I wanted to make sure we were all tracking the results of recent episodes on somatization – especially, in the throat. If you’re like me, you’ve been listening along and finding the results interesting… but we’ve not discussed them in concert so they haven’t added up to a definitive answer.
So today, let’s do a little summary episode making sure we don’t lose the thread as we trace it from childhood to adult psychosomatization.
For the nerdos, we’ll cover three research papers to expand into new, deeper, territory, give you some reflection about neglect experiences, and validate how strongly emotions matter in the effort to stave off physiological destruction.
For the rest of us, let’s enjoy an easy-breezy summary for the summer solstice. Dive into the research bonus if you’re feeling extra curious.
And here we go.
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, un-emotionality, and perturbations in soundwave.
Those perturbations or vocal inconsistencies can be called jitter and shimmer, and they’ve been found to correlate with insecure (anxious and avoidant) attachment, as well as shame.
But, interestingly, diminished voice intensity corresponds with only anxious attachment.
And, meanwhile, despite this anxious labeling, voice dysfunction ISN’T linked with anxiety, itself. Or, with guilt.
So, insecure attachment and shame uniquely affect the throat compared to avoidant attachment and guilt. From one study, anxious attachment, but not avoidant attachment or generalized anxiety, seems to have the greatest effect. Anxious attachment may uniquely cause dangerous signals to be transmitted through the voice.
ANXIETY AND SHAME
And I thought it was a good idea to talk about the connection between anxious attachment and shame to try to make sense of it. Because experientially, the two are difficult to separate.
To switch up how we normally speak about it, anxious attachment is like a pre-emptive association with negative emotion.
We don’t KNOW that a negative thing is happening within a relationship, but we respond internally (and perhaps externally) as though it is evidentially taking place.
What is the evidence?
Our expectations based on previous experience and resulting emotions ABOUT those expectations, which are rolling out like it’s 4am at a bakery, making the assumptions appear very real.
But in fact, they are only half-baked.
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 seem like a no-brainer. THIS is reality, even if it hasn’t observably shaken out yet. (They’re abandoning, rejecting, lying to us). We might feel like this constantly, as a steady state, without requiring any significant occurrences to set off the spiral.
At face value, anxious attachment “is about the other person and how they’re treating us in the relationship.” At real value, anxious attachment is about fear that oneself is not valuable enough to be treated well in relationship.
And shame?
Is similar. It’s a pre-emptive engagement with negative assumptions that can be chronic. 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’re at risk of excommunication.” But when we’re persistently shameful, we’re applying this message before any fuckup has occurred.
The mistake we fear we’ve made? Is perhaps unknown. A generalized sense of having biffed it, through potentially unnamed action and consequence. And therefore, persistent shame is really about fearing that we’re not good enough. We’re somehow flawed or broken. We’re a burden to everyone – not because we’re trying to be – but by birthright or innate quality.
In both cases, then, we have a messed up relationship with our self. We assume we’re a thorn in the side or an unwanted component of the lives of the people around us. We have a diminished, probably quite rude and damning, self-view.
Is it surprising, then, that shame and anxiety come with voice irregularities and diminished intensity?
Or does it make sense that a cumulative doubt of one’s relational value – how much other people want to have and keep you around – would correlate with uncertain and defeated voice qualities?
To me, it tracks… and also reveals why these voice qualities (slow speech, monotone, unemotional, unintentional vocal variations) are detected as signals of a good victim.
If we assume the worst about ourselves – that we are valueless or repulsive, and on the verge of being abandoned, disposed of, left behind or pushed away – then we’re excellent material for abusing. We WON’T estimate we have other relationships to lean on. We WILL estimate that whatever maltreatment we receive is just and inevitable.
And, as we stated, we’ll do so pre-emptively, before the abuse even begins, so we’re ready to accept it once it starts raining down. We might even feel comforted by it, because our expectations are becoming reality.
“We knew it! we were right all along to feel as terribly as we did.”
So, a victim’s voice might indicate anxious attachment and shame, specifically. Both of which are sturdy steppingstones linking past abuse experiences with the modern day, which predators could be able to discern and realize they can utilize.
Ultimately, because both probably correlate with what?
Childhood trauma; abuse and emotional neglect
Childhood emotional neglect affected overall and peak voice intensity.
And the authors suggested that it’s potentially because it correlates with withdrawal and a preference for an unstimulated nervous system. These are common methods of coping with emotional dysregulation when we haven’t been taught we can intentionally care for ourselves. Individuals try to hide themselves as a form of protection against acquiring any system-excitement. So the voice, itself, is a danger, and it may be silenced or subdued as a result.
All of this, of course, corresponds also with?
DEPRESSION AND PTSD
From childhood abuse, we grow to be disempowered – in voice and behavior – constantly or cyclically in life.
When we learn that we can’t live life to the fullest or we’re “fundamentally built wrong” or “trying” results in punishment. When negative experiences and expectations pervade our perspective… when we learn that it’s better to pull back than venture forth…
We get depression.
Depression voice markers:
Pitch, resonance, harmonies, sentence duration are reduced – the voice is flat, short, predictable, there’s less expression using varied volume and intensity. And changes in word choice occur; simple sentences, frequent use of common words, and less diversity have been seen.
Similar to the victim’s voice, depression makes us less vocally expressive. Perhaps, in another attempt to hide ourselves and avoid challenge we don’t feel we can emotionally handle.
Meanwhile, assuming they can be separate experiences, PTSD markers include:
Language centering around death, negative feelings, anger, and the body. High word count and more complex grammatical structures are seen. We speak more words, for longer, and insert a lot of unnecessary “fluff” which can be overly descriptive or redundant.
And that’s not too dissimilar from the issue of fragmented speech. With PTSD symptomology, cohesion becomes a problem. We might jumble time stamps, fail to complete thoughts or sentences, or leap between topics – at least from an outside perspective. Plus, it’s still not uncommon for un-emotionality to be present.
These findings suggest that something else is taking place as the mediator between childhood maltreatment, depression, PTSD, and vocal changes. And you’ll probably remember that it’s also a mediating factor between childhood abuse and substance-related revictimization experiences:
DISASSOCIATION
In the case of PTSD, disassociation is an issue that both heightens the chances of developing a stress-disorder AND is an ongoing effect of the stress-disorder. Meaning, if we disassociate during a stress event, we’re more likely to suffer from mental, emotional, and physical dysfunction afterwards. And if that occurs (PTSD) we’re more likely to disassociate again and again, potentially for the rest of our lives.
This is where jumbled, incoherent, language and chronology make a lot of sense. We don’t have a single perspective to speak from.
Disassociation is also thought to be an underlying cause or characteristic of depression. If you can’t enact your will on the environment, why be present in it? We conserve energy and protect ourselves from pains by pulling back from life – by pulling back from being IN our lives, all the way down to our own thoughts, feelings, and body sensations.
Disassociation then shows up in the voice, as we try to speak from a semi-empty vessel, or a container that’s holding various unmatching, unintegrated, perspectives. Will we speak too much (PTSD)? Or hardly at all (depression)?
Research suggests it depends on which one we’re experiencing most strongly at any given time, assuming that the experiences ARE separate. Which is questionable, since PTSD is often mis-diagnosed as major depression; the two are challenging to untangle.
And.. we’re finally getting down to the point today… Both are enhanced by what type of childhood trauma, in particular?
EMOTIONAL NEGLECT
Remember this from our most recent epiode? Laryngo responders, on average, were shown to have more ACEs, more and more-severe childhood trauma events, and – most significantly – more childhood emotional neglect, compared to non-laryngo-responders.
So childhood trauma, abuse, and emotional neglect are connected to destructive and dangerous voice, language, and throat-responding outcomes that might bend the ear of predators around us.
And one other thing.
Hidden in the results section of that paper they said:
The DES includes subscales regarding absorption (eg, becoming overly involved in a memory or a movie), amnestic dissociation (eg, blocking out certain experiences or episodes), and depersonalization (eg, not recognizing oneself in the mirror).47-49 LR had higher scores than NLR on the DES total score, absorption, and amnestic dissociation. NLR scored higher only on the depersonalization subscale.
As we said earlier, disassociation was also correlated with risky behaviors that increase revictimization experiences. When we can’t handle our emotions because no one taught us how, we try not to experience them through unhealthy coping attempts including disconnecting from ourselves and engaging in substance abuse. These put us in harm’s way, without wherewithal to protect ourselves from present threats that we might otherwise recognize from personal history. Since we’re not attached to our own life timeline, we miss out on detecting the similarities with past abusers. Disassociation was found to be one of the most dangerous factors influencing unsafe behaviors and reduced pattern recognition.
AND remember that disassociation was also connected with what?
Victim’s gait.
When we’re not present in our own bodies, operating them centrally, and instead, we’re detached from ourselves… it can be read by predators. And when we’re operating our body in a similar fashion to our thoughts and words – incohesively – we get fittingly fragmented, inefficient, ungraceful movements from that body.
Post emotional neglect and post-disassociation, our speech and our physical mobility reflect each other. Revealing the state of our mind, which is, unfortunately, to outsiders, marked as “vulnerable.”
“We’re not even in our lives, brains, or meat jackets… feel free to use them as you’d please.” is the signal that we send – at least, to those who’ve been trained to spot it through predation or their own victimization experiences.
And:
TO TIE IT ALL TOGETHER
With disassociation being such a central feature of these somatization issues that lead to further harm, it makes a person wonder…
Does emotional neglect cause an individual to have no emotional regulation skills, based partially on the poor communications that go hand in hand with parental nonattendance?
Does this lack of emotional expertise while trapped in a helpless state (as a child), then, lead to disassociation and depression because the individual has no other method of handling external or internal threats? All they CAN do is try to flee the scene mentally and emotionally until the scene (hopefully) changes?
Without corrective experiences to teach that there are alternative, empowered, options available… does this action become rooted in the psychological and physiological responses of the individual? So that they respond as a child, as an adult? Withdrawing, subduing, hiding… or alternatively pretending that NO risks exist and they live in a consequence-free world…. Through voice, movement, and behavior?
And do those behaviors then put them at risk of encountering predatory individuals while signaling an internally childlike condition to them?
I have to think so. At least it’s one theory that connects these five or six papers together. Each, somehow, indicates the particular experience of childhood emotional neglect with disassociation and absence of learned emotional regulation skills as predisposing factors for somatization, and from there, identification as potential victims.
So?
To take a lesson away from all this?
Examine your relationship to childhood emotional neglect, specifically.
From there, identify what emotional skills you didn’t learn, such as compassionate self-talk or processing safely with others.
Realizing you don’t have these tools, pinpoint the ongoing connection between emotional overwhelm and disassociation in your own life. For instance, identify how you cope when you can’t comfort yourself or receive it from others? What behaviors take place? What sharks have previously entered the waters while you’ve not been fully immersed in your own pool?
Absorb the lesson that your learned survival response – disassociation – normally hides from you, dooming you to relive it pointlessly.
And try to break the pattern.
When big feelings come up, do something different. Talk to yourself nicely. Talk to people you trust. Work with embodiment practices. Revisit your autobiographical timeline. Stay away from fucked up core beliefs (negative self-schemas) that normally drive you to defeat. Insert calming, supportive, curious thoughts, instead. They can feel delusional because they’re so outside of your experience so far.
But that’s just the thing – you’ve not had the opportunity to behave differently and receive differently SO FAR.
When you’ve been basing your life on pre-emptive engagement with negative emotions like anxiety and shame – kickstarting the overwhelm that ultimately tumbles into the same behaviors as always – you’ll get the same behaviors from others, in return, as always. Those abusive behaviors, of course, will push you back into negative emotions like those associated with anxious attachment and shame.
And you won’t even notice the pattern as you disass away from the pain.
But probably wonder, eventually, why you seem to be marked, forever, as a victim.
And with that…
The nerds are going to cover three research paper excerpts today. Join in for the extended cut if you want to learn more about emotional neglect, disassociation, and depression.
Or get outta here and get practicing being kind to yourself. A scientifically-backed way to break this cycle, heal your emotional brain, and re-establish relationship to your body.
Thanks for being here. Hail yourself. Hear yourself. Heal yourself.
Or something pretty lame like that.
And I’ll talk to you soon.