I asked if there were the only two voices she was aware of.
“No, there is a sad, maudlin, pathetic, helpless, depressed, lonely woman lurking inside. She wears a faded housedress, with hose that have enormous runs and bag down around her ankles. Her hair is mousy gray-brown and in serious need of attention. Her nails are broken and ragged, and she gazes downward. Her breasts droop to her waist and her stomach extends to reach them. She is lifeless, and has no motivation to be or do anything. She has been beaten down by the rejections, the losses, the tarnished dreams, and the profound pain of failure.”
I asked her the name of this third voice.
“Helen,” she replied.
I asked how Helen interacted with Laurel and Rosie.
She said, “Wait, there is one more!”
I asked for clarification.
She said, “There is hit man who works for Laurel. He is in charge of enforcing martial law when Rosie has taken over and is running the show. This man has an arsenal which is capable of destroying everything.”
I asked his name.
She said solemnly, “Mehitable.” She added, “It works like this: Laurel does a great job eighty-five to ninety percent of the time, but sooner or later Rosie sneaks (or slinks) to the foreground and takes over the show. Laurel gets very upset but is incapable of controlling Rosie once she is out of the closet. Laurel then calls in Mehitable and orders him to clean house. Mehitable desecrates everything in sight, including Laurel, and all that is left is Helen. Hopeless, useless, and beaten Helen, who doesn’t possess the will to do anything, stands alone. After Helen has had the opportunity to be in the foreground for enough time, gradually Laurel is resurrected and begins to take charge to run the show again. This is the scenario that repeats itself over and over again. I can’t take it anymore, and what’s more I don’t want to.”
I asked her what she wanted.
She said that unless she integrated Laurel and Rosie into herself she would keep repeating the pattern over and over again.
I asked what she wanted to do with Mehitable and Helen.
“Once Laurel and Rosie are integrated, I want the others to leave.” We embarked upon the quest to integrate the internal voices of Laurel and Rosie, and then evict Mehitable and Helen.
Where Do the Voices Come From?
The voices, which were developed from two sources, are aspects of Elena’s personality. Significant people in her childhood imprinted their personalities and words on her to such a degree that their influence formed an identity that became an aspect of her personality.
Whenever there is inner dialogue between different characters, you have a sub-personality scenario. When you’re at one with yourself, there is no need for a conversation. It is when you become at odds with yourself that there is a need for interaction. Usually the subs emerge out of some conflict. The discussion or debate is engaged because of unreconciled discrepancies that exist. When the self is out of alignment, the discord is the reflection of the lack of integration between the various imprints you received from primary role models in childhood.
The inner dialogue between the different characters drowns out the subtle inner messages that come forth from the self. In order to hear the messages, you need to integrate the characters so that they are quiet and you can once again listen to the subtle messages.
The process of integration occurs through talking, visualizing, dramatizing, ritualizing, externalizing and experiencing the unresolved conflicts from the past.
Visualization is seeing with the mind’s eye what you ideally want to become reality. It involves using your imagination and creativity to conjure up the picture you want to manifest. You close your eyes and imagine the ideal situation that you desire, in order to regroove the brain, see the image, feel the feelings, and hear the words associated with it. If you can involve as many senses as possible, you can bring texture, depth, and 3D to your images. This will enable the image to take on a life of its own and the involvement of the senses will merge the gap between fantasy and reality.
Internal Voice Management
As long as there is a schism between two different internal characters, then you are at odds with yourself. There is an internal battle, the battleground of your mind.
NEGOTIATION
The schism needs to be resolved so that the different characters are aligned rather than antagonistic. This process of resolution is called “integration.” Integrating the internal characters is similar to the mediation. The characters are dealt with as separate entities. Each one has its own agenda, set of values, and style.
If you choose to keep all of your characters within you, then you need to teach them how to live together in harmony. This requires negotiation. They need to become a management team that is supporting you and helping you get what you want. This means that you become the CEO of your management team and insist that they support you and if they cannot, they need to go. The objective is to have your inner voices work together as a unit. It doesn’t matter that the personalities are different; good management teams always have diversity. What matters is that they can transcend their differences and work together fulfilling your wishes and intentions. You must orchestrate the different parts into harmony, rather than feeling victimized by who is in charge.
Getting acquainted with the voices is a beneficial process. It is a journey to the interior of your mind to meet your internal players, your cast. You may have one internal voice, two, or several. It is not significant how many internal voices you have; what is important is that you discover who is in there and what they are saying to you. Then and only then can you choose what you want to do about them.
If you do not make a choice about who is inside you, you will feel victimized by the voices that have taken over your internal domain. The internal voices may personify real people from your past or they may be a composite of several people. Your inner voices may be represented by: numbers, super heroes, animals, shoes, colors, people you know, monsters, in fact anything that your imagination has generated that feels right. Jenna’s situation was exactly that.
JENNA AND THE HAIRY MONSTER
A client named Jenna came to me in tears one day saying, “I’m so hard on myself, and I can’t stop it!”
I asked her what was happening.
“I can never do anything right; no matter what I do I can’t do anything right!”
We went through a process similar to Elena’s. I asked for a description of the voice, and she told me of the brutal, abusive, and vicious comments this voice would make to her. I then asked for a description.
She said, “He is big and hairy and stands seven feet tall. He carries a huge club and every time I say or do anything that he doesn’t like, he hits me with the club. I’ve been hit so many times that I’m bruised and bloody. I think it is actually affecting my posture. I’m starting to walk hunched over.”
“What is the name of the voice?”
She replied, “Thor.”
I asked what she wanted to do about Thor.
“I want to domesticate him. He is strong and powerful, so I don’t want to get rid of him, but I would like him on my side and not against me. I need to teach him manners, and especially how to talk to me.” She added, almost as an afterthought, “I need to get rid of that damn club!”
We set out to domesticate Thor.
Thor is not inherently bad or good, he has just gotten out of hand. It is like having a Great Pyrenees dog who has taken over the entire house. He is not yet paper trained, and he is in the process of ruining all the carpets in the house, as well as knocking over miscellaneous pieces of art and furniture. Your house is in disarray because you have relinquished control and the animal who has taken over your house has different priorities. Your house, in this instance, is your mind. If you have some creature who has taken over your “house” then it is time to take hold of the reins. The solution is not necessarily to evict Thor, although that, of course, is an option. The strategy is to ev
aluate whether or not Thor is helpful to you, and worth taking the time to train and transform into an ally. In this case, Jenna wanted to keep Thor around. She felt that he had some real possibilities. She opted to train him, to domesticate the beast, as her best possible solution.
In order to manage your internal voices effectively, you need to suspend judgment while dealing with them. As you have seen with Jenna, the voices are not always people from your past; they may be a composite of personalities that your mind has woven together to form a whole new entity. In certain instances, the internal voices may not be people at all, they may all be animals, as in the case with Sylvia.
SYLVIA AND THE DOGS
One day Sylvia, a new client, came to see me. She had been very successful in the past, but she was now in a funk and wanted to change her situation. She complained that despite the fact that she had written six books, had her own TV show, and had lived all over the world, there were times when she felt totally powerless. We embarked upon the same journey to meet and become acquainted with her inner voices.
She spoke about feeling insecure and desperately needing approval.
“What do the voices say to you?”
She responded, “They say: Please like me. I want to play too, let me come along.”
I asked her for a physical description of the voice.
“It’s a little wet cocker spaniel with its tongue hanging out, and its tail wagging, jumping up and gently scratching with its paws.”
“What is its name?”
She replied contemptuously, “Cocker.”
When I inquired why she appeared angry, she said, “I hate cocker spaniels, they require so much attention.”
I asked when Cocker showed up.
“When I am confused, insecure, feeling inadequate, lonely, needing attention, and longing for validation.” She added, “I hate the thought of me being like a cocker spaniel!”
I asked if there was another voice within or if this was the only one. She said, “No, there’s definitely more than one. There is my powerful, knowing, confident, capable voice, the voice has gotten me everything I have ever wanted.”
I asked what this voice looked like, and was told that it was “sleek, strong, and shiny, a champion, and a force to be reckoned with.”
I asked about the size and shape of this voice and was informed with an enormous amount of certainty and pride that this voice belonged to a Doberman pinscher. He was named, appropriately, Dobie.
For whatever reason, all of Sylvia’s internal voices were dogs. She had a regular kennel within. She needed to decide if she wanted to keep every single dog or to let some of them go. After she had chosen the dogs she wanted to keep, she then had to see what role each would play in her life. She had to assign each a specific function, give it the words she wanted it to say to her, and ensure it delivered its lines on cue. It is okay to have a kennel within as long as you are running the kennel, and it serves your purposes. Don’t hand over the control of your life to the dogs!” Even if you have done so, however, all is not lost. You simply need to take charge of the situation.
Creating drama is a way to be seen by others when you can’t find yourself
Internal voices are like disowned selves who are vying for attention. They are often the parts of you that you have either abandoned, abdicated, ignored, or idolized. Creating drama in your life is a way of attempting to be seen by others when you can’t find yourself any other way. At any rate, these characters are separate from the essential you and need to be integrated.
The Negaholic may be victimized either consciously or unconsciously by the voices within. You need to understand the mechanism that formulates the voices, to see how they are nourished and what you need to do to take control of them so that you are operating from a place of choice regarding your life.
Since Negaholism is an addiction, you need to have an active daily program, an antidote to the beat-ups. No addiction simply goes away with awareness. It requires daily practice, repetition over time, and commitment.
If you are a Negaholic, take your time with the next chapter and do the exercises so you will be on the road to recovery, committed to treating yourself with gentleness, respect, and positive regard.
The next chapter will give you proven techniques to help you stop punishing yourself forever.
6
Be On the Alert For
The large majority of people do not spend every waking moment beating themselves up, but when you least expect it a Negattack will sneak up on you, jump you from behind and before you know it, you will have a full-blown attack taking over the driver’s seat of your life. If you come from a dysfunctional home, you probably automatically think in terms of problem/solution, pain/killer, not okay/fix it. You think in terms of finding instant panaceas that make everything all right immediately. You probably have very little patience or trust that things will ever change or be different.
You therefore need to understand the anatomy of self-negation, how negativity works, and what is the catalyst for the Negattack, so that you can detect the warning signs before you have totally succumbed.
The Anatomy of Self-Torment
Self-torment can start with an incident, a thought, a feeling, or combination of the above. The incident could be any situation in which you do not live up to your expectations of yourself. If you expect that you are supposed to do everything perfectly, then whenever you do not perform up to your standard of perfection you’ve left yourself wide open for a negattack. You could go for a bike ride, fall off and beat yourself for hurting yourself. You could go to a party and have a terrible time and beat yourself for not staying home. You could go grocery shopping, and forget to buy something and beat yourself for not getting everything that you needed. You could lie out in the sun and find fault with yourself for getting burned. You could criticize yourself for not making phone calls, for not writing a letter, for forgetting a friend’s birthday, for letting something burn in the oven. There are limitless opportunities to be hard on yourself. All of these opportunities for harshness are situation-driven.
Life’s Getting Too Good, Let’s Screw It Up
This one is subtle. Things start really going your way. You have just gotten your ideal job, and a raise as well, and you can’t believe it’s a dream come true. On top of that, a dear friend calls to say that she is going away for an extended period of time, and asks if you would mind housesitting for her in her beautiful home. And you have a date with the person you’ve wanted to date for over a year. You feel joyous about your life, your friends, and all that is happening. Do you start to worry and fret about what could go wrong? Do you start doubting your reality, feeling that everything is going too well? Do you start acting suspicious, waiting for the other shoe to drop? Do you question the validity of what is happening? Do you question whose life you’re living, since it doesn’t resemble yours? Do you find yourself saying things like, “Just wait, I’ll get transferred to Siberia,” or “The apartment will probably be burglarized while I’m saying there?” Do you start doing silly, subtle, and stupid things to undermine your successes? Do you have a difficult time accepting that your life really could be wonderful, happy, and everything you’ve ever wanted? Do you have preconceived limits about how great your life might become?
Woe Is Me, What Can the Matter Be?
You don’t know what is the matter with you. You’re not sick, and everything seems to be going fine. You really have nothing to complain about, but you just feel slightly “off.” You have the blahs, and you’re not sure whether to call your doctor, your shrink, your hairdresser, or go to the beach.
The blahs are often the beginning. Watch out for them! Before you start to psychoanalyze yourself, and then beat yourself for not being in great shape, try another approach. See if you can give yourself permission to be just exactly how you are. Let yourself know that it’s okay to not be on top of the world. Consider letting yourself be exactly the way you are, without fixing, changing, rearrangi
ng, or analyzing. You may be in for a surprise.
Help! I can’t Find My Feelings
Since many people have been out of touch with their feelings for so long, it isn’t surprising that from time to time you may not have a clue as to what you are actually feeling. This is quite normal. When you are not certain what you are feeling, don’t attack yourself for not knowing. Be gentle and compassionate, give yourself permission to feel whatever you are feeling.
Go through the list of feeling words, and see if one jumps out at you. If a word resonates, write it down, and say the word to yourself out loud. See if you can activate the feeling from within. If the word alone doesn’t act as a sufficient catalyst to bring up the feeling, try doing something physical to activate your cardiovascular system. Get your heart pumping, and work yourself into a sweat, then read the list of words again, and see if you can feel something. If you still can’t, then read a very sad story, watch a heart-breaking video, or play a piece of music that brings tears to your eyes. Once you find one feeling, the others will follow. Your challenge is to find at least one feeling and let it flow over you.
The Fear Takeover
Sally has just decided to marry Brad. She is excited and happy, she is picturing all the wonderful moments, walking hand in hand through grassy fields covered with daisies. She envisions sitting hearthside with a glowing fire and soft romantic music playing in the background, the smell of bread baking in the oven. As she leaves her fantasy, she goes out to get the mail and sees a notice from a collection agency for Brad. She panics. Her mind goes wild. What if he is in bad financial straits? What if he has misrepresented himself and isn’t what he says he is? What if he only wants to marry me for my money? What if he has been an angel throughout our courtship and he is going to turn into a monster after we’re married? Oh my God, what if this is the worst mistake I’ve ever made in my life? What am I going to do? This is called the “Fear takeover,” and it can happen whenever the slightest encouragement is given to any existing doubt. You need to let fear know that you will get to the bottom of the issue, but for the moment, let yourself be, and get out of the trunk of the car.
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