Whose Voice Is That? Reclaiming Your Inner Frequency

Have you ever noticed that the voice in your head doesn’t always feel like your own?

In this episode of Untamed Voices, Lizzi explores a powerful idea: What if your mind isn’t a diary… but a radio? A place where the voices of parents, teachers, culture, religion, and past experiences still echo inside your thoughts.

Through psychology, neuroscience, and wisdom from spiritual traditions around the world, we look at how the brain internalizes outside messages through a process called introjection, why the nervous system keeps replaying old patterns under stress, and how the inner critic often formed as a way to protect us.

You’ll also learn simple ways to quiet the mental noise and reconnect with your own inner signal—the quieter voice of intuition and truth that has been there all along.

Sometimes the loudest voice in your mind belongs to someone who hasn’t been in your life for years.

So the real question becomes:

Whose voice are you thinking in right now? 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Hello, everybody. Welcome back. So, have you ever noticed how your mind sometimes sounds like maybe like a crowded room? Maybe there are different opinions, different tones, different rules about who you're supposed to be. And sometimes those thoughts feel so familiar that we assume that they're ours. I mean, I don't know about you, but that's kind of what happens for me. Here's the thing: what if your mind isn't really a diary? What if it's more like a radio? What if the thoughts that sound like you are actually the frequencies of everyone you've ever tried to please? Your parents, your teachers, your church, your culture, your trauma. All of them maybe leaving like little signal traces behind. And the nervous system, your nervous system, just trying to keep you safe, keeps replaying all of those frequencies on a loop. What if, huh? So maybe the question isn't how do I stop overthinking? Maybe the question is, whose voice am I thinking in right now? The interesting thing about that is this isn't just an idea. Psychology actually has language for this. There's a reason that certain thoughts sound so convincing, even when they hurt you. Your brain literally learned those voices. So there's a psychological word for when someone else's voice becomes part of your inner voice. It's called introjection. Introjection is when belief, a rule, judgment from someone else gets absorbed so deeply that your brain starts treating it like your own thought. A parent's criticism, a teacher's expectations, a religious rule, maybe even like a cultural message about who you should be. So over time, your brain internalizes those voices. And then, friends, they start narrating your life from the inside. Does any of this sound familiar? So it really does get interesting, at least for me. Like I am fascinated by this stuff, right? So when someone experiences chronic stress or maybe long periods of emotional pressure, the brain's default mode network, the system involved, so the default mode network is the system involved in self-reflection and inner storytelling. It starts leaning heavily on old memories and condition instead of present or conditioning instead of present moment information. So it goes back to the past and what it knows instead of what is happening in the present moment. Something new. Your mind isn't actually reacting to what's happening now. Sometimes it's reacting to what used to keep you safe. And notice that I said used to keep you safe, right? So it may not actually be beneficial in the moment, right? What this means is that the loudest voice in your head might actually belong to someone who hasn't been in your life for 20 years, right? So somebody 20 years ago might be dictating how you're responding to somebody else in this moment. The thing is, is that this inner critic of yours isn't necessarily evil, it's protective. It's learned that its job was to protect you when it was small. So it learned what that job was when it was very small. And what's fascinating is that long before neuroscience started studying this, human beings across cultures were already noticing the same thing, right? So nothing's really new. It's just, you know, studied in a different way, maybe. So they they really just described it differently, different languages, different spiritual traditions, but maybe pointing to the exact same human experience. For example, Buddhism. These mental grooves are actually called samskadas. I don't know if I said that right, but they're patterns created by repetition. Every thought you rehearse deepens the groove. Meditation teaches you to notice the thought show up, it arises and then lets it pass, right? So it arises, then let it pass. The not me, just a pattern moving through, right? So not me in quotation marks. This is not me. This thought is not me. This thought does not define me, right? In Yoruba spirituality, which comes from West Africa, there's a concept called Ori. Ori means something like your inner head or inner consciousness. It represents the deepest part of yourself that holds your wisdom and personal destiny. When life becomes noisy, practices like ritual, reflection, and community are actually meant to help you return to that inner knowing. Many indigenous traditions talk about something similar through the idea of like the original instructions. The understanding that humans are born with wisdom about how to live in right relationship with life. But here's the thing: over time, through trauma, colonization, fear, and social pressure, those instructions can become buried. Healing becomes less about learning something new and more about remembering what was always there. In Sufism, the mystical tradition within Islam, the heart is often described as a mirror, but the ego, called nafs, creates noise that fogs that mirror. Through practices like the rhythmic remembrance of the divine, the mirror clears again and the truth becomes visible. So even in Christian mysticism, there is this idea that God's voice is not loud or overwhelming. It's, and I quote, still small voice, end of quote. Not the wind, not the earthquake, but the quiet whisper that appears when everything else settles. Tuning in, right? Tuning into a frequency. Practices like contemplative prayer are meant to create that inner quiet. In modern psychology, the internal family systems, which I've mentioned here before, says our minds are made up of different parts. Some are protective, some are wounded, some are trying really hard to keep us safe. And those parts soften not through the the through any type of force, but through compassion, right? That's how we that's how we understand our parts. Different traditions, different language. But at the end of the day, the same wisdom keeps showing up. The noise is learned, the clarity is remembered. And the piece that really ties all of this together is the body. Because this isn't only happening in your mind. Your nervous system is involved in which voice gets the microphone, you know? Your nervous system gets to dictate that. Sometimes, right? Like I've mentioned in previous podcasts, the polyvagal theory developed by Stephen Porgis explains that our nervous system is constantly scanning for safety or danger. When the body senses threat, we start monitoring other people's reactions more closely, their approval, their anger, their expectations. Because, as I mentioned so many times before, belonging once meant survival. So if belonging required silence, your body learned to listen outward instead of inward. But when your nervous system begins to feel safe again, something actually shifts. You start hearing yourself, which becomes regulation. Your biology finally catches up to your freedom. And when you zoom out a little bit further, you start to see that many of these voices didn't just come from individuals. They came from entire systems. Things like capitalism telling us what telling us we are what we produce, right? Patriarchal systems teaching many people, especially women, to be small in order to be loved, colonial narratives rewiring or rewriting entire histories, forms of religious fundamentalism, equating obedience with safety. These messages don't just live in books, they get absorbed into families, they get absorbed into communities, into our bodies, right? So unlearning them isn't disrespect, it's actually repair. It's remembering that your dignity existed long, long, long before those systems showed up. And if those voices were learned, that also means that they can be unlearned. Not erased overnight, but slowly returned. It starts with something really small, like giving yourself a few minutes of quiet each day. Not necessarily to think or to solve problems, but just to notice what your body is saying before the mental noise jumps in. It feels good to do that. It feels good to give yourself space. Now, in the beginning, it can feel a little unnerving, you know, or maybe, you know, I hear people say all the time, like, I just can't do that. I can't sit still, I can't focus on myself, you know. Well, it's a learned thing, right? You learned how to focus on the outward, on the outside. So you learn how to focus on the inside. That's just redirecting, right? So when harsh thoughts show up, you might try to get curious about its accent. You might notice something like, oh, hmm, that sounds like my old teacher, or that looks like my old teacher, you know, if you have that image in your mind. Or that's my dad's voice, right? Or that's the rule I learned growing up, so get curious about it. You can gently respond, okay, thank you for trying to protect me, but I lead now and I have new information, you know, and that's not my life anymore. I don't need that anymore. Something else that's important to remember is this intuition rarely speaks in long sentences, it shows up more like a sensation. Softening, a warmth, a grounded yes. And sometimes the fastest way to reconnect with that inner signal isn't necessarily through thinking at all. I guess where it's from. It's through the body. So if you don't mind if you want to try something simple together, maybe place one hand on your chest if you feel comfortable, and one hand on your belly again if it feels comfortable. Take a slow breath in. Let the exhale be just a tiny bit longer. Imagine an old radio dial. The static slowly fading, the clarity coming through. You might even whisper quietly to yourself, I can hear myself again. My voice leads with love. Slow breathing like this stimulates the vagus nerve, helping the nervous system to shift towards safety and regulation. And guess what? When the body feels safe, the real signal can come through. And once that noise quiets even a little bit, you might start noticing things that you hadn't before. Which is really where reflection can help. You can maybe sit with questions like this whose tone do I hear when I criticize myself? Which inherited rule makes my body tighten? What sensations appear when I imagine choosing my own truth? And what practices, spiritual, creative, or quiet, help me hear myself more clearly? These answers don't have to suddenly appear, and you don't have to have all the answers to these. Sometimes just asking the question is enough to start shifting that dial. So across cultures, across spiritual traditions, across nervous systems, there seems to be some sort of shared understanding that the voice of truth is rarely the loudest one. It's quiet, it's steady, and kicker. It's already inside you. That voice is already there, ready to be listened to. Getting other people's voices out of your head isn't about rejecting your past. It's about remembering your original frequency. So it's clearing, clearing those, those voices that no longer serve, right? That are no longer necessary. You know, something that I like saying to myself is I clear the energy, I release the energy that no longer serves me. I release the energy that weighs me down. I release anything that that doesn't feel like my own. Right? So take a deep breath, turn the dial, and maybe just listen to the sound of you and the sound of coming home. Alright, everybody, thank you for listening. I hope you have a wonderful week. See you next time.