Why do I raise my voice when I get upset?

A woman in one of my groups has never raised her voice at work. Not with a boss, not with a colleague, not with anyone who reported to her. In her relationship she still does it, and she feels it coming before she can stop it.

when I feel not understood, or I feel something is very important to me and I don't get feedback immediately, in one way or the other, from the person that I talk to, I tend to raise my voice. I start speaking faster, and I feel a lot of rush in my body.

a woman in one of my groups

She had the same thing with her kids when they were younger and stopped it, and with her parents for years and stopped that too. Now it is her relationship. Three sets of people, one volume, so the person in front of her was never what decided it.

The need she is asking for started long before any of that. She wanted it as a kid, asking for it caused a problem, so she stopped asking and never learned a way to have it filled since. And she is sick and tired of it, because she doesn't want to be a person who needs to raise her voice to get heard.

Why do I raise my voice when I feel misunderstood?

Because you are not asking for the thing being discussed. You are asking for something you have needed since you were a kid, and you have almost no practice at getting it, so it comes with years of pressure behind it and it comes out at volume.

The sequence runs the same way each time. You don't feel understood, no response comes back, your voice goes up, the rush comes into your body, and then comes the judgement of yourself, which is the thing that stops you feeling heard the way you wanted. By the end of it you're managing your shame instead of the conversation you came in for, and she said she forgets every tool she has in there, including how to ask for help.

In that second you want a dialogue, and instead you hear a judgement, so you argue with that, faster and louder.

what I want is for the person to tell me, "I'm sorry you feel like this. Let me try to understand what's going on." Or just be some type of curious about my situation

a woman in one of my groups

What were you asking for when you stopped asking?

Many of us stopped young, and it stuck because stopping worked. I stopped as a kid and I can tell you the moment.

There was always enough in our house and never anything spare. When I asked my mum for money I was asking for something that wasn't there, and I could see it on her face before she answered. It kept happening, so I stopped asking. I don't think I ever really started again.

Daniel Lawson

Then I got good at building things people wanted to be part of, so I never had to ask anybody for anything. That worked for about thirty years. The woman in this piece was raised on "don't be depending on nobody for nothing", and she grew up around a parent who raised his voice and knows what that did to her. Another group member had no emotional space as a child and became the one who fixes everybody.

In every one of those the asking is what stopped. You stopped asking when you were a kid. The need never stopped. It has nothing to do and nowhere to go.

What happens when you decide you shouldn't be like this?

It gets louder. You put a second feeling on top of the first by judging it, and the one underneath gets bigger so it can be heard. You would never say it to another person for exactly that reason.

Yet you would never actually tell someone that they're overreacting, because that's just going to make them overreact more. But mentally, when you tell yourself you're overreacting, it has that same effect of making you overreact more.

another group member

The woman I mentioned at the start goes much harder on herself. She said the raised voice belongs to a person who isn't aware of herself, and she called it primal and undeveloped.

So I cannot really accept that I still operate like I'm just an animal, with a reptile brain. I cannot stand that part about myself.

the same woman

Every explanation you will read for this says your body moved before your thinking did. That is accurate, and it is also the sentence she already uses on herself. She had the I'm not good enough paradigm for years, which is the same doubt that kept the need suppressed.

That judgement is also what keeps the need suppressed. A feeling avoided at all costs gets delayed, buried, and then it comes out at its worst, which is the week you yell about a planning issue. And you don't trust yourself, in part, because you suppress half of who you are.

So you end up asking somebody for curiosity while you have none for yourself, right? And we are all doing the very best that we can with the tools and the resources that we have got.

How to stop raising your voice when upset

Two steps. Recognise what the need is, and then enable yourself to ask for it as you are today.

Recognising it starts with sorting your needs by how old they are. On that call I ran the contrast with her: in the moments the ask works, is the voice raised? Is the rush in the body there? Is there the same impatience for an answer? Three Nos, in the same relationship in the same week.

So maybe when I asked it back then, I didn't feel like I deserved it, or I was worthy of it. Where now, with new stuff, I don't have the same tendency.

the same woman

When she asks for something she has started wanting lately she sounds like somebody stating a fact. "I just say it like it's natural, like how it is." With the old need she is arguing a case, because that is what it is. So if you want to know which of yours are the old ones, listen for the conversation where you get loudest.

Her version was to go back to the topic first, so she would know what state of being she was in when she discovered the need, and to go at it with curiosity rather than needing to be understood.

Then the second step. That one is about permission.

Of course, if this is my need, I should receive it. And so I don't need to demand it. I just need to make sure that I ask from a place of conviction, and I speak it from my own truth. And when I do that, it just works.

the same woman

She called that a little cheat code. And she got to the other side of it as well.

And I found a piece: that he doesn't need to understand me. Nobody needs to understand my needs. They're my needs. My job is to express them, and make sure that they're fulfilled, either from this person or another way.

the same woman

You get the years of feeling out first, because it is sitting on top of the ask. The question I use is what do I need right now. Space from this person, to cry, to go and scream, to be heard. Once it gets out, the reaction starts to go, and it can come out with people it isn't about. It won't come out where it isn't safe to, which is most of why it waits for the person closest to you.

Within days she used all of it on a discussion about planning. She caught it at disappointment, which comes before the upset and the anger, paused and zoomed out, and recognised an old topic, so she interpreted the feeling as emotional memory rather than fact. Then she asked, later, in writing: more of an I need your help type of vibe, in her words. He said the day after that he liked the way she had described what she needed, and that it showed him how he could contribute differently. She wrote that she felt proud of herself, which is a long way from I should be better than that.

Common questions

Why does it happen with a new partner as well?

Because you brought the need with you. The new person has done nothing to earn the volume, and the size of your reaction is the same as it was in the last relationship. The woman in this piece had already stopped doing it with two other sets of people before this one started.

Is it normal to raise your voice in an argument?

Common, yes. What's worth asking is what you get out of it, and in the groups I run people answer that the same way: it never gets them the result they wanted. Where there is fear in the relationship, that is a different conversation, and it is worth having with somebody qualified for it.

Why does feeling misunderstood trigger me?

Because when somebody doesn't get you, you are answering every time you have asked for this and gone without it. That's why you can go loud over a planning issue and know, while you are doing it, that the planning issue isn't the size of what you're feeling.

Why doesn't knowing the pattern stop it?

Because you learned it in your nervous system a long time before your mind tells you something is off, so you can see it accurately and still run it. It's in your head and not yet in your body, and repetition is what closes that. Why doesn't self-awareness change anything? is the long answer.

Is this the same as managing my partner?

They sit next to each other. How do I stop managing my partner? is the command voice on regular asks, where directing something never makes you admit you need anything. This is the volume on a need you have had since you were a kid, and it keeps firing after the command voice has changed.

If this resonates

If you can say a hard thing calmly to somebody at work whose reaction you can't control, you already know how to do this, and you have done it for years with people under no obligation to be curious about you.

What comes next is recognising what the need is, and then enabling yourself to ask for it as you are today. The recognising is the one most of us skip, because the argument in front of you looks like the subject.

And it goes better with a few others who ask you next week how that conversation went, and who are going after what they want in their relationships as well.

The Reconnected Man and The Reconnected Woman are our groups where we have these conversations together.