How The Human Voice Can Heal YourselfHow The Human Voice Can Heal Yourself
I Love Being Sober
Tim Westbrook and Shylah Ray Sunshine talk about growing up around alcoholism, finding recovery, and using motherhood and music to shift generational patterns. The conversation centres on how the human voice can support emotional healing, spiritual connection, and a more grounded sober life.
1:20:13•10 Mar 2026
How Shylah Ray Sunshine Uses Her Voice to Rewrite a Family Story of Addiction
Episode Overview
- Music and singing can act as a form of therapy, offering a sense of connection to a higher power and deep emotional release.
- Support groups like Al‑Anon and Adult Children of Alcoholics may help shift focus from blaming parents to owning and changing personal behaviour.
- Attachment practices such as home birth, breastfeeding and close physical bonding can help break patterns of disconnection from earlier generations.
- Learning to apologise, set boundaries and speak needs openly is crucial for healing relationships with both children and parents.
- Simple vocal practices like humming, toning and group singing can ease shame, calm the nervous system and help reconnect people with their true voice.
“When I vocally express and when I perform, it's the most free I ever feel in life. Because I'm not thinking about anything other than just being a channel of God, of spirit, creator, you know, to flow through me.”
How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety? This conversation between recovery advocate Tim Westbrook and award-winning singer, vocal coach, and mother in recovery Shylah Ray Sunshine brings that question to life through stories of trauma, music, and healing. Raised in an alcoholic household, Shylah talks openly about anger, chaos, and the deep rupture with her mother that followed her into adulthood.
She explains how leaving home as a teenager, avoiding hard drugs out of fear, and later becoming a young mum pushed her towards 12-step support like Al‑Anon and Adult Children of Alcoholics. Those rooms, sponsors, and step work became the backbone of her emotional recovery, helping her move from blame to accountability and begin breaking generational patterns for her own daughters.
You’ll hear how motherhood became a healing laboratory: home birth, attachment parenting, breastfeeding, and fierce protection of bonding as Shylah attempts to give her children the safety and presence she never had. She reflects on the awkward, uncomfortable art of apologising to teens, setting boundaries with drinking parents, and slowly shifting from resentment to compassion. The heart of the episode is Shylah’s relationship with her voice.
She describes music as her first experience of God and explains why so many people freeze when they try to sing. Shame, fear, and unspoken emotion lodge “right here in the core,” she says, and vocal expression can loosen those knots.
As she puts it, "When I vocally express and when I perform, it's the most free I ever feel in life." From simple humming and group toning to indigenous songs and plant‑medicine ceremonies, Shylah shows how sound can support sobriety, regulate the nervous system, and reconnect people with ancestry and purpose.
If you’ve ever wondered whether your own voice could be part of your healing, this episode might be the nudge to start singing, speaking up, and seeing what changes when you stop holding it all in.
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