After sharing my last post about the connection between my selective mutism and childhood trauma, more memories and realisations have continued to surface. Perhaps they finally feel safe enough to resurface now that both my grandparents are gone.

I think I finally figured out why I started whispering. Since my grandparents lived with us and I was completely mute to them, I had to whisper when talking to my parents or sister so that my grandparents wouldn’t overhear my voice. And since whispering became my default way of speaking at home from a very young age, it carried over to other areas of my life.

I think this explains why conventional treatments for selective mutism never worked for me. The therapies I received focused on anxiety reduction and gradual exposure, but they never addressed my underlying trauma. Without understanding the root cause, therapists were essentially trying to solve a different problem than the one I actually had. No amount of exposure therapy could have helped me while I was still living with my grandparents.

Back then, when treatments didn’t work for me, I thought that must mean I wasn’t working hard enough or there was something inherently wrong with me. This feeling was reinforced when I entered Catholic school, where teachers would often pray for god to heal me. When nothing happened, the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) message was that I must be unworthy of healing or not praying hard enough. The humiliation reached its peak when my primary school teacher joked in front of the whole class that prince charming would throw up at the sight of me.

These early experiences taught me that my way of being was wrong and invalid. Even now in group conversations, I’d usually keep quiet instead of sharing my thoughts, because I’ve been conditioned to believe my words have no value. When others hold a different opinion from me, my brain almost immediately assumes I must be mistaken and others should know better. It’s hard for me to even consider the possibility that I could be right.

I can now clearly see that my selective mutism was a rational and protective response to everything I experienced in childhood. It makes me so angry that I was made to feel defective because of it, which led me to feeling fundamentally inferior to every other human being. I only started inherently feeling equal to other human beings just last year, at the age of 33. So that’s over three decades of my life feeling less than human.

In an old post, I wrote:

Now, I realise that the way I speak isn’t solely caused by anxiety. I have a sensory aversion to speaking at a “normal” volume. (It’s too loud for me! And the sound is coming from inside! I can’t cover my ears to block it out!) My brain sometimes struggles to put together words in my mouth. And it takes a lot of energy for me to speak — it’s not something that comes naturally to me.

At that time, I was desperate to figure out a reason why I speak the way I do. While I think “my brain sometimes struggles to put together words in my mouth” still holds true (likely connected to being Autistic), I now wonder if what I interpreted as sensory aversion might actually be the result of being accustomed to whispering for so long. In that context, a normal speaking voice would naturally feel jarring and overwhelming.

It feels like my life is only beginning now. With both my grandparents gone, a part of me is open to transitioning to a more “normal” speaking voice. But I also feel very hesitant because I’ve been whispering for most of my life and I’m sure I’ll sound very weird if I start speaking in a normal voice now.

I guess I’ll take “fetus steps.” I’ve been going for singing lessons, which feels both terrifying and liberating. My ultimate dream is to learn to sing like my rock idols—Zack de la Rocha, Mike Patton, and Courtney Love, just to name a few! Singing was my biggest love before trauma silenced me. Maybe it’s also the key to rediscovering my voice.