YUKARI MAKINO, PH.D., AMFT, APCC, SEP

To Survive in This Society

 

When you were four or five years old—

you may have cried, screamed, and yet no one around you truly understood the reason behind your tears.

You were asked, “Why are you crying?”
and so you tried desperately to find words.

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That reason existed—
as sensations in your body,
as emotions moving through you.

But you could not find words to match them.

And in that moment, you learned something fundamental:
if you could not explain your feelings, no one would understand.

Even when your feelings were justified,
unless you could translate them into coherent language,
others dismissed them as irrational, too emotional, or without reason.

And so your loneliness, your fear, your confusion—all that your body once felt—
were left behind, unspoken, unnamed.

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The world of the unsaid is rarely received.

That is one form of the social and cultural trauma of this country.

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So you learned to survive through language.

You mastered words—to connect, to be understood, to be accepted.

Language became not only communication,
but a survival strategy.

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Over time, this survival strategy shaped the nation itself.

Emotions are translated, articulated, and rationalized—
so that nothing remains unspoken,
so that progress can continue.

This drive—to put feelings into words, to move forward without residue—
is inseparable from the pioneer spirit that built this country.

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To overcome, to explain, to define and move on—
these are celebrated as signs of strength, maturity, and resilience.

But what happens to that which cannot be explained?

What happens to the silence that does not fit into language?

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Trauma lives outside of words.
It breathes in the shallowness of breath,
in the tightness of the chest,
in the trembling of hands that cannot explain their own shaking.

When you encounter a pain you cannot describe,
your body is remembering the moment language once failed you.

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Notice the impulse to explain yourself—
to make meaning, to justify, to control through words.

That impulse is not a flaw; it is your survival.

But healing begins in the space before language—
in the presence that can stay with what is wordless,
without trying to fix or define it.

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Perhaps, as a nation, America has mastered the language of progress
but forgotten the wisdom of silence.

To pause is not to regress.
To stay with the unspoken is not to fail.

It is to remember the child in each of us
who once cried before words were possible—
and to finally listen.

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To everyone living in the United States:
May we learn again to listen—not only to what is spoken,
but to what trembles in silence.

For only there, beyond the reach of words,
does true connection begin.

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Listening to the Language of the Body…

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To pause is not to regress.

To stay with what cannot yet be spoken is not to fail.

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It is, rather, to listen—finally—to the child within us

who once cried before words were possible.

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And perhaps, healing begins right there.

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Not by doing more, not by explaining more,

but by simply being—with what is, here and now.

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To be with the moment.

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To give time and space to what the body already knows.

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To move from Doing to Being.

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From fixing to witnessing.

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From speaking to listening.

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When we allow silence to breathe,

when we make room for trembling,

that which had no words

begins to find its own language.

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In that stillness,

connection is no longer something we build—

it is what we become.

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So let us learn again—

to listen to the quiet between words.

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For it is there,

in the ma—the sacred space between breath and being—

that humanity rediscovers its home.

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Yukari Makino, Ph.D., AMFT, APCC

✳︎ AMFT #134058, APCC#12036 / Supervisor: Rachel Cole (LCSW 24313)

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Clinical Psychologist in Japan #07628

Certified EMDR therapist in Japan  (Training : Part1 2008・Part2 2009)

Certified Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner （Training : 2009-2011:  SEP 2011)

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