"Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me!" 

....except that sometimes they can. 

Words have POWER. And while it's true that words can't physically break your bones, the reality is that the things people say to us and the things we say to others deeply affects everyone involved. 

I bet you have a story from your own life where something someone said to you radically changed the outcome of your life. For example, I know people who had teachers or parents or siblings say something mean about their art, their voice, their body---and that one interaction changed how they thought about themselves and how they acted for years to come. 

Maybe you've seen this on the positive side, as well: how one kind word changed everything for you. Maybe a sentence of encouragement turned your life around. 

As a child, were you yelled at? How did that make your body feel? Your soul feel?

As an adult, do you perpetuate patterns of yelling? 

Do you have a history of being called names? And do you perpetuate that pattern in your current life? 

Are you so overstimulated from your life that you end up speaking more harshly than you wish you did to people who mean the most to you in your life? 

This session is all about yelling and harsh words. My intention is to cover the emotions that lead us to yell and lose control of our voices and words in both WHAT we say and HOW we say it. 

Sometimes when I'm very angry with my children, I know I can't be trusted to speak kindly to them, so I will sing the words instead, very operatically. But a few weeks ago, my 6yo told me, "Mom, why do you sing when you're mad at us? The singing still sounds harsh." 

And that was a needed wake-up call for me. What hurts with words isn't just the tone and isn't just the words themselves and even isn't both of those things together--it's the ENERGY underlying all those things. 

So we need to look at the ENERGY behind WHY we show up with our words that way. 

Before heading into this session, I'm going to recommend a little bit of self-assessment, where you think about the words you say and what you would like to change about them. Do you cuss too much and want to stop? Do you yell and stomp around a lot? Even if you don't yell and cuss, do you call people names? Is your tone of voice unkind? 

In this session, we'll work on all of those things, with the intention of getting to the underlying trauma behind these habits so we can start unraveling them at the source. We want some new ways of using our own voices--and we also want to heal from the ways other people have used their voices on us. 

My hope is that this session will make it much, much easier to control how we interact with others using our own voices.