Has your inner voice been quashed or silenced? Do you feel small or unseen due to the forces of your upbringing, relationships, or society? Do you wish you could take up space, speak your truth, and show up as your authentic self without fear or making apologies? Dr. Carla has found that many people have lost the courage–or never developed the ability–to use their authentic voice because they learned (often early on in life) that they had to be quiet, “good,” or obedient in order to be loved or found worthy. But she’s here to help you discover that the opposite is true: Genuine love–for the self and with others–comes from the freedom of knowing and expressing your inner truth. By discovering and embracing the power of your own vibrant voice, you can set yourself free to live fearlessly–if imperfectly.

Join Dr. Carla and autonomy expert Dr. Soha Al-Jurf for a heartfelt exploration into the power of your inimitable voice. Topics discussed include personal identity, self-exploration, authenticity, emotional experiences, individuation, autonomy, feminine and masculine archetypes, voice rehabilitation, speech-language pathologist, relationships, love, connection, personal freedom, alignment, empowerment, spirituality, soul, boundaries, self-love, and self-discovery.

Please note that this episode may contain sensitive material; listener discretion is advised.

Note: If you or someone you know needs immediate support, please call your emergency services. In the US, 24/7 help is available by calling “911” or “988” (Suicide and Crisis Hotline).

 

Books by Dr. Carla Manly:

Joy from Fear: https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Fear-Carla-Marie-Manly/dp/1641701218

Date Smart: https://www.amazon.com/Date-Smart-Transform-Relationships-Fearlessly/dp/1641704675

Aging Joyfully: https://www.amazon.com/Aging-Joyfully-Optimal-Relationships-Fulfillment/dp/1641701412

The Joy of Imperfect Love: https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Imperfect-Love-Creating-Relationships/dp/1641709057

 

Oracle decks by Dr. Carla Manly:

Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1757477615/imperfect-love-reflection-oracle-cards

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Imperfect-Love-Reflection-Oracle-Cards/dp/B0D1Z5M4YK

 

Connect with Dr. Carla Manly:

Website: https://www.drcarlamanly.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drcarlamanly/

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/drcarlamanly/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drcarlamanly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carla-marie-manly-8682362b/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dr.carlamariemanly8543

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dr_carla_manly

Book by Soha Al-Jurf:

Even My Voice Is Silence: A Palestinian-American Woman’s Journey “Back Home”

Connect with Soha Al-Jurf:

Website: https://www.sohaaljurf.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sohaaljurf/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/soha-al-jurf-a031261a/

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Watch the episode here

 

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Find Your Voice, Speak Your Truth, and Set Yourself Free with Expert Soha Al-Jurf

Discover the Power of Your Authentic Voice!

NHas your inner voice been quashed or silenced? Do you feel small or unseen due to the forces of your upbringing, relationships, or society itself? Do you wish you could take up space, speak your truth and show up as your authentic self without fear or constantly apologizing? I found that many people have lost the courage or never developed the ability to use their authentic voice because they often learned early on in life that they had to be quiet, good, or obedient in order to be loved or found worthy.

I’m here to help you discover that the opposite is true. Genuine love for the self and others comes from the freedom of knowing and expressing your inner truth. By discovering and embracing the power of your own authentic, vibrant voice, you can set yourself free to live fearlessly. If imperfectly. In this episode, we’ll focus on this real-life question. “I’m always anxious, especially with my husband. He’s a good guy but really critical, just like my mom and dad were. I’m always worried that our relationship will fall apart if I say or do the wrong thing. It’s the same at work and with friendships. Is there a cure for this?” That question is the focus of this episode. Please note as this episode may contain sensitive information, reader discretion is advised. If you need support, please see the special links.

 

 

I am joined by a very wonderful guest, Soha Al-Jurf, who will be sharing her expertise on discovering or reclaiming your own voice. Soha is the author of the book Even My Voice Is Silence. Soha is a speech Pathologist, a Voice Trainer and she has a double Master’s and such extraordinary experience in the realm of helping others find, express and live in the truth of their inner voices. Welcome to the show, Soha. It is such a joy to have you with us.

It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Helping People Find Their Authentic Voice

Before we launch into the topic, could you share with our readers just a little bit about what makes you, you? I know you have such vast expertise and so much training in many realms that you bring into the world. It’s like this amalgamation of all of this beautiful training and life experience to help people live and be their best selves. Before we get into the particulars of how to do this, could you please tell us a little bit about what makes you?

Yeah, thank you. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that before. I would say what makes me, me, like you said, is an amalgamation of things. I’m a child of immigrants. My parents are Palestinian, which I know is a contentious thing to even say out loud at this moment in time, but it is who I am and I’m proud of it. That lineage definitely impacts my sense of voice, my sense of being silenced, my sense of oppression or people who are oppressed. That is actually what my first book is about, Even My Voice Is Silence. It’s about my journey back to Palestine. I was raised in the States.

My father’s history, he used to listen to a lot of opera. He worked in Libya after he graduated from medical school in Cairo and Libya, as most people probably know, some may not, was occupied by the Italians. There was a lot of opera everywhere when he was working his first job in Libya. I grew up with definitely multicultural music, lots of Arabic music, lots of Western music, but I also had this opera in the background all the time.

That was what was in my ear and it was what I wanted to do. It’s what I wanted to sing. I sang all the way through. From grade school, they noticed that I had a singing voice that that should be heard. That was what I did throughout high school. I had the leads and the musicals, and I was in the choir and that kind of thing, so I took that into college.

Somewhere in there, my voice developed a crack and I could no longer pursue my professional career. We couldn’t resolve it with technique. Medically, we couldn’t find anything wrong. Now that I have gotten the Speech Pathology degree and know voice science, I suspect there’s probably a little scar tissue on the vocal folds, maybe from screaming when I was a teenager or playing sports, but it was unresolvable.

By the time I finished my undergrad and I was about to head into graduate school, I reached a real life crossroads. I couldn’t continue with my singing career. That is what I thought I was going to do. I went to see a speech pathologist and an ear, nose, and throat doctor to see if they could identify what was going on to diagnose the problem, but they really couldn’t find anything.

It was out of that frustration and limitation that I went to pursue the Speech Pathology degree and went and pursued a degree. I’m from Iowa. I grew up in Iowa and the University of Iowa just happens to have one of the best voice programs in the world, but that was sheer luck. When I look back on it now, I feel that it was a very spiritually guided path. At the time, it felt like obstacles and limits and things that I did not want. Ultimately, I feel now that they were leading me to my destiny. I did the Master’s degree and worked clinically as a speech pathologist, I specialized in voice, for about 20, 25 years in various ear, nose and throat clinics on a team, evaluating and treating people who have voice disorders.

Due to my opera background, I always specialized in opera. At some point in that, I just really realized that the medical aspects were wonderful. I loved my work, and the spiritual and psychological aspects were calling me even more than just the physical therapy for the voice. I loved my work, I loved what I did, I loved my patients and there always seemed to be this psychospiritual component that was just really gnawing at me to go deeper. That’s when I got the second Master’s degree in Jungian and Archetypal Psychology. That’s what I do now. I combine voice psychology, spirituality and feminine consciousness into this new modality of work that I’m doing.

What an extraordinary background and I really appreciate all of the parts of it. In hearing you start off saying Palestine and maybe you might not get the warmest welcome in certain spheres, it’s so important for us to remember that our lineage, it’s part of us. I’m half Russian. We don’t want to have to be in a position of apologizing for acts that may or may not be occurring in a country where our roots originated.

I really welcome you here as a guest. I find your history quite entrancing and taking you step by step to where you are meant to be. Each issue has taken you to this place where now you are helping people literally find their voices, the speaking voice, but also, which is the focus of this episode, helping people find that inner voice, the internal voice that has been quashed or perhaps never discovered.

I know this from personal history where it is so hard when one has been quashed from childhood forward, so hard to find that voice and then learn to listen to it and then express it in an authentic, genuine, gracious way. It’s not an easy process. I’m so appreciative to help you and to have you here to help guide our guests and readers and see where they might be able to amplify their voices, discover them, and live in accord with that voice.

Defining the Feminine Voice

Before we start that piece, could you explain to our readers a little bit by what you mean when you’re talking about the feminine? So many times, we think that the feminine means we need to be the good girl, the stay-at-home mom and be a doormat, whereas the feminine, as you and I happen to have similar training. We know that the feminine can be quite powerful, quite strong, quite resilient, quite forceful and quite fierce when she needs to be. Please explain that and then for our male readers who are tuning in to maybe explain to them that there is also room here in the feminine voice for people of all genders.

I think you and I both share at least a background in Jungian psychology. One of the reasons that I was drawn to Jung is that he has a desire, first of all, to get at the truth of the psyche, what’s really happening at the core of our psychological being, but not just as individuals but as a collective. Jung, basically, one of his focuses in his work is on the archetypes on this idea that there are essences of beingness that are cross-cultural and cross-historical that we almost inherit as a blueprint in our DNA. One of those things that Jung thought was that we all contain the masculine and the feminine. These are just energies.

From a Jungian perspective, a lot of these archetypes come out in myth and fairy tales. As you’re saying, if you go into myths from all sorts of different cultures, you’ll find gods and goddesses who have all sorts of characteristics. They’re archetypal. They’re not actual people. If you look into even just Greek myth, you’ll find female energies that are represented by the symbols of the goddesses who are caretakers of the fire, caretakers of the home and the hearth, who are warriors, wives and mothers. All of those archetypes are represented in the pantheon, let’s say, of the gods and goddesses.

I don’t call myself a Jungian because I also like to problematize Jung because he still came out of a history and a lineage that was very patriarchal. I’m not going to say it was masculine. I’m going to say it was patriarchal. Archetypally, the patriarch is the all-knowing, authoritative voice. It’s the, “My way or the highway. I am king of this land,” voice. That is one archetype of the masculine. It gets tricky when we talk about it in terms of masculine and feminine. I keep waiting for a better way to describe these energies.

However, the basic essence of the masculine and feminine can be thought to go back to womb consciousness versus more phallic consciousness. We just start getting into trouble immediately when we start talking about these things. If you think, generally speaking, about the patriarch as an archetype and then you connect that with masculine anatomy, just to be simple, or the masculine body, the male body in terms of its sex, the male representation, archetypally, is going to be hard.

It’s going to be penetrating, it’s going to be directed, it’s going to be, like I said, authoritative. That is the societal structure in which we live. The what we’re calling feminine, which would have more of a womb consciousness to it so it’s more internal, it’s darker. In Chinese medicine, it would be considered yin. It would be more moist, more damp, more cocooning, not necessarily nurturing, because there can definitely be a nurturing in the sense of usually protective energy with the masculine.

Feminine consciousness is all of that, which is that, again, it’s an archetypal mother, it’s an archetypal maternal. We all know that there are real-life mothers who are lovely, warm and huggy and there are real life mothers who are rigid, strict and don’t really want to be mothers. We have to think of it archetypally, which is the energy or the essence.

From my perspective, we live in a patriarchal culture, which favors the archetype of the patriarch, the one that is on Wall Street or is corporate has success, the one that’s in a business suit. The one, again, that’s hard-directed, rigid and forward-thinking. The feminine spirit or consciousness is much more cyclical, just like the menstrual cycle, just like the moon cycles. Feminine consciousness is theoretically softer. It’s moonlight rather than sunlight. You can find this in Chinese medicine, as well as in Jungian psychology.

That’s what I’m talking about in terms of feminine consciousness. For most of us, whether you look at it literally as women and statistics of women being assaulted, oppressed in whatever ways, their voice has been silenced to a large degree by masculine consciousness. Obviously, I’m sitting here talking, but what that means is that for most of us women who want to enter public spaces, there’s an assumption that we have to enter with a masculine energy coming through us. One that’s directive, one that’s forceful, one that’s authoritative, otherwise, nobody’s going to listen to us. That’s the distinction between the masculine and feminine voice in particular that I’m drawing.

There’s an assumption that most of us women have to enter public spaces with a masculine energy–one that’s directive, forceful, and authoritative. Otherwise, nobody’s going to listen to us. Share on X

Thank you for that clear explanation. Readers, that’s a lot. I’m going to slow it down and highlight a few pieces of what Soha really offered in such a beautiful, deep way. You may have read this before on one of my episodes, the archetypes. It sounds complex and it sometimes sounds a bit scary to people, but if we think about it, if you’ve ever seen tarot cards, you see the images on those cards, the king, the queen, the orphan, the fool. Those are all archetypes.

What they mean is that no matter what culture you go to around the world, no matter what language you’re speaking, people will know what it means to be a widow, what it means to be a wife, a mother, or a queen. When Soha was talking about the collective consciousness, it’s the fact that if you think about all of those images swirling in the ether around the world, you could show a card that you drew of someone crying to someone in any culture and they would understand the crying person. That’s an archetype.

As we’re moving into finding our voices, understanding some of these basics will help you understand the journey forward. I can take a minute and make this personal so that you understand from me what I was saying at the beginning. If we are taught as children that a good girl must essentially have tape over her mouth or a big smile on her face or that children are seen and not heard, we could make that into an archetype.

We could make a card with a feminine, a girl with a tape on her mouth, her hands in handcuffs and the word yes somehow coming out of her mouth. That would be an archetype. Soha, please correct me on this if I’ve have it wrong, but that archetype, we could also put a person of any gender in that card. It could be a male and they could have tape across their mouth and handcuffs because they were taught that their voice had to be silenced, that in order to be loved or seen as worthy, they had to be quiet.

When we move into this, we’re calling it the archetype of the good child, the silent child, the obedient child. That will likely resonate with anyone reading who has ever felt oppressed by this strong force. We can call it the patriarchy for ease. That voice that is very authoritarian coming down on us, telling us that we should be a certain way. What that does to the internal psyche, to the self, to the being, is it makes you walk around like you’re walking on eggshells.

You can’t really ever be comfortable in your own skin because you don’t know who you are and you kind of know who you are and that you might want to scream and shout and tumble on the grass and run around and speak your truth, but you were taught not to. You were taught to walk the straight and narrow. How did I do with that, Soha?

That was great. I would say that, to me, just to expand on what you’re describing, the voice is feminine. Whether it comes out of a male or female body, the voice itself is feminine. To understand where I’m coming from, it helps to have a little bit of an understanding of where the origins of psychology came from in terms of the history of Freud coming through the classics and all the way back to the Greeks. This idea that logos or speech came in the realm of the masculine.

There’s a woman named Julia Kristeva. She’s a French Bulgarian post-Freudian feminist psychoanalyst. She writes a lot about this idea of having objected the feminine or objected the mother. What really got me thinking about all of this was this idea that talk therapy itself, the idea of talking, the idea of logos, the idea of speech, if we go back historically, is put in the masculine.

Chris Davis started saying, “If you go into looking into psycho psychoanalysis and many spinoffs of philosophy that came out of psychoanalysis, there’s this idea that logos is masculine.” The question then for Kristeva was, where is the mother in psychoanalysis? To a degree, Jung thought much more about the maternal as well.

This idea of having this maternal matrix that we all come out of, which in Jungian psychology is often equated a little more to the unconscious, the dream world images, mythos, poetry, and all those things that subvert straight-up speech. When we go to therapy, all we really can do with our therapist is talk in words. What the therapist ultimately is trying to get to is, “You’re telling me your script. You’re telling me your story, but if this story were really why you were suffering, we would’ve resolved it from your story.”

A good therapist is trying to follow that thread of the story back to figure out what’s at the core of that. That core to Kristeva and to me is the voice. That voice is that, again, I’m borrowing from Kristeva’s work, but this was something from my own work in opera and my own work and voice, my own work with people who’ve lost their voices and have come to me clinically or opera singers who’ve come with vocal damage and have not been able to sing. My question throughout my entire career has always been, why is it so emotionally damaging to have a voice disrupted or distorted to feel like you cannot sing when you once could, or that you’ve lost somebody has lost their voice? It has such a huge impact on quality of life to lose one’s voice.

I started digging into that, like, “What is that?” My words are still coming out. I never had a patient who couldn’t speak words, but the essence, the core essence of the voice was lost. With opera singers, that seemed to be heightened because they’re at the height of using their voice in a very Olympic way. It was very self-defining. There was a lot of work that went into it. Even a lay person who had a hoarseness from some injury to the vocal cord tissue, they also had a huge impact on the quality of their lives when they lost their voice. Not their speech, but their voice, so they could still speak, but somehow, the core essence that represented them wasn’t coming out when they spoke. They were no longer themselves.

They could no longer identify as themselves when their voices and speech came out of their mouths. That got me really curious, especially when I’d have every opera singer I was working with would come into my office crying, like, “Why was it so heavy?” Throughout my own research, and again, guided by the work of Kristeva and then combining that with Jung, I started to think that there was something about the archetypal voice of the feminine that was silenced throughout history with the advent of patriarchy and that all of us men and women, we all carry that silenced voice of the mother. When it becomes further silenced, I think it is, on a soul level, painful to us.

We all carry the silenced voice of the mother, the archetypal feminine voice that has been suppressed throughout history. When that voice is further silenced, it feels painful on a soul level. Share on X

That makes perfect sense because you are using the voice itself. It’s like if Dr. Carla lost her ability to speak in the voice I use now and all of a sudden it became raspy and unfamiliar to me, which is what we experience when we have a really bad cold, it doesn’t sound like us. We’re not comfortable with this. You are saying that that’s coming from an ailment that will go away in a week or whatever. For someone, especially if you are using your voice as a singer, that would create almost a disconnection from the self. If we take this to a level of all humanity, our inner voice, that voice, when that, too, is silenced, then we are split off from the psyche, that psyche that drives us forward to evolve imperfectly toward our best selves.

Patriarchy, Mother Voice, and Societal Impact

I do have a question. When we’re talking about the patriarchy, so we know most people are familiar with that, that that’s that voice, that authoritarian power, archetypally male energy that is, as you said, my way or the highway, right, wrong, good, bad. Whereas when we look at it as what you’re calling the mother voice, that is the flip side of that. That would be the maternal voice. At its best, it’s encouraging, nurturing, generous, authentic, supportive, all of those lovely things.

It’s not that one is good and one is bad, but when they are married, when they are used, it’s interesting, these words aren’t going to necessarily resonate with you because you’ve already ruled one out. In my first book, Joy From Fear, I was counseled to not use the word masculine and feminine because they’re not taken in the way that Jung meant them now. I really researched it and worked with someone who’s very good at linguistics and she gave me some suggestions and I finally really decided to adopt power energy to replace the masculine and nurture energy to replace the feminine.

Not that all feminine is nurturing and not that all masculine is power, but we got away from the masculine and the feminine. If we see that, at least in symbolism, the patriarchy can be power, the mother energy, we can see her as nurturing the self, perhaps supporting the self, supporting that voice that has been silenced by, as you say, the voice of logos and rationalism.

This is something that affects so many of my clients, people of all genders, but particularly women, where they will say, “I’m being told that I’m irrational. I’m being told that I’m not thinking clearly and that I am too much in my body, or I should not listen to my instincts, that I should be rational and clearheaded and clear-minded,” all of this.

Yes, we do want to be clear-minded, but we also do want to be listening to instinct, to the maternal voice, because that’s the compliment. We want both of them married in beautiful balance, the yin and the yang. When we take out one part of it and make the other side very heavy, which we’ve done, we’ve made the masculine side or that power side or the patriarchy side, call it what you will, so heavy, look at what’s happened to society. There is so much suffering. I’d like your opinion on this. It’s one of my beliefs that so many people who are suffering from anxiety, depression, hopelessness, all of these things are suffering from a loss of their voice.

I think it becomes tricky, depending on a person’s worldview, but men are suffering under patriarchy, too. There are women who succeed under patriarchy. I think power is tricky, too, because women are certainly very powerful. If we go to what you were describing before in terms of the archetypes, if you look at gods and goddesses, especially in the Hindu pantheon, you’ll find all sorts of females wielding swords. It’s not a delicate mother image. Those of us who’ve ever been in the protection of children who needed to protect children, we also know that that is not all nurturing. I don’t have children of my own, but if I’m out in public with a baby or my nieces and nephews or a child and something threatens them, you can call that masculine, you can call it whatever you want, but I’m going to get aggressive.

Men are suffering under patriarchy, too, and some women succeed under patriarchy. Power can be tricky because women are certainly very powerful. Share on X

You can call it mama bear archetype, you can call it whatever you want, but there is a protective instinct in me as well. I don’t know if that’s a motherly protective instinct that’s distinct somehow from a fatherly, I don’t know. It can get very complicated. I think that we need to acknowledge and recognize that if you are in a female body and you live naturally in alignment with what I’m calling a patriarchal construct, you will do well.

The opposite is true. If you are a man and you really just want to be a poet or a painter or I’m just going to say like corporate Wall Street suit making money, capitalized, then you’re also going to suffer. What I started looking at, especially because my specialization was in opera singers, one of the things that I was always very curious about when you’re looking at opera singers, now, again, I’m working archetypally, and I’m saying that a woman singing opera is the quintessential archetype of the divine feminine voice.

That’s the hypothesis I’m working under. When that voice is damaged, she feels somehow that she has failed the matriarch, or she has had taken away from her the power of her archetypal lineage all the way back to what I would call the goddess, to what I would call divine feminine strength. She’s been cut off from that empowerment. In my experience, if we go back to voice science, what causes injury on the vocal folds?

Put simply, it’s too much singing, too high, meaning too high of a frequency, because higher frequency has more vibrations per second. That’s what sopranos do, as opposed to lower voices. Too much, too high, too loud. Too much pressure on the vocal folds creates injury, impact injury on the vocal folds, then you have swelling on the vocal folds and they no longer vibrate normally.

What is the most likely thing to cause that excessive pressure? A desire to compete, a desire to prove oneself and a feeling of a need to be louder than one’s body really is capable of. If we take this back to psychology, it’s the denial of the body. It’s the denial of the feminine. It’s the denial of the weaker sex, however you want to look at it. I have to push through my voice in order to either be taken seriously to be heard, or to be loud enough to be heard over an orchestra, to sing on a stage. What I started to get curious about was, there is a common archetype between the men and the women who end up with vocal injuries. It’s primarily women just because, physiologically, women’s vocal cords are more prone to injury.

That’s a physiologic fact based on how the anatomy is. That doesn’t mean I don’t work with men. When I am working with men, they are either people who are typically I have to push the heck out of this patriarchal archetype to compete with everyone, then they get injured, or especially the men who work with me, they are sensitive and sweet. They’re like the little boys who were shy and just found out they could sing. Suddenly, they’re in these roles where they’re expected to fit into that archetype, but that’s not where their heart and soul is.

When I’m going to help somebody rehabilitate a voice, what I’m going back to is where your actual alignment is. Where is your actual soul? Where’s your actual heart? How do we get that in alignment, literally, with the resonance of your own body, rather than pushing the heck out of the air that’s going through your vocal cords to try to prove yourself?

We’re asking, “What does it feel like to be embodied in my body, and then what does my voice feel like when it’s connected to my body and my breath coming through me? That’s mine.” Now, for everybody, there will be a physiologic limit. Just like an athlete. An athlete can only go run as fast as they can run. Can they improve? Yes. If they get injured, can they rehabilitate? Yes.

My core essential question in life is, if you relax into your own body, really tune in with who you are, know thyself, open your mouth, take a breath and then sing or speak what’s coming out? Who’s coming out? What is that voice? How can we hone that to be yours? Also, is it acceptable to the public if being in public is what you want to do, or is being on stage what you want to do? Inevitably, if we’re singing or speaking in alignment with the instrument, it’s always more efficient and effective than trying to sing or speak with somebody else’s voice or with somebody else’s idea of what a voice should be.

 

 

That was amazing. You had me transfixed. Why? It’s because what you’re talking about on a practical level, I can see as being a metaphor, of course, for our readers who don’t sing for a living, who aren’t opera singers, which is most of us, me included, saying, “Ah.” If I take a deep breath in, deep breath out and align myself and make it a practice to align myself, to take the time to dive in and say, “Today, this moment, what do I want to say, if anything? What does that sound like? How can I be mindful and intentional with this voice so that whatever is coming through me is aligned with what my soul is asking?”

Often, we’re coming, which I think is where we tend to get blocked. If we’re coming from this male brain, this word brain that’s saying, “You should be this way, you should act this way, you should say this, you should stay silent, you should speak.” Let’s wipe that slate clean, tabula rasa, and go back. Readers, by the way, this is for you. If we all just pause and simply ask ourselves, after I take a deep breath in and deep breath out, “In this moment, that authentic voice, if I make space for it, what is it asking me to say? How is it asking me to show up in a way that is aligned with my true self? Is that singing out loud? Is that being assertive? Is that being quiet? Is that being silent? Is that being invigorated? Is it being wild?”

We can see that as we’re practicing this, this simple exercise that you’ve offered us, which is alignment, making space, maybe morning, noon, night and 1,000 times in between to really get seated, not in what the brain is telling us to do, whether it’s the fear center, fight, flight, whatever it is, or the dictates that we grew up with from childhood forward. Readers, this is no small ask. If you had asked me to do this exercise many years ago I would’ve looked at you and said, “What are you talking about? Get in alignment? No, I have so much to do today. Forget this alignment stuff. I have a list that I have all these things I must do.”

Finding Your Voice

For the person who is in that space, Soha, what would you say? How can we find that voice? For me, my voice is pretty accessible. I can usually find that voice within a matter of moments. Sometimes, it takes a couple of hours if it’s really challenging, but I’m well-practiced at it. I had to break free of all of those yokes and chains. Not that they’re not still creeping back at times. I think it’s a work that we have to realize is a work in progress. For someone who’s starting at the beginning where what we’re talking about might sound like gobbledy goop, what would you say?

That’s why I’m doing the work that I’m doing. That’s part of why I transitioned out of the clinical setting. I really wanted to hone in on this piece of the work I was doing. To go back to the example that you brought up at the beginning of this show of the woman who you’re reminding me of a patient I had years ago who was this powerhouse of a woman. She had a PhD, had programs and was giving lectures and doing everything literally all over the world. Yet, when she came home to her husband, she couldn’t speak. She couldn’t speak her mind. Whether her husband intended it or not like the example you gave, “My parents were very strict or critical, and now my husband, even the slightest look from him,” whether he intends it or not, I interpret it as again, what I’m calling that patriarchal authority.

“In the face of that patriarchal authority, I have no confidence to speak.” Okay, so now we’re in it. What is happening in the body when you’re standing on a stage and delivering your message and your work to hundreds of people versus when you’re home alone with a husband who presumably loves you and all of a sudden, you feel silenced? Where is that happening in the body? Depending on who I’m working with, I was just working with a young woman who says she’s fine one-on-one, but when she gets into groups, her voice gets swallowed up. I’m like, “What is that like for you?”

I’ve never felt that. That has just never been a thing for me, but it is the thing for the patients I work with or the clients I work with. She and I were chatting about what that is and she said, “I get into a group space and I want to say something, but my voice isn’t loud enough to be heard. I see all these people who are being heard, talking over each other, interrupting each other, interjecting and they’re heard. Even when I try to interject, I can’t be heard.”

I said, “How loudly are you interjecting? How persistently are you following through when you try to interject or do you say a word or two and then decide that’s impolite and then stop yourself and pull back?” She said a couple of things. She said, “First of all, you’re right. I perceive loud voices as being angry and I perceive quiet voices as being calm and kinder. Are you telling me that I can actually make my voice louder than it is?” I said, “Yeah, that’s what I do for a living. There are techniques.”

For me, like I said earlier, the idea of repairing a voice strictly from a physiologic perspective so that we’re doing like a physical therapy for the voice, many voice-trained speech pathologists, that’s their love. That’s their obsession. That’s what they do. For me, it’s always been this multi-layered thing of how does the actual manifest voice, how does the physiology, the breath, all intertwine with the body, the confidence, the psyche, the history, what your parents told you when you were little.

Why, in the face of your husband, you can’t speak, but that you then you can get on a stage and say whatever you want? It just is limitless in terms of the different circumstances we can be in and feel completely empowered and embodied. Our voice comes through that versus, “I don’t know why, but I’m either silenced or silencing myself.”

What I’m hearing you say and we again are using the question of the day to work from, if this individual who wrote in who’s sounds like she’s anxious at work, anxious in relationships, afraid that speaking her truth will make her unloved, or in the case of her marriage, possibly end the marriage. She’s getting already that it’s rooted in this childhood, this critical mom and dad scenario. What would be ideal for this individual might be to work on practicing that alignment technique in private, to become in touch with what her voice wants to say. What part of her is feeling strangled? What part of her is feeling shut down? Practice that by just mindful moments, imagining perhaps what she might be wanting to say. We could take it to step two, using your woman who wanted to be louder in the group and actually amplify her voice so she could be heard.

That was an epiphany for her. We can see the woman in our question of the day that then she might practice with a friend or in the mirror, or maybe not quite yet with her husband because he’s a focal point, but practicing with someone that she trusts, “This is my truth, this is what I want to say.” She might have to practice finding the actual physical voice as well as the words that allow her. This takes practice. Neurobiologically, she will be rewiring decades of patterns to help her find that authentic voice. I don’t know if you find this sometimes, but as we’re finding our true voice, we go from being very quiet and shut down to going 180, the opposite, getting really loud, even bombastic at times, super fiery. That’s part of the practice. We come to the middle and we’re like, “Okay, this is that sweet spot.” That sweet spot might be different for different situations.

To know that you have a palette of choices rather than one default. We’ve been talking since we were a year old. A lot of these things have become very habituated and they’ve been become habituated based on our circumstances, our ancestry, what birth order we were, how many boys and girls there were in a family. I’ve heard so many times, “I was raised in this big Irish Catholic family and if you didn’t scream, nobody was going to hear you.” If we go back to Jung’s work of this notion of in introversion and extroversion, I can see in a lot of the clients I work with who are true authentic introverts. From a Jungian perspective, what Jung meant by that is that the psychic energy was moving inward rather than outward.

We tend to think of introverts as in a pop psychology way as, “We’ve read the books on what it means popularly,” but what Jung really meant by the introversion and extroversion was where’s the psychic energy moving? That is more what I’m interested in because, again, with this client I was working with, just sitting with her, you could feel her energy was introverted. Even just sitting with her, I could say, “I’m going to introvert my energy, but I’m not going to be any quieter. Now I’m going to extrovert my energy and I’m not going to get any louder.” This idea that, yes, I have my middle set point of what is naturally me on when I’m talking to somebody on a podcast when I’m more in presenter style or teaching style.

I talk differently when I’m with my loved ones, when I’m with my parents, when I’m with my elders or when I’m with children. We code switch right between, but then there’s this question of where your middle ground set point is. If you’re aware of having an introverted energy, meaning your sense of self goes inward, then it’s a question of playing with how can I get into that alignment and then bring my energy outward when I want to? Not because I feel that I have to all the time, not because somebody else wants me to, but when I choose to.

 

 

That has a lot to do with getting into that internal sense of self knowing thyself. As you said, it’s a practice and a process. If it’s not coming naturally for a particular individual and like you said, if somebody is naturally very introverted then and they want to speak up, they will probably just start screaming. When I’m working with somebody, the question is where’s the nuance? Where’s your spectrum? Where’s the whole palette? How do you learn to choose the color you want to paint with at a given moment in time?

As you’re speaking, I see images a lot and I’m getting this image of the masculine or the patriarchy as we were talking earlier, I know, readers, these are big generalizations here, so just follow us with it so you get the flow. If we look at the patriarchy as being rigid, right, wrong, good, bad, press, go forward, this is the way to do it. We look at the feminine or mother energy or nurture energy as being fluid and responsive, which is what parenting and mothering the self is all about, being responsive, being attuned. If I’m hearing you right, Soha, that we are, this is all a piece of going into alignment with the self. It is flow. It is this back and forth of, “What do I need now? What does my voice say now? Who am I now?

We are still the same person, but we may show up in situations. We work on never losing that self, but that expression, depending upon if the person across from us, is attuned and safe, we may be expressing in one way. If we’re in a big group where we’re not being heard, we may need to amplify and tune into that part. If we’re coming home and a husband or a partner is being loud, and as you said earlier, loud might be negatively, energetically very destructive, but it could also just be that person using their loud voice.

It could be excitement, it could be passion, you just don’t know.

Tuning into and being okay, learning and going with the flow, is part of finding the self, and the authentic self is realizing that we aren’t static creatures. We’re made 75% of water. We are meant to be flowing creatures, including being generous with ourselves as we find our voice, as we embrace that voice or voices and as we learn to express that voice. We can have a very strong voice, a very fierce voice.

I have to hop back to something you’ve said earlier. You don’t have kiddos, but if somebody were to harm a child that you were entrusted with, you would get strong and protective. I do think that that’s part of feminine energy. I have lots of feminine energy. I’ve worked to embrace a lot of masculine or power energy, but if somebody were to mess with a kiddo, an elder or an animal who’s in my care, you’re not going to get far because that is my responsibility.

We want to remember, readers, that feminine energy, whether you’re a man or a woman, is good to be fierce when it’s appropriate. It’s good to be assertive when it’s appropriate. We don’t need to be in that space all the time. We can be wonderfully sweet, gracious and graceful regardless of our gender and when it’s appropriate if we need to step up.

 

 

Speaking Truth in Relationships

We are seeing, readers, how Soha is guiding us into this beauty of finding your voice. I want to take it one more place, Soha, to our question. Let’s imagine that now someone is in this relationship, we’re going straight to the home relationship, and they’re finding that they’re ready to speak truth to the partner. They’re ready to say, “I am feeling like you’re going to abandon me if I get it wrong. I’m feeling like divorce is on the horizon if I do too much, be too much speak my truth.”

How might this person get to this space in a relationship? We’re just saying, in this case, it’s a marriage. It could be any relationship. It could be parent-child, it could be work, it could be friendship. We’re now at stage three. They practiced, they aligned, then they practiced with others and with themselves and now they’re going to take it and they’re going to give it a go so that they can build on this foundation. How might this person build on this foundation of authentic voice? Once they find it, once they have the words and the logos for it, what might they do? Step three.

Obviously, it would depend on, as you know, if you’re working with any client, it depends on the actual circumstances, but the most important thing I think in finding a voice is this sense of safety, of knowing that you’re safe. If the assumption is that this woman is indeed in a marriage that’s actually safe, that her husband’s just clueless or not aware, that he’s not a narcissist, he’s not abusive because there are all sorts of factors. I’m not going to tell a woman who’s in a relationship with a husband who’s abusive to go stand her ground. There’s a lot more to it. If we’re assuming a partnership where they’re just in a habit, she gets triggered easily because he reminds her of an authoritative father, but he’s not actually meaning to be that way and he’s really receptive, then it’s a question of disclosing.

What I mean by that is communicating to the person. Often in the speech pathology world, we tell people who stutter. Just disclose that you stutter when you first meet somebody because you’re naming the thing, then people won’t be all uncomfortable about what’s happening. “Okay, got it. Understood. Now, I can be conscious, empathic and compassionate about that. Thank you for letting me know.” Disclosure is such a powerful tool for communication because, with this woman, I would say to her, “You’re going to go to your husband. You’re going to say, ‘I’m practicing this thing. I’ve been working with my therapist. I’ve been working with my voice. I have these tools, I need to practice them. Are you game?’”

“’When I feel like you aren’t listening or you’re overshadowing me or you are being authoritative, I’m just going to very gently put a hand on your arm. When I put a hand on your arm, I’d like that to be the thing that gets your attention so you stop and listen so that I can take my time and space to say what I need to say. When I’m finished talking, I will remove my hand from your arm and then you can talk again.’” we’re just going to practice this. There might be other things too, like I’m going to wave my arm, whatever it is that’s acceptable within that pair to just start to get this idea of this is a flow. To your point of the idea of water being the feminine, water can’t do much if it has no container. This balance of the masculine and the feminine is yes, I have this flow and this fluidity, but if I have no structure, if I have no language, if I have no breath, if I have no body through which the voice comes, I’ve got nothing.

The idea of water, being the feminine, can't do much if it has no container, so this balance of the masculine and the feminine is essential. Share on X

The masculine and the feminine are always supporting each other. They are always partnered. If we think of the structure of the body as, let’s say, we can think of many people think of the body as the feminine, but the body as structure is masculine. There’s always this duality, always the yin and yang happening simultaneously. If you’re familiar with the yin and yang symbol, there’s yin and there’s yang. It’s always both. We can’t separate them. Part of the challenge of speaking in words is that it’s divisive. In order to speak in words, we have to talk about one thing at a time. What I’m suggesting is that the masculine and feminine are always in a dance. There’s no getting around that. My vocal folds might be fluid, but the larynx that encases them, the voice box is solid and that solidity, that holding case, that home structure is the masculine.

 

 

I can think of the structure of my house as being the masculine, but the home is the feminine. There’s always this yin and yang. There’s always this fluidity. Within that couple, they would just have to figure out, “Where is our imbalance and what can we start to do to get that back in balance?” By putting a hand on his arm, that putting the hand on the arm, you can think of as the masculine, because it’s a strong, firm, “I’m putting a hand on your arm.” No matter how gently she does it, his receptivity to that is him now being in the feminine. It’s a constant dance.

Soha, thank you so much. I know we don’t have much time left, but readers, I want to highlight the piece that Soha just offered us. This image, the hand on the other person’s arm is masculine, that holding, that pressure, but that the receptivity of the husband, being receptive, which is so critical for the health of any relationship that the other person is receptive. Whether you’re in a same sex marriage, whether it’s man, woman, whatever, you need both people to be willing, and this is the dance, to be receptive to the other person. Going back to what Soha has said earlier, we’re assuming that this relationship is safe and generally healthy and that the husband in this situation is willing to work, to learn, to grow with the wife, to evolve imperfectly alongside her. Yet if you’re in a relationship where there is, as Soha said, somebody who’s narcissistic, I don’t use that term lightly. We’re talking about narcissistic personality disorder.

We’re not diagnosing anyone. We’re also talking about abuse, whether it’s physical, emotional, spiritual abuse. Those type of people tend to be extremely rigid and can be very dangerous and destructive. We’re not advocating these gentle strategies in those situations. Those situations would need professional support. Sometimes, a lot of distance before the other person can be taught the skill of receptivity, listening and self-evolution. I really love this image of the other person. We must have the other person being receptive.

I talk about this a lot so high in my fourth book, The Joy Of Imperfect Love, that in order for any relationship to evolve, whether it’s the relationship with the self or a marriage or a friendship or a family relationship, there must be the willingness. If it’s self-work, the willingness for the self to evolve, it’s work with one person or a group of people, all involved must be willing, must be receptive. That is that beautiful feminine energy, nurture energy or mother energy that we’re talking about. If we’re not receptive, then the voice shuts down. The voice is shut down. Soha, you have brought such an exquisite energy with you today. Thank you. Are there any other pieces that you’d like to share before we start winding up?

The Evolving Nature of Voice

I know we talked about a lot. I think that one of the most important things for people to realize is that the voice, I believe, yes, there is a core essence to it that’s tied to heart and to soul and to body. That voice has many shades of color and possibility. It’s changeable. It’s not set in stone. I think just like sometimes people think the personality is set, so that’s just who I am, then they go to therapy and they say, “I can change my behaviors. I can change my thought patterns. The voices, you can change it. You can change it to be more in alignment with who you are and looking at that can be really significantly life changing.

 

 

Thank you for that piece. It makes me think that so often, when we’re finding our voice and changing it, that always means amplifying it. Sometimes, it also means bringing it down, not just quieter, but sometimes being more thoughtful with it. Sometimes being more intentional and sometimes being silent where we would normally have thought we had to have something to say. Thank you. Soha, where can our readers find you and your book?

Yeah, my book is Even My Voice Is Silence. I did end up self-publishing it through CreateSpace, which is part of Amazon. It’s like I can’t say anything without some part of it being problematic. I know Amazon is problematic for some people, but you can find my book there. If you prefer to order it from an independent bookstore, you can absolutely do that and support your independent bookstore.

My social media is a little limited. I’m mostly on LinkedIn. That’s where I do most of my social media, so you can find me on LinkedIn. My website is SohaAlJurf.com. There’s contact information for me there. There’s a quiz you can take to find out which archetypal voice is haunting your psyche so that you can begin to unravel those voices that are stopping you from hearing and finding your own voice.

I didn’t know that there was a quiz on your website. I am going to take it. I want to find out more about this work that you do. That is really exceptional work. Thank you, Soha. First off, Soha, again, thank you for your time, for your energy, for all of your wisdom. To our readers, thank you for sharing your time and your energy with us.

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Do you wish that you could speak your truth and show up as your true self, fearless and empowered? All too often, you might find that your inner voice was quashed or silenced, whether it’s from your upbringing, your relationships, or society itself. If you’ve lost the courage or never had the courage or the ability to use your authentic voice because you learned that you had to be good, that you had to be quiet, that you had to be obedient in order to be loved and accepted, let me tell you that the opposite is true. Genuine love for yourself and for other people truly comes from the freedom of knowing and expressing your inner truth. In this episode, we’ll be delving into how you can find and access that inner voice, that unique self that will allow you to live free, live big and live with joy.

We’ll focus on this real-life question. “I’m always anxious, especially with my husband. He’s a good guy but really critical, just like my mom and dad were. I’m always worried that our relationship will fall apart if I say or do the wrong thing. It’s the same with work and friendships. Is there a cure for this?” That question is the focus of this episode. Please note as this episode contains sensitive information, reader discretion is advised. If you need support, please see the special links.

 

Important Links

• Soha Al-Jurf
• Even My Voice Is Silence
• Joy From Fear
• The Joy Of Imperfect Love
• LinkedIn – Soha Al-Jurf
• Website – Dr. Carla Manly
• Instagram – Dr. Carla Manly
• Twitter – Dr. Carla Manly
• Facebook – Dr. Carla Manly
• LinkedIn – Dr. Carla Manly
• YouTube – Dr. Carla Manly
• TikTok – Dr. Carla Manly

 

About Soha Al-Jurf

In the almost 30 years she has been working with the voice—from her BFA in opera performance to her 20-plus years of clinical experience as a voice-specialized speech-language pathologist and vocal rehabilitation specialist—Soha Al-Jurf has witnessed the entire range of human experience reflected through the loss—and recovery—of the voice.

Through the thousands of hours she has spent guiding individuals who are confronted with the task of recovering their “lost” voices, I have come to believe that the reason the voice offers such a profound reflection of our shared emotional, psychological, and spiritual experience is that somewhere in the deep unconscious of our collective psyches lies buried the voice of the archetypal feminine—a voice that was silenced as humanity relentlessly sought a so-called “rational” approach to life that favored science over art; logic over poetry; commerce over creativity.

At this stage in her life’s work, Soha is focusing her heart, soul, knowledge, and skills on reclaiming the lost voice of the archetypal feminine. Combining her expertise in voice with my studies of depth psychology (Jungian and Archetypal Studies), she helps creative women work through a process of recovering their own lost voices.

Soha is the author of “Even My Voice is Silence: A Palestinian-American Woman’s Journey ‘Back Home.'”