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After some questioning, Bill identified his parents’ negative voices in his head. I asked if he could imagine a room in his head with the voices coming from a radio or some device over by the wall. He was able to imagine a radio. Then I wondered whether he would like to go over and turn down the volume, or perhaps put a pillow in front of the radio to muffle the sound. As he did this, he gave a big sigh, and visibly relaxed.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“My head is quiet for the first time ever,” Bill said. I told him, “Since it’s your head, you can put in anything you want. For example, because you are thankful for your family and your health, you can fill that room with your own thankful voice, if you wish.” To his surprise Bill discovered he could do that quite easily. We rehearsed him in reviewing his thankful thoughts while driving home from work, so that he could greet his wife and children with joyful energy. After some rehearsal, he felt confident he had installed new voices in his head. Bill’s wife called later to report she was enjoying a new, positive Bill; he had changed his attitude.
Ron Soderquist, http://www.westlakehypnosis.com/
I think it is pretty amazing that you can change a pervasive, life-long negative attitude in a few minutes, just by changing an internal voice—without extensive therapeutic time-traveling back to the traumatic origin of his voices.
However, I want you to think about what would have happened if Bill hadn’t reduced the volume of his negative self-talk before adding in a resourceful and sup-portive voice. If there were two loud voices in his head, they would conflict with each other, setting up an internal battle. Most people have enough conflict in their lives already; they don’t need more of it.
Many people seek help because they already have chronic unpleasant internal conflicts like this. A common troubling conflict is between some version of “Be sure to do what others approve of,” and “No, be independent and think for your-self.” A conflict like this often puts you “between a rock and a hard place,” because whatever you decide to do, afterwards the other side will torment you. “You just went along with the crowd again, you wimp,” or “You sure ‘blew it’ with the guests by telling that racy joke.”
Another common conflict is between indulging in a present pleasure on one hand, and its future consequences on the other. One voice may say something like,
“Go ahead and treat yourself by eating that dessert; you deserve it,” while another warns, “If you eat that, you’ll get fat, and no one will want to be around you.”
Whether or not you eat the dessert, the other side will badger you with the conse-quences later. “You denied yourself a simple pleasure that would have made you
feel really good,” or “Now you’ve done it; you’ll have to watch what you eat all next week in order to lose the calories in that cheesecake.”
However, a number of well-respected therapies—and most books about nega-tive self-talk—strongly advocate talking back to a critical internal voice as a way to lessen its influence. For instance, David Burns is a student of Aaron Beck, who is sometimes described as the “father” of Cognitive Therapy or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (11). CBT has even deeper roots in the work of Albert Ellis, whose work was originally called Rational Therapy, later Rational Emotive Therapy, and finally Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (16) as it evolved over the years. As early as the 1950s—half a century ago!—Ellis advocated actively verbally challenging a client’s self-defeating beliefs and behaviors by demonstrating the irrationality, self-defeatism and rigidity of their negative self-talk. Burns is one of many Cognitive Therapists who advocate countering a troublesome voice:
“Talk back to that internal critic! . . .
a. Train yourself to recognize and write down the self-critical thoughts as they go through your mind;
b. Learn why these thoughts are distorted; and
c. Practice talking back to them so as to develop a more realistic self-evaluation system.” (12, p. 62)
In this process the client is taught how to notice the content of automatic thoughts, identify the kind of distortion, and then generate a rational response.
For instance, if the automatic thought is “I never do anything right,” the distor-tion is overgeneralizadistor-tion, and a radistor-tional response is, “Nonsense, I do a lot of things right.”
“This shows what a jerk I am” is an example of the distortion called labeling, and a rational response is, “Come on, now, I’m not ‘a jerk.’ ” These rational re-sponses disagree with and oppose the troublesome voice. Other people don’t like to be disagreed with, and internal voices are no different; they are likely to become defensive and redouble their efforts to convince you of what they are saying.
Burns developed this method while working with seriously depressed patients who were often suicidal, having given up all hope of having a normal satisfying life. The main symptoms of depression are feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and worthlessness. Most—if not all—of depression is in response to internal voices that criticize, berate, and torment. In this context, rallying the patient to oppose their internal voices can be a huge step forward, and research does indicate that CBT gets results with depression that are superior to antidepressant medication and most other therapies.
Since then, Burns has applied the same method to quite a variety of other prob-lems that result from troublesome internal voices, including anger, guilt, addiction to love and approval, and perfectionism. If someone who is suffering from one of these problems feels completely defeated, then mobilizing a rational response to it can be a very useful first step.
Although a battle between two voices might be somewhat better than only being a slave to a troublesome voice, it is still an inelegant solution that leaves the person split between the two. It is much better to reduce the impact of the trouble-some voice before adding in a resourceful voice.
However, reducing the volume of the troublesome voice is only useful if it has no positive function or intent in the present. There is at least a possibility that a troublesome voice might have some useful information for you. Often an internal voice wants to protect you from some kind of problem or danger, even if this is hidden inside insults and criticism. It could be warning of an actual physical dan-ger, “If you did that, you could get seriously hurt.” Or it might caution you against being disappointed, embarrassed, or criticized by others—dangers to your status, or your idea of who you are. “Don’t make a fool of yourself at the party tonight.”
Often a voice once had a useful function in a past context, but it is now out-dated and irrelevant. For instance, a voice may have once warned you not to anger Dad; now that Dad has been dead for years, it is no longer serves a useful function, so it can be safely reduced in volume. But at other times a voice wants you to notice a mistake, so that you can improve what you do. “Boy, you really screwed up that interview!” What a voice says may be unpleasant, and may even be counterpro-ductive, but it usually has the positive intent of making your life better in some way.
If you just reduced the volume of this voice, you would also lose its useful pos-itive intent—“throwing out the baby with the bathwater.” Many people desperately need some kind of warning voice, because they keep making the same mistakes over and over without noticing. Losing a protective voice can have much more unpleasant consequences than hearing an unpleasant internal voice and feeling bad.
Bill’s voice was apparently simply a result of his history with his critical and unhappy parents. Since it had no useful function in the present, its volume could be reduced without losing anything. When a voice still has a positive function, sim-ply reducing the volume won’t work well, and the voice is likely to stay loud or return. Although reducing the volume of a troublesome voice reduces potential con-flict, it doesn’t eliminate it altogether, so even this solution is not as elegant as it could be, and we will explore other better alternatives in following chapters.
Here is another nice example of adding a more resourceful voice to a troubling one, again from Ron Soderquist.