I wrote last week about that sabotaging voice inside your head. I attached a blog post by Cheryl Strayed (Dear Sugar) about a woman who was afraid she would get cancer because her parents had cancer. The story in her head was so clear that she decided not to have children because she did not want to put them through that. And she was writing to Sugar to ask if she should get married, if she should tell her fiancé what he might have to go through if she got cancer.
There are two basic ways this voice appears. The first is a storyline like the one above. It might sound like this:
- I am going to mess up my kids and they will do drugs or need therapy because of me
- I am going to end up homeless on the street
- I am going to get fired
- I am bad at relationships and will always be alone
- And on
- And on
The other ways is this. Imagine that you take the orange juice out of the frig and you drop it on the floor. Or that you miss a deadline at work. What do you hear in your head? Common answers:
- That was stupid
- I am stupid
- I’ll never get anywhere being so clumsy or so lazy or unreliable
- I can never do anything right
- Etc.
- Etc.
I will talk to you more next week about how to work with this voice. For now, it is useful just to start to notice it. And then we will learn to interrupt it. This week you should:
- Recognize you have a sabotaging voice.
- Recognize that it is not you, not your highest and best, intelligent self, but just a tape loop that runs in your head.
- Start to hear what it says. We all have pretty familiar regular scripts that run.
- Stop it!
More on this next week. But for now, let Bob Newhart help you with this last one:
