MM - E1 Finding your frequency_Audio
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Dr. Julia Bowlin: [00:00:00] Somewhere, maybe in the classroom, at the dining room table, maybe even in a relationship, we learned to turn our volume down. We learned that there was a frequency that felt safe and a frequency that did not, and most of us have been living on the safe side ever since. It's about finding your frequency, the one that was always yours underneath the version we learned to perform instead.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Hi there. I'm Dr. Julia Bowlin, and this is Mindset Medicine, your weekly dose of personal awareness medicine. So take a deep breath and let this episode meet you where you are. This month, I'm gonna be talking about voice, not the podcast mic kind, the everyday kind of voice, the moments that we speak up and the moments that we don't.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Many of us learn early when it's safer to stay small or [00:01:00] quiet. So this month, we're exploring what it means to speak, to show up, to be seen without betraying ourselves in the process. That's the theme, Unmuted: The Courage to Be Heard. And today, we're starting at the beginning. Before we talk about speaking up, though, I want to talk about the moment that the volume gets turned down in the first place because most of us didn't wake up one day and decide, "Huh, I think I'm gonna be quiet now."
Dr. Julia Bowlin: No. Somewhere, maybe in the classroom, at the dining room table, maybe even in a relationship, we learned to turn our volume down. We learned that there was a frequency that felt safe and a frequency that did not, and most of us have been living on the safe side ever since. So today isn't about finding your voice like it's been missing.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's about finding your frequency, the one that was always yours underneath the version we learned to perform instead. And here's what this [00:02:00] can look like. Someone gets asked a direct question in a meeting, for example, asking for their opinion, maybe a real one, and the answer that comes out might be a safe version, the rounded off version, not because the real answer was complicated, but because somewhere a long time ago, the real answer costed something.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: For me, it was being told that I should be seen and not heard Period. All of us kids were told, "You're to be seen and not heard." Four words, but they landed like an instruction manual for the rest of my life and my entire nervous system. And it wasn't always just the words. Sometimes it was a look, a look that says, "I'm gonna hit you if you don't shut up," without making a single sound.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: There was no yelling required, just eye contact, and a body/mind that already knew what came next if the message wasn't received fast enough. And in [00:03:00] these moments, they don't have to be really dramatic to do their job, to teach the lesson. It might as-- be as simple as a hand on an arm at a holiday dinner, gripping just a little bit too hard to get the point across right as an opinion started to form into words out of your mouth.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe it was a teacher silencing and saying, "That's enough," in front of a full c- classroom. And these moments don't have to be dramatic to do their job. It could be a hand on an arm at a holiday dinner, gripping just slightly too hard, just as an opinion in your brain and your mouth started to form into words.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe it was a teacher silencing with words that say, "Hey, that's enough, that's enough," in front of the full classroom. Maybe it was a sibling getting the attention, the air in the room, while the quieter one learns that taking up less space is how you stay safe or loved, or maybe both. And here's the physiologic piece.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: A child's nervous system [00:04:00] isn't built to distinguish between, "I might get hit," or, "I might be in trouble." They both register as a threat. The body doesn't file it as an opinion. It gets filed as danger, and once that filing happens, it doesn't require the original threat to still exist. The look is gone. The parent might be gone, in my case.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The classroom is decades in the past. But the body learned the rule, speaking carries risk, and it runs that rule quietly and automatically every time something similar shows up. Maybe it's a raised eyebrow in a meeting from a boss or a slight pause before someone responds, a room that goes quiet after an opinion lands.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: None of these are actually dangerous, but the nervous system doesn't wait to find out. It just goes quiet first, the way it was trained to do. And once a pattern like [00:05:00] that takes hold, it doesn't stay confined to childhood. It finds new rooms to live in. The meeting where an honest answer gets softened into something a little safer.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe the friendship where a boundary gets swallowed instead of spoken out openly, because somewhere it still feels like speaking up might cost the relationship. The version of a text message that gets typed, reread, and quietly deleted before it's ever sent And here's the part that's easy to miss. None of this looks like fear from the outside.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It looks like being easygoing or diplomatic or low maintenance or good in a group. The pattern gets mistaken for personality because it's been running the show for so long, and it starts to look like an identity instead of just protection. Does that make sense? And here's a different way to hold this.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: When I say the volume got turned down, here's what I [00:06:00] mean plainly. The honest answer, the real opinion, the boundary, all of it got smaller, quieter, edited down to whatever felt safe to say out loud. That's the turning down. It's not a metaphor for something vague. It's an actual repeated choice to shrink our true responses into a smaller one made so many times over our life that it stopped feeling like a choice at all.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And that shrinking wasn't a flaw. In the past, was a solution because it worked. Whatever room teaches us this, whether it's the childhood dinner table, a classroom, or a relationship, or more, going quiet kept something safe in that room at that time. And the problem is that the setting didn't come with an expiration date.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It just kept running, and the rooms that we're in now don't really require it anymore. That's why we're talking about this today. Which means the goal here [00:07:00] isn't to force the volume to turn back up all at once and call it, "I'm being brave." No, that's not what I'm talking about. It's something more quieter than that.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Just noticing it in an actual moment that the safe, putting that in quotes, "safe answer" and the true answer are two different things, and letting that gap be visible instead of being automatic. The true answer isn't lost. It's just been sitting underneath the smaller one, waiting to be noticed rather than replaced.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And let me pause here for a second because what's happening right now isn't random. If a version of this frequency lowering sounds familiar to you, that's not a personal failing showing up. It's one of the most common things our nervous system learns to do. Here's the mechanism The brain builds identity the same way it builds any other prediction, through repetition.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Every time speaking up got met with [00:08:00] tension or got corrected or was dangerous, the brain just logged that as a data point. Enough data points and the brain stops treating stay quiet as a response to a situation. It starts treating it as who this person is. That's identity patterning. It's not a fixed trait, but a prediction so well-rehearsed over time, it stopped feeling like a prediction at all.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It just becomes who we are, quote, unquote. And I think of the-- a particular client that I had who described herself as, "I'm just not a confrontational person. I don't like conflict." Okay? That was the identity. It was her whole identity. Flat, simple, and settled. She just, quote, "Wasn't confrontational." Except three sessions in, a memory surfaced of her older sibling who dominated every conversation growing up in a household where jumping in got you talked over every [00:09:00] time.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not confrontational, quotes, wasn't who she was. It's what worked repeatedly so many times that it got calcified into a personality trait. So if there's a version of this, maybe a label worn for years, like easygoing or low drama or not really a talker, it might be worth holding on a little more loosely.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not as a life sentence, but just as an old data point from an old room. And maybe the invitation this week for you, if you're listening, is just a small thing. Next time, if your brain says, "Well, that's just how I am," and that shows up That's the room I want you to get curious about. And where was it built?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: This isn't who you are. It's a pattern the brain learned and rehearsed until it looked permanent. And once the visible pattern shows up, it becomes part of our identity. We [00:10:00] just absorb it in. And once you start to recognize it, hmm, it'll start having a little less grip than it did even a minute ago. And this is where personal awareness medicine comes in, not as another tool to force change, but as a different question entirely.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Instead of asking, "How do I become someone who speaks up?" The more useful question might be, "Whose room from the past am I still responding to?" That single shift from fixing a trait to locating a pattern changes the entire internal conversation going on in our heads, because here's what tends to happen instead.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Without this awareness, the inner dialogue turns into self-criticism, and I should... Like, you might say to yourself, "I should have said something. Why didn't I speak up? What's wrong with me?" Right? We tend to self-deprecate when we do [00:11:00] that. That dialogue treats the silence as a character defect that needs to be corrected.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But a pattern doesn't respond to criticism. It responds to recognition. So the internal sentence gets changed from, "What's wrong with me?" to, "Hmm, which room is this actually happening in? How old was I, and when did it happen?" The one I'm standing in or the one that taught me that in the past? That's not a mood shift, it's a location shift.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And once the location becomes visible, the pattern has somewhere else to go besides just repeating itself. I hope that makes sense. I'm clapping because this is a big deal. It really is. So here's a place to sit for a second if it's useful. Maybe it's a text that gets typed and deleted three times before landing on, "Oh, that sounds okay," but it has an exclamation point that's doing [00:12:00] a lot of the heavy lifting, right?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe it's a work meeting where the real opinion gets translated into something with more hedging like, "Oh, I could see it either way," when actually there is a clear way, and it's just easier to be foggy about it than to really push somebody who may not like what you have to say. Or maybe it's something smaller and older than that.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe it's a family gathering, a particular chair at a particular table, and in a version of quiet that has been rehearsed for 20 years without anyone noticing the rehearsal. Here's the fun thing. Sit in a different seat, and if somebody comes up and says, "That's my chair," you say, "I don't see your name on it."
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Just because it... That's what used to be doesn't mean it has to be. Shake things up just a little bit because none of it needs fixing on the spot. I just want you to start looking at these things. This isn't about catching the moment and forcing it to go differently. The question is just [00:13:00] this: Whose room does this reaction belong to?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Right? No pressure to answer it out loud or even answer it today. Just a question worth sitting with, maybe on your drive home, maybe while doing the dishes, whenever the mind has room to wander back to it. So now it's time for our unicity moment, and before we move into this unicity moment, let me explain what this is.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: A few times each episode, I pause. I do something a little different. I do a guided experience designed to let whatever we've been talking about settle somewhere deeper than just thinking about it or just in the thinking mind. It's more about opening it up to the potential option of something new or different.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's not hypnosis in the stage sense, and it's not required. It's just my invitation for you to go just a little bit deeper. And before we begin, I want to offer a gentle note. What we're about to do is a guided [00:14:00] experience, an invitation to slow down, turn inward, knowing you are always in control, and you can always open your eyes at any time or adjust your position or just simply listen without participating.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: There is nothing you have to do. Just receive what's useful and leave the rest. And if you're driving or operating machinery, please don't close your eyes during the next session. You're welcome to listen and to stay present with the road or just save this part until you can be still. So wherever this finds you, there's an invitation, not a requirement, to get just a little more still.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe close your eyes. Maybe they stay open. Maybe they just kind of relax and look at something with a soft gaze. Either way works. And just breathe in. And slowly breathe out[00:15:00]
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And another when it's ready. There's no rush, no counting required. Some people find it even helpful just to notice the weight of your body wherever you're resting, whether it's a chair, a seat, maybe lying on the ground. There's nothing to fix. We're just noticing our body
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Perhaps there's an image that wants to arrive. Some find themselves near water or in an open field or in a forest or somewhere quieter than just here Wherever it is, there might be a particular kind of quiet there. Not an empty quiet, but maybe a full quiet. The kind with sound in it if it's listened for, like wind or maybe water running.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It has its own rhythm, the [00:16:00] rhythm of the sound of this quiet place
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And in that quiet, there might be something small and steady, maybe a warmth low in your chest or maybe a point of light somewhere nearby filtering through Whatever shows up, it doesn't need a name, and here's why we're looking for it: not to change it, not to fix it or even grow it, or to turn it into something bigger than it is already.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's just let it be noticed exactly as it is because what's been practiced for years is adjusting, it's changing, it's editing, making things smaller or safer or easier to be around, and this is the one place, [00:17:00] just for a few minutes, where nothing needs adjusting Whatever that warmth or light is, it's allowed to just be itself, unedited, with nothing asking it to prove anything or become anything else.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And some find it useful to imagine that this, whatever it is, has been here the whole time. Not something to build, something that was just waiting exactly as it is already And here in this place, there's nothing asking it to stay small, and nothing asking it to be different than it already is either. No look from another person, no hand on an arm, no room that needs it to be quiet or changed.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's [00:18:00] just welcome to simply be. It could be a little more warmth or a little more light if that happens on its own, but nothing is forced, nothing required, just itself, a warmth or a light that is safe and unchanged, exactly how it is
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And whatever arose there, whether it's a feeling or an image or nothing at all, there's room to just let it sit for a moment. No need to explain it or hold onto it. It can stay as long as it wants to stay
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And there might be a small, quiet thought worth carrying forward from here. Not a plan, [00:19:00] nothing to rehearse, just a possibility that somewhere in the coming week, in an ordinary moment, in a meeting, a conversation, or a group text, that same steadiness might show up briefly without being summoned. A flicker of that warmth or of that light right where an edited answer might have gone instead And nothing has to be done with it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It might simply be noticed the way weather gets noticed. There, and then passing, and that's enough
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Let's just become more aware of our breathing right now, and slowly just pay attention to your breath[00:20:00]
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe a little deeper breath now
Dr. Julia Bowlin: and a little easier And becoming aware of our bodies still exactly where it's been the whole time, the weight of it, the surface underneath it, and the room coming back into focus, and the sounds nearby, the light, whatever's close. Take your time. There's no rush to come back to your present. It's a choice, just as everything else is, and it can happen at exactly the pace that feels right for you
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And maybe moving fingers and maybe gently opening your eyes if they were shut, and coming right back. Welcome back. Whatever was [00:21:00] noticed here, a warmth or a light, or maybe just a few minutes of quiet, it wasn't something you had to earn. It was already there, and it's allowed to stay exactly as it is, unhurried, and exactly as steady as it was in this moment for as long as it wants to.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So if there's one thing worth carrying out of today, it's this: holding back, whether that's full silence or just a softer version of the truth, a hedge or a smaller word choice instead of the real one, it's not a flaw. It was a solution that worked once in a room that isn't this one anymore, and that's not something to be fixed by force.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's just something to notice gently whenever it shows up next and for whatever form it takes. Next time, in the next episode, [00:22:00] in What Your Silence Could Cost You, we're looking at the other side of this. Staying quiet has a price, even when nothing looks like it's missing. We just don't always add it up.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And if any part of this met you anywhere, that's something real, I'd love to hear about it. You can always find me at juliabowlinmd.com or on any of my socials listed in the show notes. Thank you so much for spending time with me, and until next time, may you be happy, be healthy, and be fulfilled.
Outro: Thank you for listening to Mindset Medicine with your host, Dr. Julia Bowlin. To learn more about Mindset Medicine, go to www.juliabowlinmd.com and connect with Dr. Julia to find out how our team can help you today. Join us again next week for more expert tips, tools, and strategies to become [00:23:00] healthier, wealthier, and wiser in your personal and professional life.
