the voice inside your head

Sep 24

Dear Reader,

A woman I worked with kept describing what she called her inner critic, and she talked about it the way you'd talk about weather. It was just there, a condition of being her. So one day I asked her to say out loud what it actually said, in the exact words.

She had trouble with it. Not because she couldn't remember, but because saying it in a room with another person made it sound different than it did in her head. Eventually she got through it: that she was pathetic, that everyone could tell, that she needed to get it together. Then she stopped and said, quietly, that she sounded like her mother.

I want to be careful here, because this is the point where it would be easy to make the whole thing about her mother, and that's often not how it works. The voice isn't usually a recording of one person. It tends to be assembled from several, over years, and by the time we're adults it's been running so long in our own voice that the sources have mostly blurred together.

What struck me about that session was something else. She'd been carrying those sentences for thirty-some years and had rarely, if ever, said them aloud. They'd mostly existed inside her head, where there's nobody to hear them and little reason for them to sound like anything in particular. Saying them in a room changed what they were. She could hear the cruelty in them, which had been harder to catch from the inside, where they mostly just sounded like the truth.

That's the part I'd sit with this week. Whatever the commentary is in your head, it may not have had to survive being spoken. It might not have been heard by anyone who could have said, wait, that's not fair. A lot of it has been running in a closed room for years without much to answer it, and that's probably some of why it still sounds so convincing.

Yours in the journey,