written two books, The Courage to Speak Up and The Power of Being Heard: The Cost of Unspoken Conversations. Katy has been a columnist for a span of over 20 years at Women’s Voices News and currently at The Sonoma Sun. She’s enjoyed hosting radio at KSVY, KQED Perspectives Radio and KVON as well as being a public speaker.
Through wit, depth, psychology, immense honesty and true stories, Katy entertains and moves us to understand the confusing and helpful conversations we have with ourselves and in our relationships. We walk with her through life’s breakthrough changes in lost connections and through relationships that reunite through skilled conversations and radical reaching out. We see through her own experiences and insights the possibility of revitalization, both personally and politically, when we lean into crucial conversations.
Katy has simplified communications skills so that we can remember them. She’s deeply concerned about the anger that permeates our world: “We need a new narrative- real bravery is listening deeply and speaking up respectfully.” It’s going to take each one of us to change the world, not just our leaders or organizations.” Katy urges us to realize the desperate need for leaning into our communities and connectivity, instead of isolating, judging or blaming. Through family, friends, work, teaching children to hear each other, national and international conversation, we can build reconciliation and the wholeness of our systems.
Katy Byrne, MA, LMFT, takes a stand for keeping our relationships cleaned up, to learn from each other and to take responsibility for changing the world by working through conflict with each other. She sheds light on our human urge to belong and how that same impulse makes us avoid, shun and attack in order to protect our territories. Shamed by societies that don’t encourage us to be authentic, we have allowed our own powerlessness, fragmentation and separation. Katy Byrne is passionate about our need to unify. We are each a thread in the giant web of our world.
Cohesion is possible if we stop being complicit in our own dividedness. Our hope is us.
Learn more at KatyByrne.com
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