**The voice** is Robert Firestone's name for the internal dialogue of self-attack and self-limitation: a hostile thought process, usually experienced as one's own thinking, that criticises, restricts and at its worst destroys. ## Summary The voice speaks in a hostile second person — "you're useless," "don't try," "no one could love you" — which is how its hostility is most clearly heard. Its origin is often not a verbatim parental sentence but a *verbalisation of inferred parental attitudes*: children absorb the emotional atmosphere of the family and convert unspoken rejection into spoken criticism. It is the internal enforcer of the [[The Fantasy Bond|fantasy bond]] — the mechanism by which the child's defensive compromise outlives its usefulness and polices the adult. Voice therapy, the Firestones' method, works by having people say the voice aloud (externalising it), tracing its source in family history, countering it with the real self's perspective, and changing the behaviours it drives. The voice turned outward shows up in couples as contempt; turned upward, as [[The Fantasy Bond|fantasy-bonded]] attachment to nation or creed. `Concepts:` [[The Fantasy Bond]] · [[Death Anxiety]] · [[Self-Compassion]] `Knowledge Base:` [[The Self Under Siege]] · [[The Others Within Us]] · [[Differentiation of Self]]