Beholder 2 a generous feast3/26/2023 Saint Joseph, for instance, may teach us how to cope calmly with the pressures of a young family and how to face the trials of the workplace with a modest and uncomplaining temper. These saints are each in their different ways exemplars of qualities we should hope to nurture in ourselves. Catholicism sets before its believers some two-and-a half thousand of the greatest, most virtuous human beings who it feels have ever lived, offering them up as potential friends whom the faithful can talk to, look at and be inspired by. Certain prayers involved the frequent, regular repetition of helpful turns of phrase, like: ‘I have sinned in my thoughts and in my deed in what I have done and in what I have failed to do…’ – which is an attempt to internalise humility.Ĭatholicism introduced the practice of the conscious ‘imitation’ of the saints, where one was invited to ask what a particular saint would have thought or said on a stressful or tempting occasion. In the past, religions took the idea of voice-internalisation very seriously – and developed a variety of rituals and concepts to help this to occur. Leaving things to chance won’t do, because the odds are we won’t meet these really benign voices at the moments when we most need them. So, if we want to internalise the better voices, we need to have a deliberate and active strategy for making this happen. Slightly brutish voices tend to be the ones that speak loudest, while the nicest, kindest, wisest and most constructive voices are comparatively quiet. Or it’s more likely we’ve got the words of Melissa Fry (aged 13) making us feel eternally inadequate for having the wrong haircut, skinny shoulders or the wrong kind of bike burnt into our imaginations, rather than the voice of Montaigne reminding us wryly of the universal character of folly and reminding us that (in truth) no one worth caring about judges other people in those terms. Unfortunately, we are very much more likely to have the irritated voice of a teacher berating us (aged seven) for not knowing the four times table than to have the voice of Donald Winnicott playfully and lightly encouraging us to take perspective. We need to hear them often enough and around tricky enough issues that they come to feel normal and natural responses – so that, eventually, they come to feel like things we are saying to ourselves they become our own thoughts. To change our inner voices we need to encounter equally convincing and confident, but also helpful and constructive varieties of voices over long periods. The authority figures repeated their messages over and over until they got lodged in our own way of thinking. We internalised the unhelpful voices because at certain key moments in the past they sounded compelling. We’ve absorbed the tone of a harassed or angry parent the menacing threats of an elder sibling keen to put us down the words of a schoolyard bully or a teacher who seemed impossible to please. Where do inner voices come from? An inner voice always used to be an outer voice. We find ourselves saying: ‘You disgust me, things always go to shit with you.’ This might feel natural, but another person in a similar situation might have in their head a very different kind of inner monologue: ‘you’ve been here before and it was OK it’s tough and that’s fine, you’re going to pull through, just keep calm.’ It doesn’t represent anything like our best insights or most mature capacities. It is defeatist and punitive, panic-ridden and humiliating. You were always running away from the truth about yourself, weren’t you?’ And maybe the tone here is more assured and calmer than in fact you ever quite managed to be with them on that topic.īut sometimes, the inner voice is simply not very nice at all. Or you might find yourself berating your ex in your head: ‘You never understood how much you hurt me, I tried to tell you, but you’d never take it in. Sometimes, the voice is more explicit, encouraging you to run those final few yards: ‘you’re nearly there, keep going, keep going’. Not in any sinister or disturbing way: just the murmuring stream of thoughts that runs along inside our minds most of the time. We don’t often think about it – and may never discuss it with others at all – but pretty much everyone has voices in their heads.
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