Voices In Your Head? 🗣️

Do you often find yourself battling critical voices in your head? We all receive advice from people who mean well, but sometimes their words can chip away at our self-esteem. Here’s how you can tackle this common and challenging issue…

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They say that some schizophrenics hear voices that seem real.  Never having personally suffered from that, I can't tell you what it’s like.

But I certainly hear voices of my own.  I know they’re not real.  Not currently.  But they’re the voices of real people that I do and have known.  How about you?  Sometimes clients tell me it happens to them too.

We go through life interacting with people, absorbing advice from every direction.  Advice is well meaning for the most part.  We all give it, and generally it’s because we truly want what’s best for the receiver.

But the fact is that I carry with me the “advice” of many people who, while they may have meant well at the time, have given me quite a difficult legacy to contend with.  I hear the voices of family members, friends, advisors through the years, taking up residence in my head, their “advice” still ringing through my audiation.  And it damages my self esteem.  Unfortunate but true.  And, again, they mean well.  I think.  Not always though.  Sometimes advice is actually self-aggrandizement in disguise.

Do you relate?  Do you have the voices of well-meaning people you have encountered over the years ringing through your audiation, threatening your self esteem?

I see you, and I understand.

It’s a problem.  And here’s why it happens.  Follow along with me…

1. Everyone exists against their will.  No one asks to be born.  God is the only exception, or so say certain classical theists.

2. Because of this everyone is dealing with life as best they can.  Each of us faces forces that are beyond our control, and our lives are a response to this fact.

3. We are proud of what we build in spite of life’s considerable challenges, and so we feel compelled to share our secrets of success.

4. People are so very different.  There are many different cognitive styles, personal gifts, and ways to offer them.  We are often bad at seeing these differences, and therefore assume that everyone is just like us.

5. We take the result of this personally and feel damaged because we simply can’t meet the world in the same way as many people that we respect and admire.

6. Their words stay with us and convict us on one level, but demoralize us in equal, and perhaps greater, measure.

What to do about it?

Not sure.  Talk to me for starters.  Because I hold space for such things and help people work through them.  And I understand the problem at the heart of it all, which is having a human brain.  But here’s my shot at a diagnosis and a solution.

Here’s the problem:

1. Spacetime came to be, which means that things (including us) are metaphysically required to be at a certain place at each and every moment.

2. Our biology requires that we honor our processes to remain healthy and vital.

3. Our highly developed cognition generates thoughts, one after the other, and no amount of Eastern mysticism can really help us stop this.

4. Our thoughts seek a goal.  Finding none, they turn in on themselves cannibalistically and create what some call “parasitic processing”.  As long as spacetime continues, we will have more thoughts.  I think this is a burden, and that the bliss we so often crave would come if our thoughts were to cease, but that simply isn’t how human life, cognition, existence, or existence in general, works.

5. Our social natures absorb the mentalities and perspectives of everyone around us, integrating them with our cognition, particularly those we love and look up to the most.

6. Therefore we end up with many, many thoughts that do not serve us.

The solution…

1. Breathe and center in the present moment.  The past is there, the future will be here.  But let them go for a moment.  You’ll be back with them soon enough.

2. Remember that you exist in a miraculous time and place.  You have marvelous faculties and aptitudes, as well as a higher degree of freedom and economic security than the VAST majority of people across human history.

3. Your thoughts seek a destination, so give them one.  Direct your thoughts at creativity, collaboration, healthy competition.

4. Point #3 requires a purpose, so you’ll need to look inside and get clear on that.

5. Remember that there are people around whom you will ALWAYS find a better version of yourself.  Figure out who they are.  If you don’t know any, meet some.  I am that person to many people, and perhaps you are one to others as well (and if you’re reading or listening to this, I bet you are!)  Seek to spend more time around those people while still honoring the obligations to those you love but who don’t understand you or your goals.

That’s my solution.  Well, it’s the only one I have yet found that seems to honor everything that is true and worthwhile about the human condition.  We can’t stop our biological processes.  We can’t stop our thoughts.  We can’t stop time or collapse space back into the singularity from whence it expanded.  We can’t detach from society, and most especially the people we love.  The future is coming, whether we want it to or not.  We must at least maintain and at best build.  And that’s being human.  Did I mention that I write articles like this for me as much as you? 😉

And, did you know that I created an entire book and online course to help you with all of this?  People tell me it works.  You can find it here.