Pub Pod 6.6: Childhood Emotional Neglect, Somatization, and all your adult problems

Victim's Voice So, the victim's voice, the vocalization patterns that prior perpetrators can pick out, may be marked by qualities like slow speed, monotony, unemotionality, and perturbations in sound waves.

Those inconsistencies can be called jitter and shimmer, and they're found to correlate with insecure, anxious, and avoidant attachment, as well as with shame.

But interestingly, diminished voice intensity corresponds with only anxious attachment.

And meanwhile, despite this anxious labeling, research showed that voice dysfunction isn't linked with anxiety itself.

or as a small aside, with guilt.

So, insecure attachment and shame uniquely affect the voice and throat compared to avoidant attachment and guilt.

That means we should talk about anxiety and shame to try to make sense of how they're similar.

Now, to switch up how we normally speak about it, anxious attachment is like a preemptive association with negative emotion.

Yeah, we don't know that a negative thing is happening within a relationship, but we respond internally and quite often externally as though it is evidentially taking place.

before we know if someone is ignoring, leaving, or trying to harm us, we're quite certain that they are because our mind tells us it's likely per what we've lived through before and because our body is ringing with emotions that align with the resulting emotions of those past experiences, making it all seem like we know exactly what is going on.

This is reality, even if it hasn't observably shaken out yet.

They're abandoning, rejecting, lying to us, etc.

We might feel like this constantly as a steady state.

At face value, therefore, anxious attachment is, quote, about the other person and how they are treating us.

At real value, anxious attachment is about fear that one's self is not valuable enough to be treated well in relationship, and therefore, we must be getting treated poorly.

Shame is quite similar.

It's another preemptive engagement with negative assumptions that can be chronic.

They aren't necessarily based on real observations.

And just like with anxious attachment, those negative assumptions ultimately are about the worth of the self.

Shame tells us you fucked up socially.

You'd better fix this or you are at risk of excommunication.

It has a function.

It keeps us safe in a herd tribal sort of setting, which we do require to survive as people.

But when we are persistently shameful, when this becomes our homeostasis, it loses its functionality.

The mistake that we fear we have made is perhaps a generalized sense of having biffed it through potentially unnamed action and consequence.