The most powerful relationship you will ever have
Is the relationship to yourself
Steve Maraboli
INNER SPEECH
Part One
Human beings, like most other creatures, are aware but we are, as far as we know, the only creatures who are aware of being aware. Even a brief acquaintance with human history would reveal that this ability has provided humans with huge advantages. Being conscious of being conscious is, however, a double-edged sword because it is also the primary source of many human psychological problems. In this edition of In The Zone, we will examine both the benefits and liabilities of possessing this unique quality of mind and then follow in part 2 with a discussion of our inner voice and how we speak to ourselves.
The advantageous capabilities of being self-aware are:
1. Self-reflection: introspection, the capacity for self-improvement and personal growth as we learn from our experiences and make better decisions in the future
2. Abstract Thinking: the capacity to have ideas about our ideas fosters creativity and innovation and allows us to tackle complex problems by considering potential solutions from different perspectives.
3. Social bonding and communication: understanding that other humans possess a similar nature allows us to understand and empathize with others, improve social bonds, and cooperate. We can reflect on our own thoughts and feelings and the potential thoughts and feelings of others and communicate.
4. Responsibility and integrity: knowing that “I did that” allows for personal accountability for our actions and the development of moral and ethical frameworks for our behavior and interactions with others.
Whether people use these innately human capacities for their own benefit and that of the entire species is a matter for another time. Let’s simply state that there are a great many ways that these uniquely human abilities can be abused, misused, confused, and misunderstood. Here are some of those ways:
1. Psychological dysfunction: being aware of one’s own existence, mortality, and threats to life and wellbeing can lead to anxiety, depression, obsessive thoughts, mental exhaustion and stress.
2. Conflict: awareness of opposing thoughts and desires within oneself can create internal strife, indecision and paralysis by analysis. Opposing thoughts between and among people can lead to misunderstandings, disagreements, social conflict, and war.
3. Self-criticism and fear of failure/success: focusing on one’s own flaws, mistakes, and errors can lead to low self-esteem and negative self-talk, hindering risk-taking and innovation.
4. Loneliness and Isolation: awareness of being a mind separated from other minds by one’s body can lead to painful loneliness or detachment from others.
These are but a few of the psychological problems that affect people that can result from our human capacity to become aware of being aware. Fear of the unknown, fear of rejection, resentment, envy, regret, chronic pessimism, identity confusion, inadequacy, and impostor syndrome are just a few other common human psychological difficulties.
Part Two
At birth, there is no awareness of self. During the time between birth and about seven years old, self-awareness gradually increases. The level of consciousness with which we are born and that exists during our first 6-7 years is referred to as pre-reflective consciousness. In these early years of our life, sensations, emotions, and perceptions are experienced directly in the present moment without the inner dialogue and self-awareness associated with higher cognitive functioning. In these early years, infants babble out loud, children engage in external speech where they may give a constant narration of what they are doing at any moment, and they can go from laughing to crying to laughing again because what is happening in the moment is all that is happening.
During the transition from pre-reflective consciousness to self-awareness, children may hear the voice of an imaginary friend whose voice is actually the child’s own thoughts caught between the outer and inner speech phases. That voice sounds like it’s outside but it’s inside their mind. It is a time when certain brain structures that help us differentiate thoughts from speech are developing but not yet fully developed. When you really want to appreciate the complexity of your brain, consider that there are some rare conditions where established neural networks in the brain go awry. In such cases, the person may experience their thoughts not as silently held within them but as sound that can be heard by others. They don’t know whether their thoughts were private or could be heard by others. Imagine a world where your experience is that other people might be hearing your thoughts!
By the time most kids are seven years old, most have completed the transition to self-awareness and that little voice in their heads becomes identified as “I” or “me”. From that time forward and throughout adulthood, their lives, all our lives, are regulated and controlled by our new abilities to reflect upon and interpret, in our own way, our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. We become able to consider the past and predict and plan the future. We tend to lose track of “now” in favor of past and future. The memories of those early years begin to fade. More specifically, those memories had not been stored in words and narratives as much as they were stored as feelings and patterns of actions. After age 7, our inner voice becomes the narrator of the story of our lives. And that inner voice can become our best friend or our harshest critic depending on the stories we learn to tell ourselves about ourselves. When thinking about themselves, most people have an inner voice is sometimes a best friend and at other times a harsh critic.
As our best friend, it tells us positive stories about ourselves. It can tell us that we are loved and loveable, that we are attractive, capable and smart, that we can be successful, that we are resilient and that we can recover and heal from pain and error. As our best friend, that inner voice becomes the source of our self-esteem. As our harshest critic, that inner voice can beat us down, cause us to be depressed and anxious, fill us with doubt, lead us to bad choices and self-defeating behaviors, and make us fearful of both success and failure.
Until we are self-aware, we are incapable of shame. While guilt tells us that that there is something wrong with what we DID, shame tells us there is something wrong with what we ARE. Shame makes us feel unworthy of the love of others. The shamed inner voice says: “You must hide parts of yourself from the world because if they see the “real” you, they will neglect or abandon you.” That shamed critic kills our authenticity by making us hide important parts of ourselves from the world, it says to others who love us “If you only knew” and prevents us from receiving their love.
Complicating the process is the fact that some of our thoughts are repeated so often that they become automated. That is, certain circumstances result in thoughts which, in turn, determine behaviors and, after a time, people see the circumstances and exhibit the behavior with hardly any awareness of the intervening thought. For example, a young college age girl at a school of 45000 students, half of whom were male, was convinced that she rarely saw men on campus. She had learned to be so fearful of men that, without being aware of it, she would spend her day with her head down, averting her eyes whenever a male approached her. This is an extreme example, but most people do have more than few automated thought-behavior patterns. People get “triggered’ by certain words or external events that quickly make them fearful or sad or angry. Their reaction is so swift and automated that they really don’t know its cause. When such people are asked to describe what caused them to react as they did, they will quickly blame the external event, or say: “I have no idea”, or “It is my truth” or “I just did”.
What determines the nature of our inner voice? The almost universal answer is “parents”. And certainly, that’s one of the influences, both positive and negative. But it may surprise you how little and in what ways parents influence our inner voice. Loving parents certainly help create a more positive inner voice and abusive or neglectful parents contribute to negative inner speech. However, even good parents have bad days and bad parents can have good days. In short, parental verbal messages are not uniform and are often inconsistent. Of greater importance as influence on our inner voice is not what parents say but in what they do. While parents are watching their children, their children are watching them, and they observe certain behavior patterns. When a parent is frustrated, do they get angry or cry or become stoic? When faced with difficult situations, do they feel helpless, determined, or panicked? The child observes parental behavior and thinks their private thoughts about it. They talk to themselves about it. The child is making their own sense of the pattern, and that sense may be completely inaccurate. They may observe parental emotions but have no understanding of what lies behind those feelings. The child’s response is completely their own and created with the limited understanding of a 9-year-old or a 12-year-old or even a 20-year-old. They don’t know what it’s like to be under pressure at a job, the complexities of a marital relationship, or the anxiety of not having enough money. A child sees only the emotional response without understanding the context and the child’s inner voice talks to them in the privacy of their own mind: “When I grow up, I will not get angry” or “crying is weak” or “I will protect mom or dad from ever feeling that way”. Much of the time parents have no idea what is going on in the mind of a child over 7. So, while people often cite their parents as the source of their negativity, the fact is that in our ignorance of the context of parental behavior, we all contribute to our own understanding or misunderstanding of ourselves as much if not more than our parents do.
Improving psychological wellness involves:
1. becoming aware of what that inner voice is saying to you
2. becoming familiar with the nature of the story you tell yourself about “I”.
3. discovering whether the story is true
4. considering alternative contexts.
5. ask yourself what others might feel and why
6. understand that psychological wellness involves telling yourself a truer more accurate story.
To move oneself along the path of psychological wellness, try some of these methods:
1. Practice self-compassion: Talk yourself with the same kindness and understanding as you would a friend. Try imagining yourself as a child who is feeling badly about themselves and step into that picture as the adult you are. How would you respond to that child? Did your response help the child feel better or worse?
2. Challenge negative thoughts: Identify and question the validity of self-critical thoughts. Replace them with more balanced and realistic perspectives. Try writing the negative thought on a piece of paper in red ink and then your response in blue ink. Continue that internal dialogue on paper switching pen colors back and forth as the dialogue continues.
3. Mindfulness and meditation: Engage in mindfulness practices to become more aware of your thoughts and feelings without judgment, which can help reduce the intensity of self-criticism. In short, think deeply about yourself and why you speak to yourself in negative ways. Do not allow negative thoughts to take root.
4. Set realistic expectations: Set achievable and realistic expectations to reduce the pressure of perfectionism (which is driven by the shame of being imperfect and the fear of embarrassment).
5. Seek support: Talk to trusted others about your feelings. External perspectives can provide validation and reduce the intensity of self-criticism.
6. Celebrate achievements: Acknowledge and celebrate your accomplishments, no matter how small they may seem. This can help build self-esteem and counteract negative self-perceptions.
7. Develop a growth mindset: Embrace challenges as opportunities to learn and grow rather than as tests of your worth or abilities. Regardless of your age, realize you are always in the process of becoming. You are always creating and have the lead role in your own movie script and you write your story day by day.
By incorporating these strategies into your daily life, you can gradually improve your psychological wellness, eliminate inner speech that holds you back or keeps you down, and live a more authentic life.
Loving Yourself Is Not Vanity, It’s Sanity
Katrina Mayer
Self Love Is the Source of All Our Other Loves
Pierre Corneille
