I Don’t Like Your Tone: The Shifting Shape of Perceptions

New light shines for new ideas

I couldn’t produce a scream even if my life depended on it, so hopefully I never find myself needing one. My voice simply doesn’t project well, so making myself heard has always been a little difficult for me. I don’t have much range in octave either, so unless someone knows me well it’s hard to discern how I feel about whatever I happen to be saying. This can be confusing even in the best circumstances, so I try to be deliberate, but even that falls short: No matter how I intend for my voice to sound when I’m making a point, it often comes back to one thing: the overall tone of my voice remains problematic, despite my best efforts. 

You would think that changing something so important would be easy (because who doesn’t want to communicate effectively?), but the reality is an exercise in patience – mine as much as anyone else’s. I remember feeling defensive when I first heard this complaint. At the time it was a challenge for me to see outside of my own view and I took great offense when someone didn’t automatically understand exactly where I was coming from. It felt like a personal slight, and I think I carried that belief well into my second marriage. From my view at the time: If you didn’t understand the tone of what I meant then you clearly didn’t know me – and I had made a bad choice in trusting you with my ideas in the first place. The about face can make your head spin, but that’s how quickly I am able to detach when I feel disconnected/abandoned. It doesn’t make any sense to me today, but there was a time when I refused to see things any other way. And I’m glad I remember that shift in my beliefs.

Hindsight is one of those teachers that drops lessons in our laps when we least expect it, forcing us to re-evaluate our position again and again as environmental circumstances change and grow around us. We endeavor to make the best choices we can with the information we have, but additional intel will almost always change the landscape. If we can easily accept that, it’s a smoother ride, but if we are prone to becoming defensive, it might be a minute before we are even willing to take a look at the situation from a different view. All that really means is that we have become emotionally attached to our position, but that can be a hard thing to see when we are smack in the middle of it. My adolescence is living proof.

When we are young, we approach each new concept with childlike wonder; often to the delight of ourselves and those around us. We are able to express how we feel in real time, using our entire bodies to do that as our feelings work their way through us, physically, from lungs to toes. As little kids, we naturally move from our cores. Think back to a childhood memory of letting loose with your feelings and recall how your body felt as your breath returned to its normal state – spent and exhausted, but free from whatever feeling had grabbed us in the first place. This is an organic tool (the expression in real time, not the tantrum) that adults work to alter as soon as a child begins to understand language. 

We feel proud when our kids understand that there is a time and place for their emotions and that the world doesn’t revolve around them. I subscribed to that belief for a very long time because it was praised behavior in my household. I excelled at stifling my emotions so well that I buried a few things that would have benefitted from the light. By the time I dealt with those feelings, I was experiencing the effects of their unexpressed presence in my physical body, which was a revelation about how important the mind-body connection is to our health.

I wish I had realized that before I talked my own kids out of their true responses to stimuli. I know I would have learned a lot from those observations. Instead, I assumed what I knew to be correct because I had read a lot of good books on the subject and I was thoughtful. My adult kids continue to reinforce that wasn’t what they needed by making me the butt of parenting jokes at every turn. I’ve learned to recognize it as their love and acceptance of my ignorance, and I try to meet their humor with that understanding.

Perhaps my natural tone has sounded authoritative and scary (not my words) because some part of me has been subconsciously struggling to feel safe within myself? Seems highly plausible now that I know creating distance will make that happen, regardless of intentions. I have watched my kids struggle through their own version of this story as a direct result of my own, and though I can’t change my behavior now, I can acknowledge the things I’ve learned since. This has fueled a lot of inner questions about relationships and intentions that I will likely be examining for the rest of my life. Above all else, my kids have taught me to always be curious beyond what I think I know.

As I learn more about how and why humans have emotions, I have to wonder if we didn’t royally eff that one up early on. I see the pattern that made it happen: we needed community support to build things, and that required harnessing and shaping the energies of those around us —- to our will, and against their own in some cases. In our efforts to create bigger and better, we seem to have manipulated ourselves out of remembering our fundamental connections. I believe we used to understand exactly how we became 8 billion individualized human beings, each with a unique operating system and set of raw material that is largely unknown to the people we interact with every day. Tavish Truth: I don’t believe the reason we exist as we do in the world was always a mystery to us.

Our disconnection from our origins has allowed fear-based ideas to take root, creating further divide and vibrational segregation. Our creative development was arrested and redirected to fit an arbitrary version of “normal” or “common sense” — as if such a thing could ever find agreement among everyone, am I right?! Our Raw Material acknowledges that we will each have different experiences, even within the same households. That we will be hurt and hurt each other, and that is part of the overall experience of being human to begin with.

Somewhere along the way, I started asking myself: Is tone the real issue? Or is it the story I attach to it — mine and yours? For our part, it is not our business to control how we are received (as much as we would really like to do that). It is our business to express how we feel with our best intentions and hope that our meaning comes through with integrity. When it doesn’t, we know we are up against someone else’s raw material and we can begin learning how to honor it as such. If you're curious about what your tone might be trying to say, I hope you'll explore the ORM practice with us. It's not about fixing your voice — it's about genuinely hearing yourself within it.