How tone of voice can help you convey what you mean - Episode 47

Awareness That Heals, Episode 47.

We're trying to increase the percentages of times where we can be harmless, where we can be more connected with ourselves, with other people.

The Awareness That Heals podcast helps its listeners learn to develop the capacity to have a more healing response to emotions and situations rather than becoming stuck. Your host, Robert J. Strock, has practiced psychotherapy for more than 45 years. He wrote the book Awareness That Heals: Bringing Heart and Wisdom to Life's Challenges to help develop self-caring and the capacity to respond in an effective way to life's challenges, especially at times when we are most prone to be critical or to withdraw. Together, we will explore how to become aware of our challenging feelings and at the same time find alternative ways to live a more fulfilling and inspiring life.

Very warm welcome again to Awareness That Heals, where we do our very best to focus on bringing heart and wisdom to our life's challenges. And we start again and again with being aware of what's most difficult for us. And you'll notice we're repeating that over and over and over again. Because it's so counter to the way we were raised. We were raised to have a persona, and we're trying to counteract that conditioning where we have a great interest in, well, what really is most difficult for us. And when we look closely, we see that these difficulties are universal for all of us, and it's part of being human. And whether we recognize them or not, they're there. And if we don't recognize them, it is part of what creates war, alienation, divorce, mediocre friendships. And we have a chance if we really look at our tone of voice as really increasing our odds of being a more peaceful influence in a variety of areas of our life. And when we find challenging feelings while we're looking at our tones, we're also looking at how we can care for those challenging feelings, and hopefully even before we speak at these crucial times. How this would set up the ideal conditions for us to be fulfilled in our individual lives and to contribute to the world by finding and living from our best selves. So as we begin, I'd like to introduce Dave, who, as you know by now if you've been listening to the prior episodes, you probably know very well, is my closest and dearest friend and my partner with the Global Bridge Foundation.

Thank you. Great to be here. And of course, as we speak about this particular topic, I have no shortage of personal memories and experiences between you and I where we've had an expression of the kinds of tones that would not be considered pleasurable that we have had to work through and I think successfully work through. And so even with the awareness of tone, what I guess I'm saying is it's still a hell of a challenge to keep on the money.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Dave and I, for those of you that don't know it, we're not lovers. Somebody actually said, you know, you sound so intimate. I thought you were in a gay relationship. I thought he was your partner. But in spite of that, we sort of are like second wives. And so we give ourselves the liberty to be aggressive with each other. And we could stop, but I don't think either one of us are that motivated to be perfectionistic and sweet all the time. So we're aggressive and we're strong with each other. And We both know there's going to be a next step. We don't just let it stay there for long. It might be 5 seconds later, it might be a few hours later. And we usually calm down by the end of the paragraph, but the first part of the paragraph isn't always pretty. And so we have that understanding between us that that is really okay, not desirable particularly, But we know something else is going on in each other's lives, or we expect something from each other that we haven't done, or something like along that line. Now, I wanted to come back to what we did in the last episode and just give an example of how we could really use tone of voice in a way where we lose it, we acknowledge it, and we find it. And then maybe a couple of other derivatives from there. So, you know, we're with our— let's say I'm with my wife, you're with your wife, and you say, Georgia, I don't know why you did that. I mean, how many times do I have to tell you not to do that? I mean, I can't believe that you're still doing that after 20 years of me telling you not to do that. And you pause, maybe, and you look and you say, wow, that wasn't particularly pleasant. And maybe an evolutionary step is waiting to happen. And you say to yourself, gosh, I was really an asshole. You know, that was really a shitty way to talk to my wife. That's a shitty way to talk to anybody. So Ideally, you take time, you take a few seconds, you contemplate, and you realize that. And then you come back and you say, you know what, I'm sorry I spoke to you in that way. You know, what I would really like is for you to take care of this thing and that thing, and I'm going to do my best not to repeat that over and over again. Now, another alternative— that, that would be a humongous breakthrough. That would be a great therapy session. I don't have too many of people that speak to their, their spouses these days, but in my earlier— in my career, I had plenty, plenty of examples of that. And that's where intervention, which we'll get into later— I would stop somebody a third of the way in that, into that sentence and say, Do you have any sense of how you sound as you're speaking that way? Now I'll get into that later. And then there'd be all kinds of ways of me mirroring it and reflecting it back to the person. And they would be in denial and say, I didn't sound that way. I'd say, do you have any sense of how you just sounded to me? And of course I had to be very careful not to be sarcastic, not to be superior, you know, and hopefully most of the times I did decently. So it's also important to recognize that we can use tone in a way that is not only negative, but is also sometimes, I would say for probably 20% of the population, there's an automatic pilot niceness And so you never get to know who the person is because they're going to be nice to you no matter what, and they don't even realize they're doing it. So you probably all have people in your life that you know, oh, so-and-so is really a nice person. So case example. So there was a client named Sarah, and she was telling me that she was about ready to break up with her husband So I said, well, how far along are you? You know, how, you know, have you been to therapy? You know, have you, have you, have you, have you told him for how long? Have you been— how long has it been fighting? For a few years. And she said, her response was, oh no, no, I was never unkind. You know, I, I always have stayed soft and gentle and encouraging because I wanted to give it the best chance it could have. You know, it was never harsh with it. So my response to her was, you mean you haven't even told him that you're thinking about breaking up? She said, oh no, no, I wanted to wait until I was really clear because I still wanted to give it the best possibility. So I said, you realize what a double message this is? To act like you're happy and satisfied with your tone and not to even verbally give him an idea of where you are? And this may sound extreme, but this is probably true in 2 out of 10 people that I've seen through the years, professionally and personally. And so it's so important, as we talked about in the last episode, that when you have difficult feelings, that you find a way to talk about them. And otherwise, you're not going to be taken seriously. There are so many people who are really good hearts that basically have been taught it's good to be good and it's bad to be bad, and it's bad to even let anybody know that you feel bad. So if you don't have anything nice to say, say nothing at all. That's the mantra for these people in general. So there's no reflection of her deepest need, and there wasn't a congruency with the intensity, the pain, the frustration, the helplessness And the words didn't match it either. So you can sort of guess what the progression was over a period of the next 6 months of a gradual revealing, still with a decent vibe, but with a real truth-telling with a decent vibe. And then an acknowledgement that, you know what, I felt angry, I felt withdrawn. I felt irritated, I felt annoyed, but I've been in this habit of being nice and I don't wanna shock you by suddenly saying, you know what, I think I want a divorce. 'Cause I had shared with her, do you realize how shocked he's gonna be when you've been this nice to him all the way through? And so what ended up happening was she got in touch with what her needs were, which she also of course didn't express. I need you to be softer with me. I need you to be more focused on me. I need you to come home at a certain time. I need you to be present with me. I need you to be interested in what my experience was like. She had no vocabulary for that. As she started to reveal her needs, which her positive tone and her silent negativity buried her needs. As she started to verbalize them, Guess what? Her husband started to be attentive, and they moved into what I would call a solidly decent relationship. And there was a tremendous amount of progress. And I'm not trying to convey it, you know, that the relationship became blissful, but they were two people that were relatively unsophisticated because he wanted someone that was just nice all the time, and she accommodated. Except that she was not really being real. And so I would say that they evolved to the point where, you know, at least half the time she was being quite straight with him, and he started to understand her needs. He started to become more responsive to them, and it was better than her wildest dreams were as to what it could be, even though it probably, from many people's vantage point, would still be just be viewed as a a decent relationship for them. They were really happy with it, and it was a successful turning point, all starting with too much positivity on the top.

I'd like to hearken back to the first example you gave and a variation of that that I seem to have frequently encountered from myself in my relationship and with others, where I will get a response because in my relationships I invite people to. But I still, because again, as we've talked about an episode ago, we're often so unaware, and I'm often so unaware of my tone to begin with, that even when somebody says, "That didn't feel good," I'm looking inside and I'm saying, "You know, I'm not aware that that's how I was." I might completely disagree. I might say, "You know what? I didn't experience myself that way. And so it creates a bind. And one of the ways I've dealt with it, and I'd like to hear from you about this actually, is to say, you know, I didn't experience him, didn't experience myself that way, but that's not how I want to be. And certainly I will pay more attention to how I am with respect to that. And I'm glad you told me how you felt about it. And I'd also invite you to look at how you responded, given that I'm not seeing it. But either way, that's not how I want to be, assuming of course it is how I don't want to be, which usually it is. And that happens to me.

Yeah, the only thing I would add to that, which is really a big, big assistance, I think, if it's practiced is, okay, okay, so you say that that wasn't the way you wanted to be. Take two. Go ahead. Why don't you repeat the same thing? And let's both listen to it together. You know, really go through another practice run and see whether you were sensitive, or whether there was an edge. And you may As you're attempting to put it out loud again, right live, right there, right then, you may still say, no, same as it was before. I was great. You know, I was fantastic. And it's all you. Or you might stop right in the middle and realize, you know what? I was a little tighter there. I had a little edge. You may even see that I had an edge because I was still a little bit upset about X, Y, and Z. But if on the second attempt you really still don't see anything, then you have the freedom— being again very careful with your tone, kind of like I have to be as a therapist— you may say, you know, when I really think about it, I actually experienced you as having this tone, and I'm not sure it was me. 'But I experienced you saying it that way.' And then ask whoever you're talking about— talking to— ask them to do a— I don't want to call it a dry run— a wet run about how they said what they said. So you're both put on the spot to really do it again. And that may sound like you're sort of artificial or contrived, But the truth of the matter is there isn't any real way to get reassurance unless you're able to hear it from a different place, either from the other or from yourself. And putting it off into the future isn't as reassuring as it sounds because you both walk away feeling misunderstood. And this gives you a chance right there on the spot to actually practice it. So one of the things that is really important as a question, I believe, is why are we so unaware of our tones? Besides the obvious of what we already talked about, which is that we weren't taught about it, how did we become tone deaf? You know, because most of us as children, in my experience, were tone sensitive. And at 5 years old, 6 years old, We instantly knew if our parents wanted to hug us or whether they were lecturing us without the words. The invitation was there or the criticism was there. The aggression was there or the love was there. And of course, there can be a tween or two, something in the middle. But the message is really quite evident when we're very young. It's also true with our peers. Now, it's not so obvious, especially when we have set patterns for what happened in our childhood. I mentioned earlier that if we were in a combative situation, that just would have been reality. And we may have lost touch with what we might have had touch with when we were 2 years old or 3 years old or 4 years old, where it was more of a tender quality or more of a, a gentle quality. And it was generally— and this is very important to pay close attention to— it was frequently for many people too painful or annoying to hear, on the one hand, you know, a message that was positive in words, and yet the energy was negative in tone. It became too painful to keep listening. So we just stopped listening to the tone and we just listened to the words. And so many of us became tone deaf as a result. So for example, you might have heard from our father or mother, "Don't eat that," versus, "Don't eat that." And that might be because they had a peanut allergy and it was a loving loving thing. Or it might be, you know, that it was a sweet and you were receiving punishment. Or we might hear something like, as I did frequently in my childhood, "Would you clean up your room?" You know, like an incredulous anger about it versus, you know, "Would you clean up your room?" You know, just kind of an innocent statement. And then there's another one that's very, very subtle, that especially these days is common in parenting, where on a regular basis, you know, maybe 5 times a week, you tell your child, you know, and it comes through consciously as love, but unconsciously it's a dependency, it's a codependency, it's teaching children to need you more than anyone else. And it's like, I miss you, miss you, I missed you, I missed you, versus something that would be more, more lightweight. Gosh, I missed you, you know, just even, just low-key. And oftentimes I see kids that are in that situation where they obligatorily need to say, "I missed you too." And it sort of teaches the kids not to enjoy their friends or their school as much. "Oh no, of course I love you the most." So it's actually a hidden dependency. So sometimes, again, the tones can be coded with positivity as well as negativity. So, Another client example. So a client came in, she was a very, let's say, assertive attorney, classic sort of aggressive tone. And she started off saying to me, and I could hear it right in the beginning of the way she said it, "I seem to be picking the wrong people." And I asked her, "Could you hear your tone?" just the way you said that. And she looked at me like she wanted to hit me. What do you mean? What are you talking about? My tone. What do you mean? And I said, well, my experience is while you were describing the people, you were angry, you were irritated, you were annoyed. And she said, I think you're wrong. I think you're judging me. I I really, really think that, you know, I don't know what's up with you. You don't seem like you're the kind of therapist that I want to be with. So I said to her in a very soft but firm tone, what's your sense of how you're talking to me now? Which really pissed her off, but at least made her think. So she paused after about 4 in a row. She was disoriented. And this led to a long series of sessions where she appreciated eventually the directness and had an increasing self-reflection and became more and more harmless and less angry and superior. And this, this was something that really was really over a period of a couple years where This was a tendency, and it became less and less a tendency. And I would guess it's going to last till she dies, that she's not going to get over it, but she's going to be more aware of it. She's going to be more harmless. And one of the premises in all of my work is not about arriving. It's not about being perfect. Virtually none of us are going to ever be perfect. It's about being on a continuum and getting a much higher percent of the time. If we have perfection or arriving or understanding or faith, and we have it as an absolute, we're putting ourselves in a prison. We're trying to increase the percentages of times where we can be harmless, where we can be more connected with ourselves, with other people, and we're not laying a trip of ourselves of perfection. Or if we are, we're noticing it And then we're embracing that and saying, I can't be perfect. I can improve. And I have this aspiration to improve.

I want to reflect on something with that example specifically and then expand it, which is I love her statement, I'm picking the wrong people. And obviously a pattern in life. And so many patterns in life are repetitive. And like you said, in her case, will be to some degree repeating for the rest of her life. And I think it's, for me, always been the examination of patterns. I know of one pattern, which I've described in our podcast, of being completely unaware of my needs. I was aware of that pattern when I was 19. That is a hell of— I mean, embarrassingly long time ago. But it's also clear to me As you were talking about this, that onion will be continuing to peel forever. And other ones, you know, relationships with coworkers or a variety of ways relating to people in positions of authority or relating to people that I have a certain degree of power or control over, relating to my medical conditions and levels of anxiety or fear that I experience. These kinds of patterns are threads in my life. And I think that's an important element that you just described.

Yeah, and I think the important thing in those universally human states is that it's not just the states are there and we abandon them, hopefully. It's if we can have an awareness of not expressing our vulnerability enough or our needs enough, like you're talking about, then we can increase the percentage of times that we, we are doing that. And when we realize that's happening, rather than judging ourselves for that, we can say, I need encouragement, I need support, I need kindness I need to reveal. And, and so whenever we become aware of a challenging emotion, the reason why we were taught to ignore challenging emotions in general is because we weren't ever learned the skills of caring for them. And so it's so important to see that it's a partnership between challenging emotions and caring for them. And it's like eventually a Pavlovian response where whenever I'm feeling challenged, there's a pivot, there's a suggestion, oh, this sucks. I hate feeling this way. And then it's sort of like, oh, wait a minute, that's not going to help. You know, what is going to help? What's going to help is asking myself, how can I care for myself given that I'm experiencing this repeating universal human condition, how can I care for myself? Because we usually stay with, if you're feeling bad, like angry or mean or impatient, well, that's bad, so I'm not going to care for that, versus I'm going to care for that. Now, care for that doesn't mean condone that. It means I'm going to care for myself because when I'm in some kind of suffering, there's going to be a need that I'm not noticing. And I've got to figure out what would it be that would be helpful if I were to take care of my anger or take care of my aloneness or take care of the needs that I haven't revealed that you just mentioned. Well, I need to keep repeating that. I need to even have practice sessions when it's— when I'm not live. I need to wake up in the morning and say, okay, you know what, this is my life tendency, so I need to reveal my vulnerability when that's happening so that I'm not attending to other people's vulnerabilities so much. I need to look at that list of needs and I need to circle the ones that are dominant and really look at that list On a daily basis, I need to see the ones that are most frequent the last month, the last week, today. So all of us are going to be human until we die, and all of us are going to have some degree of quality of life. And the key is, with tone of voice, it can be like almost like a printout. At one level, you're saying the words, but the tone of voice is a completely different printout. It says, oh, this is conveying a tone of exasperation when we might be saying something completely different. So hopefully this is an enticement or an encouragement to, oh, I get to look at my tone. Not I should, not I have to, but I get to look at my tone. This is going to give me a much better chance to have a quality of life, an inspiring life. A much more fulfilling life. We can start to see how powerful it is to be able to have a chance to be harmless when we're harmful, to be contemplative when normally we're impulsive. When we're opinionated, we can learn how to inquire. When we're just talking about things that don't matter at all and we're boring people and we're We're off in our own world. We can learn how to be silent. When we're angry, we can learn how to contain ourselves. So all of these times of being more aware of our tone can be like a mini miracle. It's definitely a stage of evolution of inquiring, what is my tone of voice like? And like Dave mentioned earlier, what are people letting me know my tone of voice is like if I can't see it for myself? What's the reaction to it? You know, for some people, they're always too neutral, so they never get any read. They're just flat. So maybe you need to see that you're just a flatliner and you need to amplify whatever you really feel, or at least internally amplify so you can see it. So this mini miracle of seeing our tone of voice and being able to have our seeing and our tone of voice come together. And that seeing that really can guide us to, do we need to care for ourselves because we're suffering, or are we actually expressing something that is improving our quality of life? And if we aren't, it's not about judging, it's about learning how to care for ourselves so our tone of voice can authentically come through. This is not a mechanical exercise. To just change our tone of voice. Just, oh, nothing. No, this is a reflection first of deeply seeing where we are and then doing the inner work to find an intention to heal, to find an intention to care, to find an intention to want to be closer, to be more connected. And that intention is what can change our tone of voice from an authentic place. My dearest, greatest wish is to see the ramifications for all of us, that if we see our tone of voice and we do this inner work, all of our lives are going to be more connected and more fulfilled, and we have a chance to really help the world around us that so badly needs it. Thank you very much for your attention.

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