I’ve said this to clients for years, and I believe it with my whole heart: Voice therapy can help you discover the confidence, presence, and freedom that’s been there all along.
Your voice is that fundamental to how you experience yourself and move through the world.
In my work as a speech-language therapist and corporate communications trainer, I help people find the voice inside them that is free of tension, old stories, and old habits picked up along the way. They start to connect to their voice in ways they typically had not experienced before. And here’s what I’ve come to believe: there is no faster, deeper, or more complete way of getting to the core of the matter, shaking up the systems, and accessing reset buttons—gently and oftentimes joyfully—than through voice.
Why? Because it addresses three systems simultaneously: the body, the breath, and the mind.
The Body-Breath-Mind Trinity
Your body: Your voice is housed in your body. How you feel in your body impacts your voice. Habitual tensions held in the throat, jaw, shoulders, gut, or anywhere else dampen sound vibrations. How can your message resonate with your listeners if it isn’t even fully resonating within you?
Your breath: This is the power source for your voice. When it is held back, squeezed, or used in a shallow way, you are diminishing your own power. Speaking on full, unrestrained exhalations doesn’t just support your sound—it anchors you, liberates your expression, and transforms tension into calm.
Your mind: Old stories you carry around about yourself reveal themselves in vocal habits. Whether they were formed through societal norms and influences, your background, or personal experiences, they tend to reinforce stories that never did or no longer serve you well. Anxiety, trauma, the ways you’ve learned to edit yourself—all of it can flatten pitch, reduce volume, interrupt flow.
Voice as Window and Tool
Research confirms what I’ve observed for decades: acoustic features of speech signal shifts in mood and mental health. Depression often shows up as flatter intonation, reduced pitch range, slower speech. Stress or anxiety tightens the voice, increases pauses, quickens speech.
But voice isn’t just a reflection of your state—it can actively shape it. Sustained tones, vocal play, singing, character work, making sounds from different parts of your body—these practices can release tension, spark joy, and support confidence, often faster than talk therapy alone.
Voice therapy isn’t just about technique—it’s about transformation.
Ryochi’s Story: What Freedom Sounds Like
Several years ago, I worked with a Japanese businessman—I’ll call him Ryochi—who came to the U.S. wanting to reduce his accent for business and social settings. He had a flat affect, monotone speech. He told me he’d had catatonic schizophrenia in college, and while he had stabilized, the flatness remained. A former boss in Japan had bullied him cruelly about it.
The day after New Year’s Eve, Ryochi told me he had watched the ball drop in Times Square on TV. He said he was jealous of the revelers—the ones who whooped and yelled in exuberant celebration. This was not something he could do. He then opened his mouth wide and let out a diminished, faint “Ahh.”
Well, you can guess what happened next. We spent the whole session gradually building up bigger and bigger sounds until we were both yipping, hollering, and throwing our arms in the air along with our bellowing “whoop!”s.
In the following sessions, we explored making sounds from different parts of his body—sounds from down in his gut, strong sounds directed straight from the solar plexus, sounds from his heart area, softer tones from his throat, then from his nose and face, his head. Some sounds were deep and wailing, others strong and direct; some were soft and compassionate sounding; others were airy and light. Character play opened doors to voices he didn’t know he could make.
This range of sounds emanating from different parts of his body elicited different feelings and emotions. You could see his face change as we did the exercises. Sometimes he got quite emotional. Occasionally he’d smile such a genuine smile it would almost make me cry.
The work we did to find these sounds in his voice, or recover them, was more valuable than the accent work—though that was valuable as well. Ryochi said he had no idea when he left New York that he would be a different person.
Can you see why my work is so meaningful to me?
When Depression Lives in the Voice
I have a psychiatrist friend who occasionally sends me patients who are depressed. These individuals often speak with low affect, low volume, flat tone—or all three at once.
The voice therapy exercises I do with these clients vary, but they overlap with what I did with Ryochi. And character work—asking someone to embody a different persona—is absolutely amazing. When a person allows themselves to be a different person, they are capable of creating an entirely different voice. A different persona brings out very different sounds.
When a depressed person is asked to sing, go up and down in their range, move with their voice, make all different kinds of vibrations and tones emanating from the various spaces within their bodies… Well, suffice it to say, I don’t think any of these clients ever walked out of my office without a smile on their face.
The Cases That Aren’t “Extreme” at All
It’s not uncommon for clients to experience relief, release, insight, a greater sense of freedom in their self-expression, and a broader perspective of who they are through voice work—something that started out as simply a sound they weren’t comfortable with, or wanted to improve to play their professional role more effectively.
Then there are cases where a person has just never learned how to “play” their voice. They’ve gotten stuck in a habit of sounding that is not consistent with who they think and feel they are or want to be. Most people haven’t had lessons in how to use this instrument. Is it any wonder so many people don’t like to hear themselves on recordings?
Nearly 30% of adults experience voice difficulties at some point, often accompanied by mental health challenges. But even people without voice disorders benefit from voice-focused practices. They enhance presence, confidence, emotional expression.
You don’t need formal voice therapy to begin experiencing these benefits.
A Practice You Can Try
Before an important conversation or presentation, take a few minutes to explore:
Feel your feet on the ground. Drop your weight so that the floor is supporting you. Take three full breaths that fill your belly, and take nice, long exhalations.
Gently massage your jaw. Roll your shoulders. Notice where you’ve been holding tension. Consciously let it go. It was a distraction from being fully present, wasn’t it?
Now make a long, grounding “hmm” sound emanating your gut. Next, an empowering“ahh” coming from the solar plexus. Then, a softer sound coming from the throat.
Next, imaging a razor sharp sound coming from your nose and mask “Mmm.” And finally, an airy voice that seems to emanate from someplace just above your head.
Say something out loud. Notice what’s different.
On Accent Work: Your Choice, Your Voice
Accent work can be controversial and I get asked my opinion on it often, so I’ll give it here. Some people want to change their accents. If this is something you want to address, it is no one’s business but your own. Only you know what you need to feel confident, comfortable, and free in expressing yourself. The process itself will be illuminating—who knows what you’ll discover.
Accent work isn’t about erasing identity. It’s about exploring expressive options, expanding how you can communicate in different contexts. It’s a tool for self-expression, and often, for self-revelation and growth.
Why This Matters
Voice is more than communication. It reflects your state of mind and body, and it shapes how you experience yourself. Working with voice supports greater awareness, presence, and emotional expression. It offers a way to inhabit your body fully and connect with others more authentically.
For professionals, vocal mastery is strategic—it enhances engagement, builds trust, ensures your message lands. But it’s also personal. It’s about sounding like the person you know yourself to be. It’s about releasing what constrains you. It’s about access to your full range.
In summary, yes, I believe the voice truly is the seat of the soul, and when you address it, you’re really addressing everything.
Listen to the voice deep down. It knows.
What Could Your Voice Unlock?
If something in this article stirred something in you—if you recognized yourself in these stories, or felt curious about what might shift if you worked with your voice differently—let’s talk.
I offer free consultations where we can explore what’s possible for you. No pressure, just an honest conversation about where you are and where you want to be.
Schedule your free consultation here.
*Judith Weinman, MA, CCC-SLP, has worked as a speech-language pathologist in New York City since 1993. Her practice focuses on voice and speech therapy, corporate communication, accent reduction and dialect coaching. She works with individuals, corporations, licensed mental health professionals, and casting directors, bringing clinical expertise and a deep understanding of voice as a pathway to self-discovery and empowerment.