Your Voice Sometimes Knows What Your Mind Doesn’t
About choosing silence, or having silence chosen for you
There’s a moment in every first session when I don’t just listen to what a new client says but how they say it. If their hand rises unconsciously to their throat. If they clear it. If they apologise for the rasp. If they explain they’re “getting over something”, though that’s not really it. It often tells me more than twenty minutes of conversation.
I’ve now spent over a decade working at the intersection of voice coaching and psychotherapy, and I’ve come to understand our voice as a kind of border between inner truth and outer expression. It’s where what we feel meets what we’re “allowed” to say. And for many of us, it’s heavily guarded.
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The body (unlike our minds) cannot really lie. It can be suppressed, ignored, numbed, but it cannot fabricate in the same way our thoughts try to spin stories. When someone tells me they’re fine while their voice is thin and breathy (NB: and they don’t have a diagnosed voice problem), barely occupying space, I know their body is telling a different story. When someone speaks of their anger in a noticeably controlled manner, all the while sounding constricted, I know their rage has nowhere to go but inward.
We think of voice as simply sound, but it’s so much more than that. Voice is breath given shape. In a way, it’s our deepest self. To speak is to claim space, to say, “I am here, and what I have to say matters.”
No wonder so many of us are so afraid of it.
What Lives in the Throat
I had a client once who came to me because she kept losing her voice before presentations. No voice pathology. “Just” stress. But when we began working together, what surfaced was a lifetime of being told to lower her voice, not to interrupt, to wait her turn, to be “nice”.
When I asked her to give speaking loudly a shot so I could get a better idea, she could barely do it. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Her throat would tighten, her breath became shallow, and she almost started to cry.
For many of us, voice tension isn’t random. It’s cumulative. Every time we swallow words we wanted to say, we laugh politely instead of objecting, we make ourselves small to make someone else comfortable.
The muscles of the larynx and the soft tissues respond to how safe you feel to express yourself. Chronic tension is biographical. It’s the story of every time expression feels dangerous and silence means survival.
There’s a profound difference between choosing silence yourself, and having silence chosen for you.
Physical silencing is more like creating a dam to hold back a flood. But emotional silencing? That’s when we’ve internalised things so deeply that we no longer even feel the impulse to speak. Nothing is trying to get out anymore. We’ve done such a thorough job of self-censorship that we’ve forgotten what our actual voice sounds and feels like.
I can teach someone to release physical tension: We do exercises (not just on the voice), we breathe, we make sounds that feel ridiculous until they don’t. But working on emotional silencing requires remembering that you ever had something to say in the first place.
The Body Speaks
The body (sort of) doesn’t operate on the same timeline as the mind. While we’re busy rationalising and justifying and convincing ourselves of (sometimes comfortable, sometimes uncomfortable) narratives, the body is often not quite so good at doing that (NB: I’m not saying the mind and body are two separate things btw, because they’re not. But our minds are very good storytellers. And these stories sometimes include overthinking, lying to ourselves or simply ignoring things we find too painful).
I’ve had clients whose voices would spontaneously crack when they talked about relationships, though they insisted everything was fine. Others whose breath would catch when mentioning their jobs. A client whose voice would drop to nearly a whisper whenever she spoke about her father, though her father had been dead for years.
The voice doesn’t lie because in most (!) people, it simply can’t. It’s too tied to the autonomic nervous system, too connected to our emotional centres, too honest in its expression of what we actually feel versus what we think we (should) feel.
This is why public speaking (and singing) terrifies so many people. It’s not really about the audience. It’s about the fact that when you speak, you reveal something about yourself. Your voice carries everything you’re trying to hide: your fears, your uncertainties, your hope to be seen and heard and valued.
How do we reclaim a voice that’s been guarding the boundary between “acceptable” and “authentic” for so long?
Well, that really depends, so I can’t and won’t give a “one size fits all” here. But I found that having a bit of fun with the voice without the filter of what we think we should sound like almost always helps.
And slowly, carefully, we also need to begin to say true things. Small truths at first perhaps, but truths regardless.
“I don’t like that.”
“I need a moment.”
“No.”
We practise letting our voice match what we actually feel, not what we think others want to hear.
When we begin to remember who we were before we learned to silence ourselves, many tensions slowly start to fall away. But it takes time, and sometimes, we’ll take two steps forward, one step back. It can feel quite unsettling at first to remember what we can claim: air, space, the sound of our own truth.
Your voice knows that you’re lonely, even when you convince yourself you prefer solitude. It knows you’re angry, even when you’ve decided anger isn’t “productive” or “kind”. It knows you’re scared or exhausted.
And that’s both humbling and hopeful. Humbling because we can’t fully control or deny the truth our bodies hold on to. Hopeful because even when we’ve lost our way, even when we’ve convinced ourselves of a thousand narratives, we still have a compass pointing us toward what’s real.
So yes, I listen not just to what people say, but to how they say it. A lot. It tells me where someone is holding back, where they’re afraid, where they’ve given up trying to be heard. And since you’ve read this far, I imagine something here has resonated. So I’ll leave you with this simple thought:
Today, just notice what you’re saying (or not saying). And if you’re saying it: How are you saying it?
Your voice is always trying to tell you something. The question is if you’re at a stage where you’re ready to listen. Sometimes, we need a bit of help with that, and that’s okay.
And when you’re ready to hear what your body has been trying to say, speak. Not perfectly, not eloquently, but truly…
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