From Silence to Spellwork
Parallels between trauma narratives and women’s incantations in myth
There is a moment in many women’s stories, mythic or modern, when the voice falters. The trauma cannot yet be spoken; the words are too large or too dangerous to shape.
In the ancient world, this silence often came before transformation: Philomela, tongue torn out, wove her story into cloth; Medusa turned her scream into stone. Their power emerged not through speech but through what Foucault might call counter-discourse — the subversive act of communicating outside sanctioned language.
In the contemporary world, women survivors of abuse do something similar. The silence that once protected them becomes intolerable, and the body begins to speak in its own ways, through illness, fatigue, insomnia and pain. But also through empowerment, determination, strength and assertiveness. What was suppressed finds form.
As I’ve written elsewhere in creative work like Night Witches, women’s voices often move from suppression to spellwork: from the unspeakable to the re-enchanted, from the wound to the word.
To speak after trauma is to work against a system designed to render you mute. Language itself can feel contaminated by the logic of control — the gaslighting phrases, the courtroom scripts, the bureaucratic forms. Survivors often have to invent new idioms, a personal lexicon that resists the language of blame.
This reinvention has deep mythic roots. In countless folktales, women reclaim voice through incantation: the whispered name that breaks enchantment, the charm that exposes truth, the lullaby that restores life. The spell, like the survivor’s narrative, is both rebellion and repair.
Where society sought to pathologise women’s speech as hysterical, witchy, excessive — feminist theory reframes it as epistemological resistance. The tremor in the voice, the pause, the circular retelling: these are not weaknesses but signatures of survival. In trauma narratives, as in ancient spells, repetition is not redundancy but power. The act of retelling, of naming again and again, transforms chaos into order, shame into purpose. It is a form of linguistic alchemy.
In my research on women working in the domestic abuse sector, I’ve seen how this spellwork unfolds in professional lives too. Many survivor-practitioners carry within them twin selves: the silent one and the speaking one. Their work becomes a kind of ritual, a daily invocation of safety, empathy, and truth-telling in spaces still shaped by patriarchal disbelief. Each disclosure they receive, each form they fill, each training they deliver, becomes a small act of counter-magic: undoing the silence that once bound them.
To speak at all, after silence, is to practice a form of enchantment. Words become wands, fragile but potent. Through them, women re-enter the world not as passive witnesses to harm but as agents of reclamation. From silence to spellwork, the voice becomes a vessel, carrying what was once unbearable into the realm of story, and from story into collective change.
Notes and Reading
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin.
Herman, J. (1992) Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books.
Cixous, H. (1976) ‘The Laugh of the Medusa.’ Signs, 1(4), 875–893.
Irigaray, L. (1985) This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hazell-Caldwell, C. (2025) Night Witches: Stories of Women Who Rise from Shadow. London: Morrowlight Books