how emotions shape your voice
I can still feel myself shrinking. I was fourteen, in the back seat of a low-rider, and —as the weirdo I am (and full with a side of mushrooms working in my blood)— I'd just suggested we go into the mall and pretend we were watching a bunch of busy bees.
Yes, it’s weird… but safe people embrace this kind of weird.
My boyfriend at the time wasn’t one of these safe people. In fact, he turned around, sneered, and said, "Why don't you shut the fuck up, you're so fucking stupid." To this day, when I think of that moment, my throat tightens, my tummy tenses, and my face feels like it’s been splashed with a bucket of ice water.
When I think about how emotions affect your voice, this is the kind of moment I think of first. The ones that are still sitting in my body years later, shaping the sound I make and the action I take with my voice.
The small moments count, too…
In my mid-twenties, I was playing in a band I loved. I was grateful and eager, always sharing ideas for how we could develop our songs... coming into rehearsal and sharing them. But it wasn’t always appreciated, or welcome. One day one of the guys got really angry and accused me of being bossy and telling them what to do after sharing an idea I had. I was not prepared for it. It was all I could do to get to the bathroom and cry into bunched-up towels, working out how to leave without anyone seeing my face. My voice had nowhere to go without wailing. So I choked it back and got out of there as fast as I could.
Countless moments like these became voices in my system. "Who are you to be wise?" "Why do you have to be so ambitious?" "What makes you think you have the right to..."
Next to the bigger tragedies in life, these smaller moments can sound pretty tame —even petty— and we tend to put ourselves down for even having the feelings at all. “Life is harsh, right? Why can’t you just get over it??”
And yet these small moments stay with us, hiding in our psyche, sometimes for the rest of our lives. The voice is TENDER... and FRAGILE... and it STINGS when it is silenced.
In each of those moments I'd taken the shell off, and in all the tenderness of my skin, I thought I was safe.
How emotions affect your voice in the body
These moments live in our bodies as much as our minds. They affect how we sound and how we belong with others. They also shape the constriction in our pharynx (the passage at the back of the throat that sound travels through), the position of our larynx (the voice box), and how our breath connects to sound and moves it out of the body.
These experiences literally shape our voice.
"Why don't you shut the fuck up" turns into us “shutting the fuck down”. And when we shut down, our voice follows suit. It learns patterns of constriction and tension. It learns that being powerful is unsafe, and that making sound can other us.
So we stop sharing and start hiding.
we shrink in our seat
our diaphragm tightens
our throat closes
and we close off our soul...
And for some of us it can bury itself deeply. e.g. I kept my singing voice completely hidden for over a decade because of abuse in a recording studio when I was a child.
The idea of anyone hearing me felt like life or death.
And this can manifest physically, too. Some people become literally unable to speak after trauma, even when nothing is physiologically wrong with their vocal mechanism.
When the body and voice separate
I call these events, big or small, separations of the body and voice. They're the moments where we lose the connection between who we are and how we sound. When we separate from our sound, we lose awareness of a tangible part of ourselves, and that can leave us feeling like we've "lost our voice."
But the body, voice, and emotions live and breathe as one unified system.
We can't actually lose our voice.
When I talk about voice, I mean the wholeness between who you are and how you express yourself... how you connect with others, whether you're speaking, singing, writing, leading, or shaping clay on the wheel. Sound is where it all starts, though. Vibration holds wisdom, and it doesn't let you hide.
That's the gift built into studying voice: you have to face the body to change the sound.
To move the instrument, you meet whatever is blocking it:
The lump in the throat.
The way you hold your breath.
The butterflies in your stomach
and the tears or anger sitting underneath.
Your voice is the greatest window to your fragility. And it’s also your path back home.
Noticing what your voice is carrying
If you'd like to start exploring this, you don't need to go digging for the big stories. You can start with what's already happening.
Over the next few days, notice when your throat tightens or your voice goes a little smaller than you meant it to. You don't have to fix it. Start by getting curious about what was happening right before... who you were with, and what you were about to say.
You might start to see a pattern, maybe a certain person, or a kind of idea you tend to swallow. That's information. Your body is talking to your spirit, and your spirit is shaping your sound.
I think of this as loosening the zipper on your space suit (there's a whole story about that in this podcast episode). Tiny acts of courage, one notch at a time.
You'll be surprised by what reveals itself.
Questions people ask
Can emotions change the sound of your voice?
Yes, and researchers are starting to measure it. The larynx (voice box) is surrounded by small muscles that respond to stress even when we aren't making a sound. In one study, some vocally healthy participants showed increased activity in these muscles just while silently preparing a speech they found stressful (Helou et al., 2018). Voice researchers describe this as our stress hormones and nervous system acting together on the muscles we use to speak.
In my work, I call this the emotional physiology of the voice. Feeling comes first, and the breath and muscle coordination follow it. The sound we hear is the result of everything happening underneath... which is why a voice can sound thin or tight when we feel unsafe, and full and resonant when we feel free.
Why does my voice shake when I speak up?
When we feel threatened, even socially, the body releases adrenaline. Our heart rate goes up, our breathing gets shallower, and the muscles around the larynx brace. The voice relies on a steady stream of breath meeting the vocal folds, so when the breath gets uneven and the muscles are gripping, the vibration wobbles and we hear it as shaking.
Speaking up adds another layer. Researchers studying functional voice disorders (voice problems with no structural cause) found that women with these disorders had faced more situations of "conflict over speaking out" (times they needed to speak but felt they couldn't) than women without voice problems (Baker et al., 2013). That research looks at diagnosed voice disorders, but it lines up with what I see in voice work: the body remembers the moments when speaking up wasn't safe. Getting curious about when the shake shows up, and building safety with yourself first, tends to steady the voice more than pushing through it.
Why does my throat tighten when I'm upset?
That tight, lumpy feeling has a name: globus sensation. When we're upset, the nervous system signals the glottis (the opening between the vocal folds) to stay open so we can take in more air. Swallowing, or trying to hold back tears, pulls it closed, and the muscles end up working against each other. That tug-of-war is the lump (Science Focus).
I find this one tender, because so much of the tightness comes from holding back. The body is ready to let the sound or the tears out, and we're working hard to keep them in. When that becomes a habit, the throat learns to brace even in calmer moments, which is part of what I mean by separations of the body and voice. If the tightness is persistent or painful, please check in with a doctor too.
Can trauma make you lose your voice?
It can. Some people lose their voice partly or completely after a shock or trauma, even when an exam shows nothing physically wrong with the vocal folds. These are called functional voice disorders, and research links them with stressful life events and with situations where speaking out felt impossible (Baker et al., 2013).
For me, it showed up as a decade of hiding my singing voice. In my work, I start gently, with safety, because a voice that has learned it isn't safe won't open by being forced. If you've lost your voice suddenly, a doctor or speech-language pathologist can rule out physical causes and is part of good care.
Your voice belongs
When we stop filtering who we are for the sake of being liked, and stop changing our voice to fit in, we start to get a sense that we naturally belong, just as we are. The truth stops threatening that belonging, and we stop pushing it away.
Your voice belongs. Period... and your job is to get out of its way.
The full story, space suit and all, is in Episode 1 of The Wisdom of the Voice, Space Suits and Sun Burns.
And if something here feels familiar and you'd like company in exploring it, you can get in touch here.