The Voices
It’s amazing to me how much the voice in my head is constantly chattering. Honestly, if it were someone in the room, I’d either have to walk out or walk them out. But I’m used to it. Even as I type this, I can hear the voice speaking with every word. It’s automatic.
The voice I hear takes many forms. Most of the time its narrating what’s going on outside. Sometimes it’s talking itself into and out of some decision or choice. At times the voice is preparing for a statement to impress or entertain someone else. During sadder times it could be the voice of sympathy, empathy, or pain.
Sometimes, there’s a version of my internal voice that I don’t like to hear. It is the voice of self-criticism. It’s the critical voice that butts in whenever it sees fit, reminding me of the failures of my past and adding them up to paint me as a failure in the present. It has the potential to pull me down to the depths of my soul with self-loathing and self-insult. Given free reign, the critical voice can take the moment-to-moment burns to my psyche and stack them into a tower of smoldering kindling ready for ignition. It’s purpose seems to be to burn me down.
The voice of criticism has a good friend. It’s the voice of inaction. This voice is a constant reminder that taking chances to fulfill ideas of creativity or betterment are doomed to fail. It relies on self-criticism to throw down past examples of failure, to bring uncertainty and to crush self-assurance. It encourages me to just keep thinking about my dream rather than taking steps toward practice, proficiency and working towards perfection. Or it places discouragement as a means to safety, and scraps any seed of growth in my life before there’s a chance to germinate. It’s like spraying weed killer on a fruitful garden.
These aren’t voices I’m born with. They are learned behaviors that are developed by external experience. They come from all kinds of sources as I’ve developed from a newborn to adult. It’s parents and siblings and friends and teachers and whomever else showed what I am not. Sometimes the criticisms against us are malicious, but most of the time they aren’t meant that way. The people that direct them see it differently than we receive it. The criticisms directed at us are meant as a corrective, building effort by identifying the negative. Often the part that goes missing is the immediate move of aiding in the creation of a positive. Showing flaws in ones decisions isn’t a bad thing, but failing to aid in finding a new and better solution is.
Constant negative reinforcement creates hardwired behaviors in the mind. So do the barriers of pursuing life changing circumstances. When creativity, lifestyle change, character change or seeking adventure is discouraged or even shut down, I become less likely to take chances. Chances are opportunities for success. Failure teaches more life lessons than immediate success, because each failure can be a building block for success. That building occurs when each failure is seen as a learning point and treated that way by trusted sources. When the world around me treats an attempt at success despairingly, then I become a person in a state of despair. That despair becomes a powerful voice in my thinking.
These two voices are hardwired channels of programming, and are strong and difficult to break. There is no ready-made tool for overcoming them, and each person has to put together their own means to turn the volume down or off. For the alcoholic, the tool is easy: just drink enough alcohol so that the voices don’t matter anymore. A buffer is created like noise cancelling headphones. The problem is, not only do those voices not matter anymore, but no voices matter anymore. Living a fruitful, productive and healthy life is cancelled just as quickly as any sense of responsibility, duty or agreement. Drinking alcohol becomes like making the whole body sick to cure a headache. Alcohol will alleviate the voices, and possibly other dis-eases in my life, but the monumental calamity and ultimate collapse it brings with it can’t possibly be worth it.
When it comes to recovery, the obvious first step is to stop drinking. That’s a huge thing, as the drink has it’s hooks into the mind, body and spirit, and each needs to heal. How we speak to ourselves and to others is a huge part of the process.
These voices aren’t a genetic condition or a permanent trait of my being. These internal voices are the result of a lifetime of environmental influence and my own acceptance of it. Since they are created by variables they can be changed by variables. It’s now up to me to change the variables I allow to be in my recovery environment.
The first thing is not accepting how I speak to myself. When the internal voice in my mind comes at me with malice and wrath, it’s silly to chastise myself for speaking poorly to myself. That’s really the same voice doing the same thing from a slightly different angle. I need to correct myself with the voice I would like spoken to me.
One thing to try is to bring God into the picture. When I find myself speaking poorly, I try to immediately respond with God wouldn’t speak to me that way, so why am I speaking that way to myself? Of course, any loved or trusted person could be used for that sentence. I could also use positive statements like I love myself too much to speak that way, or that’s not important right now, but this is... Any type of statement recognizing a better way to speak to myself with grace will help cancel out the negative.
The same thing is true of limiting myself with internal jabber of procrastination or doubt. I find what works for me is to remind myself that I can reach my goal or complete my plan, but first I need to start somewhere. I will compromise with myself to get that start. If I can get up and move to dedicate just a couple of minutes to the task I want to complete, every day or on some frequent basis, I find that I end up enjoying myself and doing it even longer each time. It feels good to have worked on putting my ideas into action. The greatest part is that I am accomplishing something and feeling rewarded without having to drink.
The moral of this post is to be good to yourself in thought word and deed. Treat yourself as a trusted friend would treat you. When you catch yourself giving the mental smackdown, or discouraging yourself from committing to ambition, then change and control the conversation.
Whatever the endeavor, the idea is to commit to practices that aid and reinforce recovery. By correcting, replacing and overcoming the voices we talk to ourselves with, we are farther away from the triggers to drinking