"Voices inside my head Echoes of things that you said"
Gordon Sumner (The Police) Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group
Have you ever stopped to consider whether you hear voices in your head? This is one of those questions that seems simple and obvious, but isn’t. When I think about my own inner world, there are definitely some language being formed in my mind, but do I hear it or just experience it? I’m not too sure. You could call them ‘thoughts’ but to be accurate, they are a subset of thoughts, as some thoughts are purely visual.
Nevertheless, this language arises, so as I am writing this blog, the language is being formed a moment before I type it. As I ‘hear’ it, I type it, and then I edit as I go, trying to put it into coherent sentences that are (more or less) grammatically correct.
When I am not writing, I also experience voices in my head too. They might be helpful, such as ‘don’t forget to stop at the shop on your way home’ or not, such as ‘you made a right mess of that, you are an idiot’.
People seem to experience their inner dialogue in a variety of ways. Writing in ‘El Pais’, Daniel Soufi describes a viral Twitter (X) thread from 2020[i]. A user named @KylePlantEmoji wrote:
“Fun fact: some people have an internal narrative and some don’t. As in, some people’s thoughts are like sentences they ‘hear,’ and some people just have abstract non-verbal thoughts and have to consciously verbalize them. And most people aren’t aware of the other type of person.”
The resulting conversation revealed that people have vastly different experiences of their inner voice. One of the dimensions of this is the proportion of language to visual experience. Some people (myself included) find it very difficult to conjure up images in their heads. This is called ‘aphantasia’. So if, for example, you ask me to picture a fox, I get glimpses of what a fox is like, perhaps the ears, the brush and the colour, but I can’t maintain a stable image of a fox in my head. Others can do this effortlessly.
Nevertheless, we all seem to experience some kind of inner voice and that’s fine and part of what makes us human. However, when our inner voice is excessively negative, it can seriously damage our well being. As Ethan Kross writes in his book ‘Chatter: The Voice in our Head and How to Harness It’:
“The key to beating chatter isn’t to stop talking to yourself. The challenge is to figure out how to do it more effectively’. [ii]
Our Inner Voice and Alcohol
I wrote an article for Tiny Buddha where I argued that paying attention to the voice in our head is incredibly important to dealing with our drinking problems. Here’s how it starts:
“It’s 3.00 am. I lie awake knowing I have a busy day ahead of me but my mind is racing. I had a few drinks last night and I know that this is why I am awake at this ungodly hour. “Why did I drink when I knew I had to work today? You are a fool. You are weak. You are useless.”
This is how I used to talk to myself most mornings, perhaps with riper language, and the process would repeat itself when I had to get up and face the day. I wasn’t anything like a bottle-of-spirits-a-day drinker, but I knew that even a couple of beers and a glass of wine with dinner would ruin my sleep and leave me feeling well below par. And it all added up over the week to a level of consumption that I knew had long-term health implications.
Then six o’clock would roll around and I would talk myself into having a drink again—I was stressed and needed to relax. Heck, I deserved it, didn’t I, after such a busy day?
This is the cycle that keeps so many of us trapped in a drinking habit. That negative self-talk is a manifestation of the internal conflict that is going on inside our heads, which psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance arises when we encounter a situation where we have conflicting beliefs and attitudes or exhibit behaviour that contradicts those beliefs and attitudes.
When we experience cognitive dissonance we feel discomfort or stress and will try to find a way to reduce that. Our choices are to either change our behaviour, change our beliefs and attitudes, or come up with a story that papers over the cracks and hides the disagreement in our minds.”
In the article I set out the three essential steps to dealing with our inner voice and solving our problem with alcohol (or any other addiction).
Our Everyday Experience of Voices in our Heads
This is a special case of how our inner voice harms our wellbeing, but this is not the only one. Ethan Cross describes many others. For example, some athletes run into trouble when their inner voice derails their performance. Cross describes how Rick Ankeil, a promising pitcher playing for the Cardinals had a nightmare game where he kept throwing wild pitches. He was pulled out of the game and never recovered, playing poorly in subsequent games and dropping out of the major leagues.
While we might not be professional athletes, we have surely all experienced how a negative inner voice impacts our performance or mental state. Perhaps we have to speak in public and a voice in our head tell us that the PowerPoint probably won’t work and we will stumble over our words. Or perhaps we don’t get a job we applied for and our inner voice tells us we are not good enough and will never succeed.
This begs the questions, ‘where do these voices come from?’ and ‘why are they so negative?’.
There are many different models in psychology to understand this, but one which I find compelling and helpful is Internal Family Systems (IFS). Developed by Richard Schwarz, IFS is an approach to psychotherapy that identifies and addresses multiple sub-personalities or families within each person’s mental system.
“These sub-personalities consist of wounded parts and painful emotions such as anger and shame, and parts that try to control and protect the person from the pain of the wounded parts. The sub-personalities are often in conflict with each other and with one’s core Self, a concept that describes the confident, compassionate, whole person that is at the core of every individual. IFS focuses on healing the wounded parts and restoring mental balance and harmony by changing the dynamics that create discord among the sub-personalities and the Self.”[iii]
The reason I find this compelling is that it resonates with my own experience and I think it is enormously helpful in helping us see where our inner voice is coming from. The truth is that no matter how well meaning our families are (and I am aware that not all are) we all develop protective mechanisms to deal with the tensions and stresses of growing up and becoming an adult. I also agree that at our core, we are whole and not broken, no matter how difficult our lives have been. IFS says that we are, at our centre, compassionate, connected, calm, creative, clear, curious, confident and courageous, which I think is a very positive an life-affirming outlook.
These ‘parts’ of us that we develop to cope become like computer programmes that keep running even when they are no longer needed. Without going into detail about IFS, I think the core concept to recognise is that these thoughts are not us. They are not who we are.
Once we recognise this, it becomes easier to move past those negative inner voices by acknowledging where they have come from but not believing them.
One way to do this is highlighted by Ethan Kross—he calls it distancing. There are a few ways to do this. One is to use distanced self-talk, so when you are trying to work through a difficult experience, use your name and the second person ‘you’ to refer to yourself. Sports people often do this—for example, “You’ve got this shot Paul!”. Another way of distancing is to imagine that you are advising a friend experiencing the same problem as you. It’s really amazing how much clarity you can bring to the problem by doing this. I often invite my clients to do this and it always brings about a quick transformation in perspective.
Kross talks about several other methods you can put in your toolbox to help with changing the voices in your head. I will return to these in a future blog post.
I was horrified to see that it’s 45 years ago that Sting first sang about ‘Voices Inside My Head’. We all have these voices, they are essential for our learning and can be very beneficial to us. But they can also hold us back and recognising that they are not from the core of us, and distancing ourselves from them is one of the keys to happiness and success.
Comentários