The Voice That Sounds Like You But Isn’t

Have you ever stopped to wonder where that voice actually came from?

In this episode, I'm getting personal about the inner critic, where it's really born, how it takes root, and why it sounds so much like you that you never thought to question it.

Because the voice that has been narrating your life may not be yours at all.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Dear Soul Rising, a sanctuary for remembering, rising, and reconnecting with the deeper wisdom within you. This is a space for the deeper conversations, the ones many of us didn't grow up having. I'm your host, Naomi Carr. I want to open today by asking you something. When you hear that voice in your head, the one that says you're too much and not enough, somehow both at the same time. Do you ever stop and ask where it actually came from? Most of us don't. We never think to. We just accept it as the sound of our own mind. We speak it in first person, like it belongs to us, like it's our compass, keeping us honest, keeping us in line. But you never chose that voice. You never sat down one day and decided to believe it. So what if it wasn't yours at all? What if the voice that sounds the most like you, the one that knows exactly where to press, was handed to you so long ago that you simply mistook it for your own. That is what I want to talk about today. Where the voice really comes from, what it has quietly cost you, and what happens the moment you hear it clearly enough to say, wait, that is not me. There was a moment I will never forget. I was sick, really sick. And somewhere in the middle of it, in the middle of the exhaustion and the pain and a body that was struggling, a thought arrived. At least I lost weight. It stopped me cold. I was so shocked I had to sit and ask where a thought like that even comes from. Because it was cruel. There was no other word for it. It wasn't kind, it wasn't tender, it wasn't concern for my well-being or relief that I was going to recover. It was loud, and underneath it was something I could suddenly hear for what it was. You deserve to be punished. It has to be extreme to get you in line. And that mentality didn't sit right with me anymore. Because I had been doing the work, the healing, the unlearning. I thought I had moved past this. So when I heard it that clearly, that casually, in the thick of my own suffering, the question that hit me wasn't just whose voice is this? It was how long has this been running? Under the surface on repeat all this time. And to understand how I know it was never mine, I have to take you back. You will hear me talk about my father often on this podcast. My relationship with him was one of the most complex of my life, second only to the one with my mother. Both of them shape me in ways I am still untangling to this day. I grew up with a father who had opinions about my body. They were loud and they were constant. He would tell me I was going to be a farmer's wife, his way of saying I was too big, too stocky, heading somewhere ordinary and unremarkable. He would look at me and say, You need to get out there and go walking with your mother. And I need you to understand why that landed the way it did. My mother had always struggled with her weight, and I knew he saw her as not enough. So it was never really about walking. It was him telling me I was becoming her, that I was heading toward the thing he had already decided was a disappointment. Other times he would reach over and pinch at my skin, looking for fat that as I know now was never even there. And here is what still gets me. I have always been big boned, tall and curvy. That is just my frame. But when I look back at photographs of myself from those years, I'm struck by it. I actually had a good figure. I was not overweight by any means. I even remember being sick with the flu and my mother coming to pick me up from school, and a teacher pulling her aside in the hallway, worried about how gaunt and hollow I was starting to look. And you can see the programming in that. I was sick, being sick had made me thinner, and thinner was the thing people noticed. The thing that got worried over, the thing that got seen. Somewhere in there, a quiet equation got written into me. Sick means weight loss, and weight loss is the thing that matters. But it did not stop with my father, because I was also raised within a religion that had its own opinions about my body, because I was a woman. And the message there was a saying that my body was too much, that it was something to be ashamed of, something to be covered, hidden, kept from view in case it was seen and became a problem. So think about what that does to a child. At home, a voice telling me my body was too big, and all around me a teaching that my body was too much, too tempting, too shameful, too dangerous to simply exist. Two different authorities, the same verdict. There is something wrong with your body, and it is your job to shrink it, hide it, apologize for it. And it went deeper than all of that, deeper than my body and wait. Because many years ago, just once in my adult life, I was overwhelmed, worn down to nothing, and all I wanted was to be taken care of, to rest, to be comforted the way a mother comforts a child, held and told it was okay to stop. And in the depths of that aching, a thought surfaced. Quiet, almost matter of fact. If I were sick, then I would be nurtured, then someone would come, then I would be allowed to be cared for. Only if I was sick, only if I was suffering. And I was dumbfounded because what that thought had apparently believed my whole life was that I could not simply ask for care. I could not just be tired or human or in need. I had to earn it through suffering. I had to be visibly broken down before I was allowed to be held. That being enough on an ordinary day was never quite enough on its own. And that is what this programming does. It doesn't just tell you you're not enough. It quietly rewrites the terms of your own worth. And here is why I am telling you all of this, because I know I am not the only one. Maybe it wasn't a father, maybe it was a mother, a coach, a church, a culture, a magazine. A single sentence someone said once and never thought about again. But somewhere, someone handed you a verdict about your worth and your enoughness, and you were too young to hand it back, so you kept it. You locked it in as truth. You started saying it in your own voice. I did not see that girl when I looked in the mirror. I saw what I had been taught to see, and so I went to war with my body. For most of my life that war was quiet and relentless. In my teen years I starved myself trying to stay thin enough. I would look in the mirror and imagine cutting away flesh that was not there. I rejected my body, I made it my enemy. I treated it like something defective, something wrong, something that needed to be fixed before it could be acceptable. And the worst part, the part that took me the longest to see clearly, was that I thought that voice was mine. It felt like mine. It used my name. It knew every insecurity, every fear, every tender place to press. But it was not mine, it was theirs. A little girl had absorbed the voices around her so completely that she could not tell the difference between what she had been told and what she actually believed about herself. And that voice followed me everywhere, into dressing rooms, into every special event, into the mirror every single morning, into the most private moments of my life that no one else ever saw. That is how deep it goes. That is how completely a borrowed voice can take over, until you never once question whether it's telling the truth. And then one day it was mirrored right back at me. I was in a changing room, trying on clothes, and I had my toddler with me, and she stood in front of the mirror and patted her little tummy, and she said again and again, I fat, I fat I froze. It was like being punched, like the floor dropped out from under me, because I understood in that one horrifying second exactly what was happening. I was programming her. The voice hadn't stopped with me. It was already reaching for her, already climbing into a body that had done nothing wrong, and was too young to hand it back exactly like I had been. I carried that war for years, and now I carried something heavier alongside it. The guilt of what I was handing her. But I still didn't have the tools to reshape my own thinking. Not yet. And that is where it begins for me and I would guess for you, and for just about anyone who has ever lived, because I don't think there is a single person alive who hasn't carried some version of this voice. And that is exactly what makes it so hard to see. When something lives in everyone, it stops looking like a wound and starts looking like reality, like just the way things are, like just the way you are. But it isn't. So before we put it down, we have to understand it, because you cannot set down something you still believe is yours. That is where we start. I need you to understand the trick of this voice, because it is the reason it has survived this long. It never announces itself as the enemy. It doesn't say, I am here to make you smaller. It masquerades as protection, as discipline, as the thing keeping you honest, keeping you in line. Remember how we started, the inner compass. That is the disguise. It convinces you it is on your side, and then it convinces you of something worse, that it is you. And here is the part that traps you. That voice wore the faces of people you loved, people you needed to survive. So to question it feels like betraying them, and so you don't. You protect it. You defend the very thing that is wounding you, because it is tangled up with everyone you were taught to trust. That is why you could never catch it. Not because you weren't strong enough, but because by the time you were old enough to ask whether it was true, you could no longer find this scene where they ended and you began. That is not your failure. That is how deep it goes. Installed to the very core of you. Think of it like a hitchhiker that climbed into someone long ago. A frightened parent, a frightened parent before them, handed down a line so long you cannot see the start of it. It rode inside each of them, quiet and unquestioned, until one day it slipped across into you. Not because they were cruel, because they never knew they were carrying a passenger at all. They thought it was them exactly the way you thought it was you. Riding along in silence, mistaken every time for the driver. But it was never you, it was only ever a passenger that climbed in before you were old enough to deny it access. You did not inherit the truth about yourself. You inherited someone else's fear, riding shotgun pretending to be you. And a fear is not a fact, no matter how much it sounds like your own voice. So if the voice was never true, if it was only ever inherited fear, then why is it still running your life? That is the harder question. And the answer is not a comfortable one. Because that voice has no power of its own. It cannot make you shrink in the photograph, it cannot turn down the invitation, or apologize for the space you take up, or talk you out of the life you wanted. It can only suggest. You are the one who signs. And I say that with so much tenderness because I sign for decades. Here is what no one tells you. The people who first planted that voice only had to do it once. But a voice cannot survive on its own and needs someone to keep speaking it long after those people have left the room. So it found someone. It found you. That is the quiet tragedy of it. At some point you stopped being the child it was done to and became the adult who keeps it alive. Every time you looked in the mirror and agreed. Every time you let it narrate the conversation you didn't start, the dream you didn't chase, the room you walked into already apologizing for being there. Each agreement signed the contract again. And I am not telling you this to shame you, but the opposite in fact. Because if you are the one keeping it alive, then you are also the one who can let it go. That power was never with them. It has been in your hands this whole time. You just never knew you were holding the pen. But before you set it down, be honest about what it has already cost. Not just your peace with yourself, your presence. All the moments you were in the room, but not really there, because you were somewhere else managing how you were being seen. Count the rooms it followed you into. Count the joy it talked you out of. That is the bill, and you have been paying it with your one life. Here is what I have learned. You do not silence the voice. I used to think that was the goal. Kill it, win, be free of it. But you cannot silence something that has been speaking your whole life. That is not how it works. What you can do is smaller than that and bigger. You can hear it. Because the moment I asked whose voice is this, something separated. There was the voice, and there was me listening to it. And for the first time in my life, those were two different things. That is the whole turn. Because a voice you can hear is a voice you can question. And a voice you can question is a voice you no longer have to obey. It still speaks. Some mornings it is loud. But now there is a gap between what it says and what I do next. And in that gap is my entire life. That is what hearing it gives you, not silence, distance. Just enough room to choose. In the first time I truly chose, it wasn't even for me. It was for her, the little girl in the changing room, patting her tummy in the mirror. I could not undo what had been handed to me, but I could refuse to hand it down. I could be the place the passenger finally got out. That is how it loosens, not all at once, but in one refusal at a time. Every time you take up the space, stay in the photograph. Walk into a room without apologizing. Until the voice becomes what it always was, not you, not the truth, just a passenger you can finally hear, writing quietly while you decide where you go. Because we are more than this voice. We are more than a body, more than a grade on a report card, more than the baseball team we didn't quite make, more than the dreams our parents had that we never fulfill. We are a soul. We get to choose our own path. We get to decide what enough means to us. Because we cannot measure our lives with someone else's ruler. Their dreams, their wishes, their wounds. They do not have to be ours. We get to write our own. If this resonates with you, I've created something for you, a guided return to unconditional self-love bundle. You can find the link in the show notes. And I want to offer you this soul musing to hold in your heart. Our enoughness is not measured by anyone else's eye, but by the truth of our own wholeness by Naomi Carr. Before you go, I want to leave you with these three questions to sit with. The next time it speaks, stop and ask where it learned to talk that way. Second, what has it already cost you? Name one room it followed you into, one joy it talked you out of. Third, if the voice was never yours to begin with, what would you choose now with the pen in your own hand? When you finally hear that voice and you choose not to repeat it, something moves that is bigger than you. You begin healing in both directions at once, backward for the child you were, who only needed to hear they were enough, and forward for the ones who will never have to inherit what you set down. That is the quiet, sacred work. Because I truly believe that when we begin healing ourselves, we create more compassion, more understanding, and ultimately a better world for everyone. With so much love, I'll see you in the next episode, dear soul.