Unfolding Insight 3: Understanding the voice in the head
If you haven't yet, I'd invite you to go back and read the previous posts introducing the Voice in The Head, and exploring how to tune in to it. They’ll bring you nicely up to speed for what follows below.
In the last email, we brought some awareness to the voice in our head, the one with strong ideas about who, what, and how we should be in the world.
Now I want to expand that awareness to explore where this 24/7 chatterbox comes from, and how it becomes such a controlling figure in how we live our lives.
When we were young, we soaked up everything that was going on around us. Through observation, mimicry, and the successes and failures of experimentation, we learned about the outside world and how to survive in it.
Our internal world took shape in much the same way. We’d learn which behaviours would please our caregivers — our parents, relatives, older siblings, teachers — and those that would piss them off. We’d learn some things about what love felt like, and what it felt like when it was withdrawn, too.
Sometimes the lessons were explicit: a painful smack across the back of the legs for talking out of turn, or a request to stand a certain way so that we didn’t look fat, or act a certain way, so that we didn’t draw attention to ourselves and make others feel uncomfortable.
We might be pep-talked in to certain subjects or sports — in spite of our inclinations being very much elsewhere — because they’d someday make us some kind of success in somebody else’s eyes.
And sometimes, the lessons would be more implicit. A parent might leave every Monday only to return on a Friday, because work — and everything it afforded the family — was their way of expressing love. Or they might soothe their anger to keep it from us with a drink or three or four and then just drift off to sleep when we needed them most.
These lessons, taught by folk who were trying their best but didn’t know any better themselves, and sometimes singular but often repeated a hundred times across a childhood, are how we learned to fit in, to love and be loveable.
As kids we encoded these lessons in language — what to do and what not to do — and committed them to memory. Over time, we learned how they’d help us stick to the straight and narrow, how they’d keep us safe.
It’s from that memory that the voice in the head draws. Acting out of the fear of disapproval or shame or abandonment it recites its lessons — Do this! Don’t do that! Are you fucking stupid!? Try harder! — as it shows up like an uninvited guest in our adult life.
And until we bring our attention to it, this voice — and sometimes voices, because they can gang up against us or even fight among themselves — will be our unofficial guide to life.
To pinpoint where these lessons came from, who taught them, and to try and identify what they might have wanted to achieve by teaching them can be a useful exercise.
Through this inquiry, we can develop a more compassionate relationship with the voices, and even the people that gave rise to them.
An Exercise
Take the Awareness exercise you previously completed (and if you haven’t yet, go do it — it’ll only take 5 minutes).
Take a look back at all the things that the voice in the head said to you in those five minutes.
Pick one that feels particularly potent right now, one that shows up most regularly in your life, or one that’s been troubling you today.
Close your eyes and just sit with what the voice says to you.
Remember, the voice can’t hurt you even if it’s being a total prick, so it’s safe to bring some gentle curiosity here.
As you sit with the voice, see if you can locate where it’s coming from.
Whose voice is it? Is it a parent, or a teacher? Or is it a blend of voices who all told you the same thing as a kid?
And what were they trying to achieve by saying these things to you?
Were they trying to protect you from a bully at school, or an abusive parent? Or were they the abuser themselves?
Were they trying to help you live up to some kind of potential that they thought they saw in you?
Or were they simply tired, all out of energy to care for you, and wanting you to go away?
This gentle interrogation of the origins of the voice in the head can be another powerful exercise in helping us realise that the voice is not, in fact, our own.
By creating some distance between us and the voice in this way, we can start to build a different relationship with it, one in which we can learn from it and, in the process, reclaim our sense of agency from it.
We’ll explore how we can start to do that in the next post.
In the meantime, if you'd like to jump in to your own exploration of how the voice in the head might be holding you back from unfolding in to life, I'd love to explore that with you, too. Get in touch.
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