VOTE FOR THIS 2027 SXSW PANEL PICKER SESSION beginning Aug 5, 2026: Silence isn’t passive. It is often engineered. It is sustained by sophisticated systems of silence and fear campaigns that make speaking up feel more dangerous and consequential than staying quiet. Those systems, whether in industry or relationships, professional and personal, don’t survive despite our silence. They survive because of it. VOTE here
SXSW PANEL PICKER SESSION
Journalist, storyteller, author and entrepreneur Catenya McHenry has spent years existing in toxic environments that tried to use strategic fear campaigns and intimidation to silence her and others into submission. These systems of silence, threatened fear of job loss, loss in general and more, all to make sure she and others understood the consequences of speaking up and the same is true for so many others. She has spent years researching and observing that fear and psychological human behavior associated with it. It’s what inspired her scientific podcast Fxck Fear, her first book, Married to a Narcissist: Enduring the Struggle and Finding You Again and her forthcoming second book.
TAKEAWAYS
This talk is for leaders and others who are not ok with letting things slide and for those experiencing abusive systems of silence and fear campaigns engineered to keep them quiet. Exposing misconduct or challenging entrenched norms is rarely without consequence. Recognizing those risks highlights the courage required to disrupt systems that depend on fear to exist and thrive. Though personal experience, case studies and psychological strategies and tactics that produce mindful outspokenness, this session will activate a movement of people and leaders who blaze a path of bravery, replacing silence with courage and accountability and ultimately cultural change.
SOCIETAL CHALLENGE
If you’re going to be brave enough to speak the truth, you must expect there will be trouble but this session will give you tactics of how to do it anyway. The question is not whether speaking up is risky—it is whether the long-term consequence of silence is even greater. So, be brave enough and VOTE FOR THIS SESSION.
LISTEN TO THE FXCK FEAR PODCAST wherever available
BUY THE MARRIED TO A NARCISSIST BOOK
