Accent, Dissociation:
From the past to the future
Voices of Creativity: Introduction
In the early weeks of undertaking the MA, and starting GDE710 at Falmouth, I experienced what I can only describe as a rupture in my sense of self. This was not burnout. Not academic stress. It was something stranger. A dissociative break triggered by exposure to cartin accents.
It began with a comment. Or maybe it was just a reaction. A subtle shift in tone. A moment where my voice seemed to mark me internally, and not in a good way. Whatever it was, it landed hard. My accent, something I rarely questioned, became the site of sudden, silent collapse. It was as if I had been pulled out of myself. Split. The voice speaking no longer felt like mine. I became both observer and performer. What happened was more than embarrassment. It was disorientation. A felt fracture in coherence. The sound of my own words, shaped by place, by family, by class, became something to fear. Something to hide. Looking back, this was the moment Voices of Creativity began. Not as an idea. As an event.
Later, I would encounter R.D. Laing’s writing. His 1960 book The Divided Self described, almost exactly, what I had lived: “The outsider, estranged from himself and society, cannot experience either himself or others as ‘real.’ He invents a false self… The disintegration of his real self keeps pace with the growing unreality of his false self” (Laing, 1960).
His words made sense of the rupture. I was the outsider. Not just in the room, but in myself. My authentic voice, my accent, felt unacceptable. In its place, a false self had surged forward. One trained to speak differently. To sound more neutral. More professional. Less me.
The sketch became my first map of the split. A visualised fracture. One part of me trying to pass. The other trying not to disappear. What Laing described in theory, I had drawn by instinct. A mind fraying under the pressure to perform acceptability. A voice pulled between connection and correction.
This moment, intimate, disorienting, embodied, is where the research began. Not in literature. In loss.
As I reflected further, I realised this break was not just psychological but profoundly embodied. There was a physical reaction entwined with the mental turmoil. My heart pounded. My voice trembled and felt distant to my own ears. I became light-headed. Classic signs of dissociation and panic.
The experience recalled the insight of trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk, who notes that “trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust” (van der Kolk, 2014). In that moment, a wave of shame and confusion, however unjustified, washed over me simply because of how I sounded. It was as if my body had kept score of every prior moment I had felt othered.
The voice is an intimate instrument of identity. When it becomes a source of threat, the body responds as if in danger. I lost trust in my voice in that moment. I lost trust in the ease of being myself. On the surface, it was minor. A misattunement. An awkward moment. But it struck a nerve. It showed me that trauma is not only born of overt violence. It can emerge from subtle, cumulative injuries to one’s sense of self. My embodied self, voice, mind, and body together, had experienced a rupture. Only later could I name it. A convergence of personal history and social bias triggered a fight-or-flight response in the middle of a classroom.
This insight reshaped the path ahead. It underscored the political nature of voic, how something as seemingly simple as an accent can carry embedded hierarchies and subconscious reactions. These are not abstract. The body feels them.
Psychologically, I found language for what had happened in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. His concept of System 1 thinking, fast, automatic, intuitive, helped explain how the bias I encountered might have arisen. He writes that System 1 operates through internalised patterns of normality. What is fluent feels true. What deviates feels suspect (Kahneman, 2011).
An unfamiliar accent, by this model, can cause friction in the listener’s brain. Reduced cognitive fluency, the ease with which we process stimuli, eads to discomfort. One study summarised it clearly: “Non-native accents make speech somewhat more difficult for native speakers to parse, thereby reducing fluency and causing people to doubt the accuracy of what is said” (Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2010).
My classmates or tutors may not have been biased. But their cognitive reflexes, trained on a particular soundscape, may have registered with myself that my voice was less natural, less credible, less belonging. Kahneman’s insights allowed me to stop personalising the bias. It wasn’t just about me. It was about the way minds work. The way systems shape instincts.
This realisation helped. It located my experience in something larger. But it also revealed how deeply embedded these reflexes are. You cannot simply unlearn System 1. You have to name it. Interrupt it. Bring in System 2, the slow, reflective part of the mind, to counteract the automatic.
This is where Voices of Creativity would need to work. Not just in describing bias, but in making it visible. In creating artefacts that invite reflection. In building space for the slow mind to listen.
A sketchbook diagram from that period shows this tension visually. Two poles emerge. Autonomous and Relevant. I wrote these words pulling them apart. One spoke to self-trust. The other to social fit. The crisis I experienced was the space between them.
Autonomy means speaking in one’s own voice, unfiltered. Relevance means being heard, accepted, understood. When my accent drew attention, autonomy felt dangerous. At the same time, silencing it felt like a form of disappearance.
This tension lives at the core of creative identity. A voice that stays true risks isolation. A voice that conforms risks erasure. The diagrams I drew showed this conflict as a system of forces. The inner voice pulled one way. The outer world pulled another. Arrows met and crossed. Friction built. The question beneath it all: Can I speak in my own language and still be heard?
That question reshaped the project. Voices of Creativity is no longer just about design. It is about the politics of expression. The negotiation between voice and reception.
Looking back, I can name this rupture as a point of origin. A moment of convergence, where theory and experience collided. Kahneman, Laing, van der Kolk, these thinkers did not simply appear in the literature review. They emerged in my recovery.
This was not the kind of research that begins with curiosity. It began with survival. With trying to understand why I felt so destabilised by a moment that, on the surface, seemed ordinary.
What was fractured that day has become the core of this project. Voices of Creativity was born in that crack, between expression and erasure, between speech and reception, between the body and the bias it absorbs.
References
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Laing, R. D. (1960). The divided self: An existential study in sanity and madness. Penguin Books.
Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking Press.
Harrison, A. (2024, March 3). Accent bias in the creative industries: How your voice affects your career. The Guardian.Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com
Falmouth University. (2021). GDE710: Contemporary practice, MA Graphic Design. [Course materials]. Falmouth University, Cornwall, UK.
