The Voices We Inherit
(And How to Find Your Own)
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“I don’t like the sound of my voice.”
I hear that one quite often. But when I ask people why, or what they don’t like specifically, it’s sometimes not really about pitch or tone. Very often, it can be something like, “I just sound like my mother,” instead. Oofffft…
We’re rarely talking about just one thing. Yes, of course we’re also talking about the instrument in our throats. But what we’re really talking about is also how we express ourselves in the world, and about the voices we absorbed before we even knew we were listening.
The First Voice You Ever Heard
Before you had language, you had sound. Research shows that newborns can distinguish their mother’s voice from all others within hours of birth1. Our mother’s voice wasn’t about words initially; it was about emotion, safety, stress, love. It taught you what it meant to be heard, to matter, to exist in relation to another person. Or the opposite. But either way, it taught you.
Your father’s voice, siblings, other caregivers, the ambient sounds of your household then proceeded to create the acoustic backdrop for your developing self. You learned to speak by mimicking these sounds, but you also learned something else:
How to speak.
The pauses your mother took before disagreeing. The way your father’s voice rose when he was excited, or how it dropped when he was disappointed. The silence that potentially meant danger, or the silence that meant peace.
All of this lives in your (muscle) memory, the habitual tensions of your jaw and throat, your breathing patterns, the vocal choices you make a thousand times a day.
The Voices of Your Culture
Beyond family, you inherited voices from culture, class, region, and identity. You learned which accents were “correct” and which were to be hidden. You absorbed messages about whether your voice should take up space or make itself small, what emotions were voiceable or unvoiceable.
I know many people who code-switch. They have a “work voice” and a “home voice,” or a voice for white spaces and a voice for other communities. The psychological cost of this can be very real for some, because they are choosing between authenticity and acceptance, between inherited voice and the voice that helps you survive.
And for most women, there’s another bind: Speak too softly and you’re not taken seriously. Speak with authority and you’re “aggressive”. The pitch of your voice, the very instrument you were born with, becomes politicised. I’ve worked with so many women who have, consciously or subconsciously, lowered their pitch to be heard in professional settings. Sometimes, that created vocal strain. What’s more insidious though is if it creates a disconnect from their selves.
The Sound of Trauma
Sometimes the voices we inherit are damaging. Constant criticism, unpredictable rage, silent treatment when you needed to hear a voice most. These memories can keep on living in your body as chronic tension, vocal shutdown or an inability to voice certain emotions.
I wrote about what this can look like before:
Trauma can literally change your voice. It lives in the shortened breath of hypervigilance, the tension of suppressed rage and the apologies that pepper your speech when you learned early that taking up space was dangerous.
The Work of Finding Your Own Voice
So how do we find our own voice when we’ve inherited so much? The work happens on multiple levels, and it’s both simple and complex.
Literally, in the body: We start by noticing. What happens in your throat when you’re about to say something true? Where do you feel tension when you’re about to disagree with someone?
Metaphorically, in therapy: We examine whose voice you’re channeling when you speak. We get curious about the internalised critical voice. Whose criticism is it really? We explore narratives you’ve inherited about who you should be and what you should want. We practise saying things in your own words, without softeners and apologies.
And these two processes support each other. When you release physical tension, you might suddenly access emotions you’ve been suppressing. When you challenge an internalised belief about being “too much,” you might find your voice opening up. And so on.
“Finding your voice” doesn’t mean you’ll never sound like your mother or father by the way. You probably will because genetics and early learning run deep. And it definitely doesn’t mean you only have one fixed “true” voice that sounds the same in every context.
But you develop the capacity to choose and notice when you’re speaking from an inherited pattern. It’s important to recognise when you’re silencing yourself out of fear or shame.
You can hear your mother’s voice in your own and think, “Yes, I got that from her,” without feeling overtaken by it. You can still code-switch when it’s strategically useful, but you’ll know the difference between strategy and suppression.
An Invitation to Listen
If you’re reading this, I invite you to pause and listen to yourself.
Maybe read this sentence out loud: “This is my voice. Right now, in this moment, this is how I sound.”
What did you notice? Tension anywhere? A quality you liked or didn’t like? Whose voice did yours remind you of?
Your voice carries your history, but it also carries the present and possibility. Every time you speak, you have a choice about what to amplify and what to let go.
It definitely is a lifetime’s work to become conscious enough to choose, to make space for all the voices you contain and learning to conduct them with intention rather than being conducted by them.
Your voice is yours. It always has been, and I’d love to hear your reflections in the comments.
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Peña, M. et al. “An electrophysiological study of voice processing in newborns.” Cerebral Cortex 21(8):1705–1715 (2011). https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/21/8/1705/266729