The Forums › Forums › Emotional Journey › Is It Just Me? › There's a "tone" to my voice that everyone hates › Re: There's a “tone” to my voice that everyone hates
Anonymous
My very first job out of college was at a Pain Management Clinic that employed a psychologist to help people with the depression that comes with chronic pain. One day he told me that I needed to ‘monitor my tone’ after I had once again hurt someone’s feelings inadvertantly. His explanation was that I was so ‘naturally sarcastic’ that whenever I was attempting to be sincere it STILL came off as being sarcastic.
For me, and I assume for a lot of us, I think that the ‘sarcasm’ was a defense mechanism for the constant strain of critcism I felt that I recieved on a daily basis. I always said that I don’t have much, but I have my wits
The problem became that I was hurting people more and more and found that I had to explain myself or ‘mend fences’ on a near constant basis. The thing that I tried, and I don’t know if it will work for you is kind of waiting a beat or two before responding to anyone. I find that sometimes, because my mind is racing, I will be formulating my response AS the person I’m interacting with is talking ( loved when I found out that was an ADD trait, BTW) and that I wasn’t really concentrating on EVERYTHING involved in the conversation so I was missing maybe a certain emotional component from the person I was dealing with so the response sounded very snarky. I try to listen, as tortorous as that can be sometimes, until the person is done talking and then respond. Things have changed, but I’m still a knee jerk responder, or I guess ‘knee jerk jerk’ from time to time.
Like with most things unique to me, the people who know me and love me are comfortable enough to let me know when I sound less than sincere or even nice. I tell people now that the ultimate irony in life is that I’ve been struggling with expressing myself in an accurate way as the world hurdles towards texts, emails and social networking for communication.Talk about difficulty in reading between the lines!
I love the idea of recording your voice. I hope everything works out for you.
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